Memory Crisis

My girlfriend and I have a game we like to play called "Memory Crisis".

It's based originally on my inability to remember the names of celebrities, movies, music or other pop culture references, although it also just comes up as a matter of course.

I'm also particularly poor at describing people, and my references to other things they may appeared in or worked on are generally rather obscure. I'll often recognize an actor from a small cameo on one of the Star Trek series (in many cases, it's the only instance I've seen them), but be completely unaware that they've attained celebrity A list status through something else.

It's a great guessing you can play around the camp fire or on long car rides... but where as I come by it naturally, others will have to try to be as vague as possible (it helps if you bang your head on a hard surface until your speach slurs and you can't remember where you live... if you black out, you gone too far). Normally I'm the one chosen to be the person in "Memory Crisis" for that very reason. Often when selecting a subject for the guessing match, I've already forgotten their name.

In fact, even while writing this blog, I've had to wiki the name of the actor as per the following example:

Girlfriend: What movie did you see tonight?

Me: Uh, I don't remember the name of it, but it had "that guy" in it that's related to the "other guy".

Girlfriend: Which "guy".

Me: You know the one... he uh, has hair... and was in a bunch of movies.

Girlfriend: Cary Grant

Me: No, you know... the guy...  he was in that movie with the squid.

Girlfriend: Keep trying.

Me: He was in that other movie with the guy that played the rich dude on Gilligans Island.

Girlfriend: Keep trying.

Me: Uh... remember that time that we were playing "Identity Crisis"* and his name came up. It was the time we were playing when I thought the name Chloe was pronounced "Shlow".

Girlfriend: No help.

Girlfriend: The guy I thought was dead, but wasn't dead after all.

Girlfriend: Kirk Douglas.

Me: That's the guy.

Girlfriend: So he was in this movie?

Me: No, the other guy... you know... he hangs out with the Welsh chick.

Girlfriend: His son, Michael Douglas?

Me: Yeah!

My girlfriend has since nailed down my code pretty well, and can now usually ascertain the identity of the subject in question most of the time within a few guesses. For others this can be an extremly drawn out and frustrating process.

So the rules to Memory Crisis are:

1. Pick a name of an actor, movie, album, musician that you know but can't remember their specific name or title. 
2. Drink a few shots of something particularly strong or bang your head on the table to make sure you don't remember (again, I don't have to, but you probably will). 
3. Have your friends take turns guessing. They can ask any question they like up to twenty questions... or until they become frustrated to the point of wanting to kill you. 
4. Answer everything as vaguely (but truthfully) as possible. 
5. No one can reference the internet.
6. The first person to guess correcly wins, if no one does, then the person in "Memory Crisis" wins... or loses. I guess it depends on how badly you want to know who it is you can't remember. 

*Identity crisis by the way is a great game for those of you whole like pop culture guessing games. 

Basically, you have a bunch of cards with names of celebrities on them, and you have to get your team mates to guess all the persons on your cards within a set frame of time without saying the celebrities names. You can give all sorts of other hints, like people they've acted with, or movies they've been in. As you can imagine, I'm the "weak" link and usually get yelled at. 

As I breifly referenced in the example above, one card I was forced to try get my team mates to guess was for Chloe Sevigny. Now until this time, I'd never see the name "Chloe" spelled before and had no idea how to pronounce it. I'd always assumed it was spelt "Klowey". Anyway, I had no idea who this person was, and after I'd been yelled at for making my team lose, I stated I'd never even heard of this "Shlow Sevigneee" person before. 

"Yes, you are SHLOW" was the general consensus. 

It's a stupid game anyway.