I put "City Scavenger Hunt" on the list, because this was something I've been wanting to do for months, if not years. I keep seeing them on Groupon -- or, when I'm in a new city, TripAdvisor -- and they seem like a fun way to learn about someplace new. Or to just solve fun clues and be competitive. I'm flexible on that.
Sarah and Richard signed up to do this one together -- which was a great idea, because a team of three is way better than a team of two for one of these things. Sarah and Richard are friends of mine from work. Richard is retired now (lucky) but we still keep in touch -- usually giving each other theatre advice for upcoming Broadway trips. Sarah is still at the office with me. (We were comparing notes, and I've been there something like six months longer than she has. We're still hoping we'll get parking in the building before it's time to retire.) We used to work in the same Division, but I switched a few years ago after my boss died, so don't see her as often as I used to.
(We ... we have a tradition, Sarah and I. When one of us is having a SPECTACULARLY shitty day -- like, say, when my boss passed away -- we go out for lunch. But not just any lunch. We go to Big Man Bakes, order a dozen mini-cupcakes, and drown our sorrows in carbs and frosting. And while I really, truly would be super happy if we never had to do THAT again, I know that if I ever drop her an "I need a cupcake lunch" e-mail, she'll be right there with me at Big Man Bakes, and I'd do the same for her, no questions asked.)
Where was I? Oh, right, Scavenger Hunt. We selected this weekend MONTHS ago, and Sarah booked us for a hunt, and we hadn't quite put together that this would be the March for Our Lives day. So we sent our love and support to the marchers, and found ourselves on a scavenger hunt at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA, to its friends).
We weren't entirely certain if we would be, like, the only people there that day -- or if there'd be, like, 100 people there. Turns out there were about 5 teams, which seemed a pretty good number. Particularly since they staggered us through the clue list. (We started with Clue 1, another group started with Clue 6, and so forth.) This meant that we shouldn't run into other groups in the museum, which would enable us to just talk out loud amongst our trio, and save us all of those Mind Games you play when you want to mislead another group that happens to be in the same gallery as you are.
At least, that's how it was SUPPOSED to go. By the time we were on Clue 5, another team caught up with us. (I think they had started at 21. There were 22 clues. So, I mean, they didn't have TOO many to make up to catch up to us. But still.) Clue 5 was a fucking BEAR. (Not an actual fucking bear. It wasn't that kind of museum.) But, basically, each clue would give you an actual gallery number, and once you were in the gallery, the clue would describe one of the works of art (in a humorous, arch way which would not enable you to Google it), and once you figured out the art in question, you'd then have to answer a question about it. (And once you got THAT answer, there would be two letters in it highlighted, and those two letters would be turned into a word, which was part of the "secret message," and once you figured out the secret message, you'd get another secret message, and ... whatever, just find the damn cocoa cups, OK?) So, here was are, working Clue 5. We'd gotten 1-4 and we knew they were correct, and we were getting nowhere on Clue 5. We looked at every damn piece of art in the room and none of them were matching the description -- and, NOW, the other team caught up with us. Shit, shit, shit.
To be fair, I probably would not have given up if the other team wasn't there. But the other team WAS there, and we wanted to keep ahead, and we also wanted them to think we'd gotten it (even though we hadn't), so, hell, Mind Games on! Let's pretend we got it and move on.
We moved on. Somewhere around Clue 8, they caught up with us again. Clue 8 was hard, and we hadn't solved it by the time they got there. We had been pretty sure we knew what painting it was referring to, but we couldn't make any of the answers fit (they didn't correspond to words that made sense in the secret message), so we were just coming around to the idea that maybe we were looking at the wrong painting. I decided to take a quick spin around the room and thought I saw a Second Candidate for the right painting, but it would require a lot of really obvious staring for me to figure out the answer to the question. And there was Other Team, just entering the room, and I'll be damned if they're going to ride off my hard work on this one and see me staring at Second Candidate and get the answer right after I walked away. So I go stand over by a THIRD painting, call Sarah and Richard over, and tell them to take a brief stroll around the room, including what I think they should look at on Second Painting, while I go back and stare and First (Wrong) Painting and pretend to have an epiphany.
This works! They casually look at Second Painting, come back to me over by First Painting (where, I realize, I am standing oh-so-casually with my finger on my chin to simulate deep thought, and I wonder if I am actually fooling anyone with this), and they have the actual right answer from Second Painting, and we move on -- hopefully, leaving the other team none the wiser.
Sarah, Richard and I are a good team. Sarah has a good eye and spots a lot of details I miss. Richard, too, spots some things super-quickly -- once or twice making a beeline for the right work of art while I'm standing there in the middle of the room wondering where to begin. (He also spots a HUGE error I made, in reading a clue too quickly.) My contribution appears to be largely in solving pop culture references in the clues. We run pretty well through the rest of the clues until 16.
Fuck Clue 16. Honestly. We are very nearly out of time, and we can't solve this. We might have been idiots on Clue 5, but we're pretty sure Clue 16 is just wrong. There are four possible candidates in the room which can be the painting they mean, and it is very clearly none of them. And I mean, even though we can tell from the description that it's none of them, we try all the answers anyway, and none of them work. Clue 16 is just wrong. We're ticked that we can't solve it. We are ESPECIALLY ticked that we can't solve it, because you know that second secret message which you need to solve the whole thing? THAT is dependent on six of the clues, and 16 is the last of them. We might be able to fake our way around 5, but not solving 16 means we lose. We know this. After we've gotten as far Clue 20, we have ten minutes left and two choices: we can go to another building in the museum to solve 21 and 22, or go back and try for 16 again. We go back and try for 16 again, because it is critically important. We still can't solve it.
We go back to turn in our answer sheet, defeated. On the way, I realize that we can solve 22 without looking at the painting at all -- THAT one can be reverse-engineered. OK, we're missing 5, 16, and 21 -- that's three out of 22. But if we had 16, we could solve the second message and get, like, 8 more points. Did I say "Fuck 16" yet? Fuck 16, man.
We get to the turn-in point and have five minutes left. Clue 16 is supposed to give us the 6th character in a password we have to use on the internet. Well, fuck it. We've got four minutes (now), I whip out my phone and try to brute force it. I try about half the alphabet before time runs out. I do not get it. (There are two reasons for this: (1) I didn't get to the right letter; (2) in my rush, I had copied another letter wrong. The amount I contributed to this team outweighed the amount of mistakes I made, but I was starting to feel like it was a close call.)
There was a free extra point for the best team name. I thought we had a shot -- we went with "LACMAma, Can You Hear Me?" -- but the quizmaster gave the point to the team that came in last anyway. Fair enough. THEN the quizmaster told us that NOBODY solved it, so I started feeling a little better about our chances. I mean, if nobody got any of those extra solving-it points, it really came down to how many of those 22 clues everyone got.
Quizmaster runs through the scores from bottom to top, and eventually says that two teams got 18 and one team got 19, at which point I'm thinking, "well, we ANSWERED 19 -- did we actually get them right and win this fucking thing?"
Why yes, yes we did.
Cheesy medals and everything.
We're psyched.
We're also still ticked about 5 and 16. Quizmaster has given us an answer sheet (including the names of the paintings in question) and we're pretty sure those paintings weren't on the walls -- at least, not in the rooms they were supposed to be in. We take the answers and go back into the museum to confirm this.
That's right. We already WON, but we will still not be satisfied until we've either figured out where we went wrong or proven that the museum rotated the art out. I point this out to Sarah and Richard. They respond that it is precisely this quality which is why we all went to Law School. (I also noted that the only thing that kept us from a three-way tie was that I'd reverse-engineered that last answer. Which makes me feel better about the two things I'd really screwed up.)
Long story slightly less long: Those paintings were not there. I mean, now that we had the titles of the paintings, we could Google them, look at the pictures, and stand in the relevant galleries and go, "Nope. That is not on these walls." We text this fun fact to the quizmaster, who cheerfully responds that he knows the paintings were there because other teams got those answers right. I roll my eyes and think, "Yeah, well, I figured out 22 without even walking into that BUILDING. Doesn't prove the damn art is there." We decide to just enjoy our medals and let it go. Because we're gracious winners and all that.
Sarah and Richard took me out for Birthday Dinner afterward, which was really cool because we'd had a good time in the Scavenger Hunt, but we were so busy solving clues (and getting pissed off at 16), we didn't have time to chat much. So we sat in a lovely restaurant attached to the museum, ate tasty food, gossiped a bit, and got caught up on each other's lives.
It was definitely a grown-up dinner (the menu had lots of words I didn't understand, and wine was involved); but I think what was the most fun about it was that we were proudly wearing our Scavenger Hunt medals while we ate. I mean, we went right from doing the playful game into the adult dinner, and I love both things. And I love that Sarah and Richard both enjoyed doing both things just as much.
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