Role Playing
A few days ago we were eating at our local breakfast taco place when the Brooks & Dunn song “Neon Moon” (1991) came on and I remembered with a start, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I LOVE this song.” I tried to explain my brief flirtation with ‘90s pop country music to my kids. I knew I had mentioned this phase in a column I wrote years ago, but when I tried to find it, I discovered the publication where it had appeared is long gone; their archives are no longer online. (This probably means I should see what other pieces of mine are not accessible anymore, what a depressing task that will be.)
So I dug this one up to run again here, lest the world forget the time I joined my friend’s thirty-something mother for singles night at a country line-dancing club.
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I was really into the Lord of the Rings when I was in junior high. This was a decade before the first Peter Jackson film; The Lord of the Rings was not cool in 1991. I discovered the trilogy through my mother, who also loved it. I'm not sure I even knew that other people had read the Lord of the Rings. In any case, I certainly didn't think of people who were into the books as “nerdy.” Some of my friends may have been less than popular, but I had no contact with nerd culture and knew nothing about it beyond the broadest stereotypes from movies and television.
I never owned a video game system. I never LARPed. I didn’t read science fiction or comic books. I didn't even use a computer until I was in college. Before the internet, I mostly learned about things by walking past storefronts at the mall. This is how I happened to collect decorative soaps from Crabtree & Evelyn, how I spent all my allowance money on a Galilean thermometer from a store called Natural Wonders, why I coveted a t-shirt with a big watercolor mallard on it from Northern Reflections, a Canadian clothing company for people who think Eddie Bauer is too flashy.
I was into whale song, Laura Ashley prints, vegetarianism, and Fran Lebowitz. I was into stuff so uncool it defied labels. You think you were a nerd in middle school because you collected action figures or played in the marching band? I spent the summer of my freshman year cross-stitching a sampler for my mom. You think you were geeky because you liked to watch Monty Python? When I was in junior high I wrote a country western murder ballad about blackjack called “The Dead Man's Hand.” In fact, I had never even heard of Monty Python, because I was as out of touch with nerd culture as I was with mainstream culture. I was out there two-stepping on my own.
No one I knew had read LOTR or wanted to talk about it if they had, and so I considered it a private enthusiasm, almost a family story beloved by only my mother and me. And that's why I was so excited when I saw the Lord of the Rings role-playing game. I was with my parents at Walden Books at the Glendale Galleria, and there with the small coterie of non-book items that would soon take over this and every book store, was a small cardboard box with those familiar Michael Herring illustrations on the lid. I had to have it.
I had never played a role-playing game; I didn't even know what one was. The only games with which I was familiar were family board games like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. I suppose I thought – if I thought about it at all – that this was a sort of Lord of the Rings-themed version of Risk. What I knew was, I wanted it. Desperately. I also knew it was expensive. I went to work on my parents, and somehow convinced those two beleaguered people to buy it for me .I remember bringing the handsome game home, tearing open the box, and finding – what? Nothing. Nothing but a bunch of dense pages of impenetrable directions. There weren't any little figurines, as I'd come to expect from a board game. There were no cards, no dice. There wasn't even a board. It was immediately evident that I was in over my head.
I poured over the cards and booklets, trying to make out how to play the game. Instinctively I knew I could never ask one of my school friends to play it with me, so I enlisted my parents, who gamely tried to follow along. But they had no more knowledge of role-playing than I did, and after a half an hour or so they were clearly bored and tired of pretending otherwise. For my own part, I was far too self-conscious to do whatever playacting the game seemed to require, especially in front of my parents. So I packed it up and put it away under my bed, where I would occasionally catch a glimpse of it and feel a stab of guilt that I had persuaded my parents to spend so much money on such a sorry thing.
I don't remember whatever became of that game – I have the vague recollection that I gave it away before going off to college – but I was wrong to think my parents had wasted their money on it. In fact, I did get some value out of the Lord of the Rings role-playing game, even if I never completed a single round. I learned that as bad as I was at being cool, I was bad at being a nerd, too.
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Since I wrote this column almost a decade ago, role-playing games have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity, fueled in part by the Dungeons & Dragons-playing protagonists of the TV show Stranger Things. Apollo and Arthur and even William play D&D regularly with their friends. There’s a D&D club at their middle school, and two kids’ clubs at the nearby game store Geeky Teas. My husband sometimes plays with them, too, but it’s not for me. My role-playing dreams died sometime around 1993, under a twin bed with a lavender bedspread and matching pillow shams.
What I Should Be Doing
Studying for my German exam (this Friday), getting a paper ready to (maybe) submit for publication (maybe)
What I’m Actually Doing
Planting a sunflower maze, redesigning the closets, resealing the bathroom floor, celebrating the birthdays of my husband and three of my five kids this month, inflating a lot of balloons for Apollo’s junior high graduation this week, visiting my brand-new baby nephew, working through Learn Watercolor in 30 Days
What I’m Reading
In the summer I finally catch up on all the non-grad-school reading I never get a chance to do during the school year. I just finished Magda Szabó's astounding novel The Door and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Also I'm Very Excited About
Summer break! I’m out of school more or less entirely until September. Until then it’s all gardening, taxidermy, painting, reading, and as always, endlessly renovating our weird old house. Maybe I’ll actually try to do a little writing somewhere in there, too.
The Fine Print
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