Chicken or Go?

Let's talk about kissing, specifically kissing games that, I am sure, have been around in some fashion since the dawn of time. We all (hopefully) had a turn playing Spin the Bottle or Truth or Dare. I remember going to a birthday party when I was around fourteen and six girls showed up and only one boy... we played Spin the Bottle and Truth or Dare and (looking back on it now) that boy must have been in complete Heaven. From what I remember of that day, most of us girls didn't even necessarily like him but he was the only male there and we fought over him like crazy. This might have been my first real look at the creature that is known as girl.

In Yonder, on Isabel’s sixteenth birthday, Samantha mentions that everyone should play Post Office. I first heard of Post Office when I was reading a play from the 1940s and the characters were talking about playing the game. Recently I was watching “Design for Living,” from 1933 and the main character is complaining about a game of Post Office. But what is this game and how is it played?

Well, the mechanics of this game are really simple: First you divide the group, boys in one room, girls in the other. A girl is chosen to visit the “Post Office,” and she then enters the room and gets to go down the line and kiss each boy before the next girl gets a go and so on. Now there are variations to this game, one I read about was that when the girl enters the room the lights are turned off. Another (my dad recalled to me,) was that the girl asks each boy if he wants “a kiss or a stamp.” If the boy answers 'stamp' the girl then stomps on his foot.

But Isabel and Samantha do not play Post Office, they play Chicken or Go instead- a game that is more mature and more daring. I will not go into how to play it, Samantha is the teacher in that scene but I will tell you this: The first time I saw Chicken or Go was when I was in New York City with some friends and one of them started playing Chicken or Go with the other in a joking fashion. It was only a minute or two that passed in my life years ago but as I was working on Yonder and (as if out of nowhere) I started typing about this game. I guess the memory of games like these just stick in your head and hold. We all remember our first kiss, be it from something like mistletoe, a playground or even Spin the Bottle. I guess my point is: that feeling of butterflies is something that remains universal.