It was sunny here on Saturday and partly cloudy on Sunday. Gloomy on Monday
and downright rainy and stormy on Halloween. Would have been a great night
for a Murder Party! Or even a great weekend for the same.

To me, the trend of bell bottom jeans, hip huggers and daisy dukes, tie-dyed
t-shirts, tube tops and smock tops... they look like costumes, don't they?
Clogs and wedges and platform shoes. Costumes of an era now come back to
haunt us.

So why not Murder Parties? Nothing wrong with a good murder party Where
you can dress up in character and also serve and eat good food.

If you have the money you can rent a boat or an old mansion to stage the
scene, but who do you know can do that without charging admission?!

Think of the old game "Clue". No, this isn't Colonel Mustard in the Study
with a Wrench. There doesn't need to be a butler and he didn't have to do
it.

My brother and I staged a Murder Party back in the 1980's. The premise was
simple: we'd all just returned from the funeral of an old college chum and
one of us murdered him, but he was my fiance! [In reality we made a lot of
nice hot appetizers like buffalo chicken wings and potato skins and we had
chips, various dips, vegetables and fruit and lots of beer and liquor
available.]

We were all supposed to be rehashing this fictitious characters' life after
his funeral and trying to figure out who killed him. We all suspected one
of us in the room had killed him, but why?

We were each given "clues" to leave laying around. [I spent hours trying to
get the stain on the note I had to drop without being caught look like old,
dried blood... my only real experience with oil paints (and John was proud
of the way I mixed them to achieve the shade when I told him about it.]

Anyway, the person "leading" the game doesn't know the outcome, either, but
he or she serves as a sort of director of the plot as things move along.
And they are just as equally surprised as everyone else when the final
information in each persons packet is revealed and you find out who the
murderer is!

A Murder Party can be great fun. Something to consider for *next*
Halloween. But the only costumes required are those of the characters...
sorry, you won't see Wolfman or Dracula or SpongeBob Squarepants. This is
for adults and while they may be dressed in period character it's nothing
too outlandish, if you get my meaning.

There are a number of Murder Party hosting kits available online, some free,
some not. But there's no need to wait for Halloween. As I recall, we did
this party well before October around 1988. We had a blast! Good food,
good fun, good times had by all. Except for the guy who didn't read his
script and announced he thought he was the murderer when he wasn't. That
guy turned out to be my (today) Internal Medicine doctor. I do not remind
him of how he flubbed our 'Murder Party'

Jill