Mystery Dinner Theater in Space: Aw Yeah.

Sleuthing is serious business.

Hey.  It’s everyone’s favorite day of the week: Lollipop Tuesday!   If you battle with aggressive bouts of forgetfulness, feel free to check out the link “What’s Lollipop Tuesday?” at the top right corner of the page.

This week, I decided to do something I have long entertained but never acted upon.  I’ve been intrigued, I’ve been curiouser than a Curious Georgette, but never have I ever gone to mystery dinner theater.  Naturally, I couldn’t just go to regular old dinner theater.  To satisfy my funny bone and to sustain the high levels of geekiness per milliliter in my blood, I ventured over to a show called “Space Trek”.

Get ready for a double dose of nerd.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a bit of a Trekkie.   You have to understand that it was virtually impossible to leave my home at the ripe age of 18 and not have been at least brainwashed into liking the stuff.   I (read: my dad) was an avid follower of Star Trek: the Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager (ugh. worst ever.) and even shows like Babylon 5, which might has well been called “Star Trek: Babylon 5”.

For those of you who have no idea what I just said, just know that each of those is a different series with the same premise and different actors and a slightly different situation.  Just slightly.

It’s like Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess.  Same idea, different genders, and sometimes they would do a dual show together.

…Did I just attempt to explain to non-nerds what the different Star Trek followings were by relating the Hercules and Xena shows?

This is a new low.

Anyway, the point is that I know so much about Star Trek that it’s impossible to not take advantage of the opportunity to see it mocked and warped into a murder mystery.   Of course, Captain Kirk (Captain Quirk) is the victim.  He also happens to be a big womanizer, a bad actor, and suffer from severe cases of pun attacks.   A lot of people had motive.

As you can imagine, I’m not exactly the go-getter type in these whodunit scenarios.   I had every intention of just sitting down, eating a yummy dinner, and getting a Lollipop Tuesday post in the books.  But it turned out to be so much  more.

When I throw myself into a new experience for a Lollipop Tuesday, I do my very best to embrace it in its entirety.  Instead of being myself and curling into my hermit shell, I make a sincere effort to mimic the actions of others so that I can truly say I tried something.  And just when I put my feet up to relax and watch the show, I realized that I hadn’t at all anticipated the sort of folks who come out to these things.

I was fixating on what I might have for dinner when I noticed a bright suit set in my peripheral vision.  I looked up to see a woman not a day younger than 60 jotting down something or other in a fury.   I  glanced to her paper and noticed a list she was building.

Apparently murder mysteries are quite interactive.  Each table had a paper with a set of facts, with all but one missing.   It was our job to go around and meet people to get the facts we were missing so that we’d have the back story before the show started and would thus be better sleuths.   When I looked around, I saw a gaggle of old ladies getting up from their seats with yellow, #2 pencils in their hands, ready to crack the case.

There was nothing I wanted to do less than go meet people and write down their information.

…but I have a blog to maintain.

So I went full force and covered all 7 facts in a solid 5 minutes.  I looked over shoulders, bargained with whomever appeared to be the table leader, and even shook a few hands.  *Shudder* It was painful.   So, so painful.

All of my work was for naught – I didn’t crack the case.  Looking back, it’s totally obvious that the alien princess used her stinger on Shmuck and that he was under her command and stuck in a hive mentality that forced him to kill Captain Quirk for command of the Secondprize.

I don’t know how I didn’t put that together the first time.

I’m still kind of twitching from the double dose of nerd I injected so forcefully and all at once.   So you’ll have to excuse me, but I need to go watch stupid and popular TV shows like Glee and American Idol before I erupt in a nerdgasm.  ♣

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011