Secrets for FUN

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Jennifer Schulman •Washington, D.C.

When most folks hear 'play,' their minds burn a U-turn to sunny summer days in the sandbox and creaks of a swing set chain in the lemonade dusk of childhood. But I say play is grown-up, child. Play is about breaking rules, bending truths, sidling past the iron-vested mores to a place where punishment is held at bay by the mighty Shhh...

My brand of play falls out of its pack and scatters about my feet like tiny mice squealing after fun. The pedal gasses the car faster, faster, and I let my hair whip loose in the thin wind that winds in through the window crack. Music plays louder, its lead singers fatter, sprouting whiskers that curl about their lips, growling naughty words into a microphone with perfect pitch. Fun in my neighborhood involves boys and girls and girls and girls taking strange, itchy peeks at one another's private playing cards.

There is no innocence in play. That is the misconception. One absentmindedly plunks mere amusement into the play box. Real play is frolicking, rollicking, the same sense that any second the revelry will screech to a stop and a still white silence will shuffle into its place. To play is to defy, to rebel, repel the appropriate, and bare our breasts in the face of other, nunnish pastimes.

That is the play Garth Brooks hasn't gotten around to singing about.

That is the play that makes our hearts beat faster, our toes squirm inside our shoes.

And then there's Yahtzee.

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