In August, 2008, we rebuilt the parlour where adult parlour games were invented — in Black Rock City at the Burning Man Festival.
Games at Burning Man are very different than other places. First, the kissing starts much earlier in the game. Clothes come off much more willingly and the men are much faster to embrace their heteroflexibility. And, since they’re often pick-up games (no screening of participants as whoever is around and feels the urge is welcome to play) the quality of the games is much more hit or miss. But when it hits, man does it hit.
Click to launch the slide show. Pictures are, of course, blurry, dark and cropped to protect the guilty.
The origins of adult parlour games happened very late one night, with a not-ungenius-like stroke, in a hookah lounge of exceedingly ill-repute.
A group of “travelers” (let’s just say they were all very comfortable in the upper atmosphere) were, late one night, wondering the streets of an ancient city. Quite unexpectedly, they found their way to an oasis in the desert — a dome in an otherwise brutally harsh climate, filled with carpets, pillows and welcoming strangers, all huddled around burning embers of apple and honey tobacco.
As the warm fires and bodies worked their magic on chilled bones, thoughts predictably turned to … clothing … and how best to remove both this group’s own and all the clothes adorning the strangers around them.
At this precise moment, someone spied an unassuming pair of dice on the table. He picked them up and, with just a few moments’ thought, invented a game.
He turned to the people around him and asked, “Anyone want to play a game?”
Everyone, and I do mean everyone, leaned in.
“It goes like this. Ask a question or state a command. Then, roll the dice. If you roll doubles, you have to do it. And then, you get to ask the next question or state the next command. If you don’t roll doubles, pass the dice to your left. Then, that person then rolls.”
He tossed the dice down on the table. Snake eyes.
“Hmmm. Sounds fun,” a particularly bright-eyed young woman said. She was wearing pink furry boots, a pink mini-skirt, pink bunny ears and … not much else. “Mind if I go first?”
“Sure,” our mad scientist inventor replied. “Go for it.”
She scooped up the dice, held them to her forehead for just a moment and told the group, “Whoever rolls doubles has to …”
She paused.
“Look into the eyes of the person on your right. Um … tell them a physical quality that you find hot or whatever. And then, with their permission, kiss that part of their body.”
She looked nervously around the table.
“Is that okay with everybody?”
The group of strangers and friends, still leaning in, spoke symbolically, with looks of anticipation, excitement and desire in their eyes.
She laughed and threw down the dice.
4 and 2.
And the dice haven’t stopped moving since.
The games have evolved, new games invented. That simple dice game eventually morphed into our game, Double-Does. And even though the cliché about never going home again may, in fact, be true, who are we not to press our luck?
