Stuff I've dug up.
I searched and searched, but I couldn't find the John Updike Trivial Pursuit quote I mentioned yesterday. Maybe somebody else said it. Then again, maybe I dreamed the whole thing up. I did find these other passages about party games, though.
They gave impromptu parties, and put on amateur concerts and theatricals. . . . They played literary games, one of which involved setting Proust to the tune of the River Kwai march. "Here is my first effort," Jimmy wrote:Swann's Way, a book by Marcel Proust,
Tells how the hero took to roost
Racy
Odette de Crecy
Who to his friends could not be introduced
--Alison Lurie, Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson
It's fitting that Christmas should degenerate to this, its barest bones. The family has begun to seem to Therese like a pack of thespians anyway; everyone arrives, performs for one another, catches early flights out, to Logan or O'Hare. Probably it's appropriate that a party game should literally appear and insert itself in the guise of a holiday tradition (which it isn't). Usually, no one in Therese's family expresses much genuine feeling anyway; everyone aims instead--though gamely!--for enactments.
--Lorrie Moore, "Charades" (from Birds of America)
GEORGE (Claps his hands together, once, loud): I've got it! I'll tell you what game we'll play. We're done with Humiliate the Host . . . this round, anyway . . . we're done with that . . . and we don't want to play Hump the Hostess, yet . . . not yet . . . so I know what we'll play. . . . We'll play a round of Get the Guests. How about that? How about a little game of Get the Guests?
--Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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