Pharrell

Recently, a friend I haven't heard from in a while mentioned that he's found a new pastime during the Coronavirus pandemic. I can't exactly fault him, since I've taken up brewing kombucha during my time. We're all doing things a little bit differently these days, you know?

So, what was this new hobby? A virtual version of the Telestrations game, played among a group of folks he knew. Now, if you're like me and you've never heard of this game before, it's based on the Telephone game that people often played as kids.

If you're unfamiliar with that game as well, the basic premise is that no one can repeat a phrase with 100% accuracy. So, you get a string of people, and you have each of them whisper a phrase to the person next to them. More often than not, the phrase will be transformed in unexpected ways because someone in the chain will have added a slight tweak, and those tweaks add up over the length of the chain. Eventually, the phrase becomes something different.

Now, the Telestrations game combines that premise with drawing. So, rather than having to say the phrase out loud, someone has to draw it. Incidentally, that's also where the name of the game comes from (Telephone + Illustrations = Telestrations). To really simplify things, one person draws and another person interprets the drawing in words. If you keep that cycle going with different sets of people, you get the same basic outcome as the original game; the phrase is transformed, often hilariously so, by the end.

So, my buddy asked whether or not I wanted to play along. I figured it'd be fun to give it a go, especially since I didn't need to commit tons of time to it. I would basically draw something for a few minutes or try to describe a drawing in an even shorter amount of time. All in all, it seemed like a fun gig.

I ended up having to draw a scene involving Halloween trick-or-treaters and murderous adults, because that was the phrase I was provided. That very likely seemed like the work of a creative person behind me, but since that was my task, I sketched something out. It wasn't a work of art by any stretch of the imagination, but I was proud of myself for getting the relevant details into the drawing. I had three little kids dressed as a wizard, a princess, and a ghost with bags of candy, and I had an adult pirate standing at the doorway. I figured it was a reasonable representation of what I had been given, so I submitted my drawing.

Days later, I then found out about the full chain. Sure enough, the descriptions had gotten mangled a bit by the time it had got to me, but the part that really made me laugh was the description that someone gave of my drawing. Remember the would-be pirate that I put in the doorway? Someone described that person as Pharrell (Williams). I mean, sure, the guy will occasionally wear interesting outfits, but the seemingly random attribution made me crack up.

Apparently, I draw a half-way decent Pharrell. Who knew?