Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem

A few months ago I started a round of movie nights with a selection of Chocolate, and last Saturday night I had a bunch of friends over again, this time to share the movie Rear Window, the Alfred Hitchcock 50's film with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly.

Since I like to have themes, I sent out the invitational email with the title "Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem".

I think we had a bit of all three, especially the "Mayhem".

Everyone brought some sort of goody (apple pie, brownies, chocolate, chips, cheesecake), and we had enough drinks available to set up an entire bar!
I made lemonade with strawberry puree icecubes and had Tequila (for All-Natural Mama) and Gin to mix in with the lemonade (preferably not at the same time!).
As we watched the movie, we also played a game in which someone (unknown) was the "Dastardly Villain" and the rest of us were victims. When the "Dastardly Villain" winked at you, you were then dead, and had to die in as dramatic a fashion as possible (this involved such scenarios as: tripping over a knitting bag, being stabbed in the neck with a sock needle, screaming bloody murder fit to awaken the dead, coughing up blood/ketchup in a fit of consumption, and falling dramatically from a chair). It was pretty funny how exotic the method of death became as the night progressed!

The Villain had to be sneaky about her winking, because if anyone (other than the dead victim) caught the Villain winking, she could be exposed and then the game was over. Nikki and Flipflopping Mama were quite good, and managed to murder all of us before we realized they were the Dastardly Villain.
Then the Mayhem began. During a lull in the movie, I started relating a story about how the previous night I had the oddest dream in which a bat flew into my room and was flapping around all night, but when I got out of bed to investigate, I couldn't find any evidence of my dream. Just as all the other women were assuring me that it must have been a dream, Esther calmly looks over my shoulder and declares, "Look, a bat."
For a few seconds, no one thought she was serious, and then as we saw the bat swoop over someone's head, shrieks erupted from every female throat. If an ax-murder bent on hacking us to pieces were in the room, the volume level could not have gotten any higher.

All-Natural-Mama, usually a laid-back person, vaulted over three other women and crouched under her sister-in-law's chair, looking positivily terrified with fear. Several other women went barreling out the front door, nearly crushing each other in their mad dash for a bat-free space.

Not Esther. Nope. Esther (perhaps due to her previous bat-battling skills, or perhaps the Gin laced lemonade) ran towards the wildly flapping bat and began wacking at it with her knitting bag. When this didn't work, she spied a nearby plastic bin full of yarn, dumped out the yarn, and with a terrific heave managed to trap the bat under the bin.
(We will not comment on the fact that I had a bin full of yarn nearby.)

The ladies returning from their frantic dash to the great outdoors heard the bat's irritated clicking and sqeaking from inside the bin, and made another wild migration to the outside.

I quickly grabbed a towel, and with Elise's help, the three of us managed to carry the temporary bat prison outside, where we literally vaulted the entire thing (bin, towel, and bat) off the porch and onto the street twenty feet away (while screaming the entire time; we can multi-task).



During the entire scenario, Handyman sat upstairs oblivious to the ear-popping decible level. When I asked him about it later, he shrugged and said, "Well, it didn't sound any louder than the rest of the evening."