DANGEROUS GAMES

Letter from L.A.

In Beverly Hills these days, a new craze for parlor games has got the likes of Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and William H. Macy running, screaming, guessing, and confessing

As well night out in Hollywood used to mean dinner at Chasen's or a private screening where you raised the van Gogh and projected your studio's newest film on the screen underneath. These days, if you're invited out for an evening in the Hills or Santa Monica, you'd better be prepared to spend it playing fierce, revealing, and exhausting games, and if you're not good at them, you'd better not expect to be invited back.

The most popular of the new games is Running Charades. Regular hosts include Kristen Johnston, Helen Hunt and Hank Azaria, William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, and Julianna Margulies. Players have ranged from Gwyneth Paltrow to Mike Myers to Brooke Shields to Brad Pitt. As in regular charades, quotations or the titles of books or songs or movies or plays are acted out in pantomime. Ideally, according to William Macy, for the new version you should have 21 people. You split them into three teams of seven, and each person writes out a list of 10 quotations or titles—Gone with the Wind, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, "Give me liberty or give me death." Now for the running part.

The player who goes first takes his list and sits in the living room. His team and the other two teams retire to different rooms at equal distances from the one he's in.

At a given signal, a member from each team runs to the person with the list, who gives them the first title or quote on it; then they run back to their teams and act out the charade until someone guesses the answer. As soon as a team has the answer, a second member of that team runs and gets the next quote or title, and so on. The team that

gets all the answers first wins. You play until everybody's list has been acted out. The bigger the space, the more you run, which can make for a lot of sweating, screaming, alcohol, cigarettes, and hysterics. "At the beginning of the evening, you'll meet some director or some actor that you're just in awe of," says William Macy. There you are being all deferential and complimentary, and 20 minutes into the game you're screaming, 'You idiot! What's the matter with you? Get it together!'"

Alternative new party games include Which Would You Rather ... ?, Celebrity, and I Never. The first is likely to be played while seated over rubber chicken at one of the hundreds of the industry's charity events or awards dinners. It starts out with harmless questions. Which would you rather: sleep with Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford? That will inevitably lead to rougher choices. Which would you rather: sponge-bathe Shelley Winters or shave Robin Williams's back? The longer you play, the rougher the choices become. Which would you rather: have sex with your father or cut off your pinkie toe?

Celebrity is a simple team game. Everybody puts the names of five famous people in a bowl. You pick a name out and describe the celebrity in under a minute without saying Myers his or her name. Example: Likes monkeys. Pop a charade, and The team that gets the most names wins. As Fran Drescher said at the start of a recent game with friends, "I can't believe we are going to play Celebrity with celebrities."

I Never is a way of getting to know intimate details about people very quickly. The players hold up all five fingers of one hand. The first player might say, I have never had sex in public. Everyone who ever has had sex in public puts a finger down. Then the next person goes. The last person with one or more fingers up wins. As one agent said, "I hate that game. My relationship broke up because of I Never!"

KRISTA SMITH