Ham Party

Andrew and Dan came over for a ham party this past weekend! After all of our talk about ham, inspiration struck Andrew in the form of delicious meat. As a Jewish person, Andrew guesses that he's only eaten ham four times in his life, which just goes to show what a great friend he is to invent such a party. It also goes to show how much he HATES GOD. This party began like most parties end - with me sound asleep on the couch. I was completely under a blanket when they walked in, so when I awoke and popped up, I terrified poor Dan. What a way to kick off a ham party!

The ham, by the way, was delectable and was accompanied by great fresh bread. I'm sure Andrew would agree that selling his soul to the Devil never tasted so good.

It didn't take much to make ham the focus of our evening. I had thought we'd have to stretch it to make the theme work, but the conversation came pretty easily. We played ham truth or dare; although it revealed no meaty (pun!) ham secrets, it did offer some amazing ham would you rathers, including an amusing hypothetical about the Duke of Mustard and the Earl of Ham and the extremely difficult "would you rather punch a senior citizen in the stomach or never eat ham again?" Andrew is willing to forego the ham while I elect to do the fogey slam. As for the dare portion, Dan makes Andrew and I kiss - with nothing separating our lips but a ham sandwich. We brought sexy back to the carnivorous celebration.

The best party game of all, however, had to be the Ham Scrabble match. Regular rules applied except that any word pertaining to ham would receive double the points. After each word was played, the competitor would have a chance to explain why eir turn was worthy of the ham bonus, followed by an opponent's rebuttal. It had all the fun of a challenge during a regular game, but allowed for the amusement after every turn. The arguments were stellar on the part of Andrew the philosopher (he's much better at that than the keeping kosher thing) and Dan, who is currently on the last level of his lawyer Gameboy video game. I, on the other hand, argued poorly, doing a better job at just sitting and looking pretty.

When all was said and done, I was the only one to actually score a ham double on the word "boil." I still contend the word "be" should receive a similar distinction, though, as the most famous quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be or not to be" is comprised of the word be twice. There were some other valiant defenses: ham is "stock"ed at stores and, indeed, ham is also "fine," but we were pretty harsh in our judgments. After all, we couldn't just be blinded by our love ham. Unfortunately, we were so blinded by the ham thing, we missed two of Dan's phony words: though we deemed them unrelated to ham, we failed to recognize them as bogus words altogether.

Next time you're invited to a party, be sure not to RSVP before asking the host, "Will there be ham?"