by David Kubicek
Years ago my wife, Cheryl, left her job at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for greener pastures with another company, so we threw a party to celebrate. As often happens at parties, people break off into groups to talk about different things or to do different things or to play games. My brother, John, and I found ourselves in a group with others who were playing the game Celebrity Taboo. Little did we know that we were about to instigate a minor controversy.
In Celebrity Taboo, you pair up, and the teams compete against one another. One partner draws the name of a celebrity and gives the other partner clues to his or her identity, which the partner must guess within a set amount of time to earn points. If you guess the celebrity before your time is up, your partner keeps drawing cards and giving clues until your time runs out. On the card is a list of taboo words which the clue-giving partner is forbidden to say.
After a while, we decided as a group that we were having more fun guessing the celebrities than we were playing by the game’s rules. So we opted to have one person give the clues while the rest of us guessed. John volunteered to be the clue-giver.
That’s when the trouble started. Most of the time I quickly guessed the celebrity, which irritated a friend of ours who accused John of signaling the answers to me. Of course, we denied this allegation, but our friend was not convinced. He declared that if we didn’t stop it, someone else should be the clue-giver.
The last straw was broken when John drew a card and said: “This guy’s birthday is March 6.” Immediately I said: “Michelangelo!”, which was correct.
Our friend said: “That does it!” He snatched the clue box away from John and gave it to another member of the group.
I could not convince our friend that because John knew how I thought and I knew how he thought, and because of our shared experience in many areas, he was able to give clues that clicked in my mind. Take the Michelangelo one, for example.
John and I both worked with computers on our jobs. Not long before this party, everyone who worked with computers was terrified of a virus that was set to go off on a certain day and crash any system that it had invaded. I was working with CliffsNotes at the time, and the editor told me that they weren’t even going to turn on their computer system that day.
Although this virus was mentioned in the media, it didn’t stick in the minds of people whose work lives didn’t revolve around computers–which included everyone in our Celebrity Taboo group except for John and me.
The virus was called the Michelangelo Virus because it was programmed to shut down the computing world on March 6–Michelangelo’s birthday. And since this party took place in April of that year, the Michelangelo Virus scare was still fresh in our minds.
I guess, looking back on this incident, John was signaling me in a way; he was giving clues he believed I would be able to pick up on. But isn’t that the point of Celebrity Taboo?
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