Meet the Friends

Friday Night was Meet the Parents, so Saturday was the more critical Meet the Friends. One can survive not having parental approval, but not having the okay from the friends can be lethal.

So I’m told to turn up to a house in Island Bay mid afternoon. Now most people will not know where Tiber Street is, but it is just one block away from my childhood home and the house in question I actually used to deliver newspapers to, so I had no problems finding it.

All up, there are 14 of us – eight girls, six guys. Initial game is a music quiz game called Buzz (Play Station 2 game), which thanks to my civil union with Andy, we actually won. Those who know my musical skills will correctly conclude that the division of labour was that Andy tells me which button to push and I pushed it!

Then we played the famous Hat Game. Yes it is really called the Hat Game. It’s a bit like Game of Two Halves but about celebrities.

Each person writes the names of six celebrities down, and puts them in a hat. So we have a total of 84 celebrities. Then you split randomly into two or in this case three teams. After this, starts Round One where a team has 60 seconds to guess as many names as possible. One team member pulls out a name, and describes the celebrity so that his or her team mates can guess who it is. At the end of 60 seconds, the hat goes to the next team, and it keeps rotating until all 84 names are correctly guessed.

Now it can get quite hilarious when someone doesn’t really know the celebrity and has to describe them, as they do it quite badly. Our team had Serah give us a clue of “A woman, slightly handicapped”. We used up our entire 60 seconds trying to guess who this was. In desperation I named my “companion” which went down well with everyone else playing, but less so with her. Finally we found out the name was Helen Keller!! I snarkily suggested that a woman who is blind, deaf and almost mute could be better described than “slightly handicapped”!

The most hilarious incident though wasn’t from that night, but from a few years ago, as I was told the tale of how the companion was having to do the descriptions for her team, and she was telling them that this person was a character in Lord of the Rings. They went through all the well-known characters but none of them guessed correctly – probably because Ghandi wasn’t actually in Lord of the Rings 🙂

Round Two has all the names put back in the hat and is identical to Round One except the person reading the name can only use one word to give you a clue. Hence you need to have remembered all the answers from the previous round.

Finally in Round Three it is Charades, where the name reader can’t speak at all. Gets very amusing as Britney Spears is shown as a woman dropping her baby. I won’t describe how Jenna Jameson and Devine Brown were portrayed!

We then headed out to dinner at Hede on Cuba Street. It’s a great place – good food, good atmosphere. After the meal, the boys insisted we do shots at the bar to celebrate my birthday. The fact that it wasn’t actually my birthday was dismissed as a triviality, and we proceeded to sample the bar wares. They even let me behind the bar at one stage to find any further liqueurs we hadn’t sampled. Thank God they had no Chartreuse!

After many rounds, we finally called it a night. Somewhat amused that the food came to only 15% of my total bill! Despite my clear desire to return home at this stage, I was further dragged down town and we ended up in that Karaoke bar in the Oaks Complex. To my great amusement I ran into my gym trainer there who is terrified I will tell everyone at her work she does karaoke 🙂

Finally got to head home, I think some stage after midnight. The friends tolerated my company very well, and everyone had a great night. And best of all didn’t even have a hangover on Sunday.