2002-12-13 - 4:40 p.m.

Games for Geeks to Play: Yelling Eliot

Do you like poetry? Do you like acting like a crazy person? Find a crowded public place and a volume of poetry (Eliot's "The Wasteland and Other Poems" is favorite) and go to work!

The game works best if you have the poem in question memorized, but if necessary, you can sneak glances at the book. Find a place where there are a lot of people who don't know you and start yelling the verses in as angry a voice as possible. The trick is to look crazy, but *dangerously* crazy - the kind of mental case who is frighteningly difficult to outwit.

EXAMPLE:

Player 1: (screaming) Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, LIKE A PATIENT ETHERIZED UPON A TABLE!

Variations

Get several friends together and space yourselves out at one person per five yards. Each of you has a line from the poem to say. Pick one mark to recite to, and as the mark moves on, people should sneak around to the mark's next destination, without being noticed, until the poem is over.

EXAMPLE:

Person 1: (creepy) I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

Person 2: (distraught) I do not think that they will sing to me!

Alternately, each person yells one line of the poem until a passerby yells the next line back. The passerby is then invited to join the game.

Special Variation With Props

Example:

Person 1: (solemnly) Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look! (Player 1 opens hand to reveal two perfect pearls)

The game ends either when everyone is out of poems or when all players are arrested. Enjoy!