2 points – Activity – CLUE Murder Mystery

A favorite game in our family, both growing up and raising our own children, was CLUE. So it made perfect sense for us to register for the Dallas Museum of Art Murder Mystery. Who did it, Where and With What?

We expected a turnout of about 30 people but close to 200 people showed up! The mystery took us to all 4 levels of the museum, each of which revealed some suspects and possible murder weapons and one room with the outline of a body. Had we not overthought the obvious (since the body was riddled with stab wounds, surely it would be too obvious to say the weapon was a dagger, right?…WRONG!), , we would have been one of the many winners.

2 points – Movie Theme CHOICES

Although we do look at movie reviews, we’ve always felt that if the subject sounded interesting to us we could easily ignore the review and watch it, as many good movies could be missed if one chose solely based on its rating. We’ve definitely been vindicated with the movie The Words, starring Dennis Quaid, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons and Zoe Saldana. It’s a movie about living with your Choices and how they affect the rest of your life. Loosely based on a real life incident of Ernest Hemingway (his first wife, Hadley, packed all the pages he wrote prior to 1922 in a briefcase and forgot it on a train), it’s the story of a young, unsuccessful writer (Cooper) who finds a briefcase in an antique store and discovers a manuscript in it. There is nothing to indicate the owner of the briefcase or the author of the manuscript. After much deliberation, the writer decides to retype it and pass it off as his own. The repercussions of this choice, along with others made after the true author reveals himself, is the heart of the movie. It made us think of what we would do, how bad actually was his initial choice, etc. – and any movie that makes us think and discuss after we’re done watching is worth it. We both felt the reviewers were definitely too harsh on this film.