more games children play

some of the games my brother invented required a lot of dressing up. "Liquid Silver" was one of them. yes, liquid silver. we cranked the turntable in sara's basement, dressed in sara's jazz-dance clothes and jumped around like maniacs to our newest and hottest and favoritest 80's hits. my brother hosted of course. i don't even remember what the host of a dance show does, but i am certain my brother was a natural. he was a natural at everything weird. as i write this, i am picturing sara's face as she reads the words"liquid silver". it is one of those memories that always escapes one of us, and when the other says it, uproarious laughter ensues. sometimes sara laughs until she turns red and shiny. and her eyes are little moon slits. sara also used to laugh until no noise came out but tears did. i hope she still does that.

wedding. that was another game invented by my senior sib. he would marry sara and i would marry sean. essentially, the game was not much different from "house" which all children played. but in "wedding", the marriage ceremony takes up most of the game and is generally quite spectacular. especially sara and mike's wedding. that was the part that sucked the most about wedding. i naturally was not going to marry my brother, so sara always got to. since he was the director for every game and in fact, our entire childhood, he got to decide on the life circumstances and socio-economic status of both couples. he and sara, of course, were exremely wealthy. they took all the props from around the house that indicated economic comfort. for example, sara's wedding dress/veil was actually white, like a pretty soft sheet or something. i had a heavy quilt draped over my head that was blue on one side and the other side looked like something that really wanted to be 70's kitchen linoleum. it was the kind of quilt that was held together but little tiny tassels that were apparently latch-hooked into place. sara would walk slowly down the stairs into the "church" (also the site of human burrito) looking so dainty and elegant. of course she did. they were the rich ones. my neck would ache from trying to maintain a relatively natural position while balancing a quilt on my forehead. sara would move into the big house (the larger room of the basement...we were neighbors in this game.) "you guys are poor." my loving brother would say to me and his best friend. neither sean or i ever challenged this successfully. "why can only one couple be rich?" "Why do you always get to be rich?" there was always an explanation that could not be countered. something random like: "one of us has to have more money." or, my personal favorite: " i have more money in real life." we were like 7. but he did have more money. he always did and he always will. one day while we were playing wedding, the song "Sarah" came on the pop radio station. my bro stopped the game dead in its tracks and said: "LET'S SAY THAT I HAD THIS SONG WRITTEN FOR MY WIFE AND THE MOST FAMOUS SINGER SINGS IT BECAUSE I AM REALLY RICH!" no songs were ever about me.

wedding seems like the kind of game that is, by nature, quite benign. how could wedding go wrong? what could that boy possibly do to make "wedding" stressful or painful? here's how: my one faithful blog reader will ber that i had some anxiety as a child. once during wedding, my brother held a bible open while sean and his blue-veiled bride stood before him. he repeated the words that i am sure he had memorized from watching roman and marlena get married over and over again on days of our lives. or whatever it was that happened on that f-ed up show. he said the marriage words that all young television junkies have memorized by age 6. then he said, "i now pronounce you man and wife." later, because he loved me so much, my brother said to me: "you know, since i said all the right words and i was holding the bible, you two are really married now and you will never be able to marry anyone else in your whole life." "that's not true!!!" was my protest. "yes it is, i held the BIBLE! and i don't have the power to divorce you. i'm telling mom you got married!" i worried about this for months if not years. everything that child said was so damn beleivable. and so damn mean! i truly thought that i had married my best friend's brother and now i was stuck FOREVER! i can't even tell you how many nights i lay awake worrying about how to get out of this situation. i learned about 20 years later, at sean's real wedding, that he had suffered the same anxiety for much of his childhood. he thought he was married to me. we were all under my brother's control. how sick is he?!