A Strange Game of "Two Truths and a Lie"

Some time ago I wrote a piece about how, when you get to a certain age, everyone appears to have a story that is really interesting.  Our collective life stories are interesting, because, in part, we have our own now-mature stories to compare them to.

That is interesting to me at least, because I have had a particularly checkered career, and as documented in the less-political pieces on this site, I've done some weird things.  When my best girl and I sit down with new friends, well, I don't begin to tap the list of screwy things I've done, intentionally or not.

So I was watching a TV show of some kind the other day, and they made reference to the parlor game "Two Truths and a Lie."

Now, if you have never played it, or never been in a parlor, the game is quite simple.  Each person around the table, at the same time, writes down two one-sentence facts about themselves and a one-sentence lie, a non-fact with no basis in truth at all.  The others then "vote" on which item is the lie, and the winner is the person who disguises the lie the best and convinces the others -- who hear only three total sentences -- that, based only on the written sentence, their lie is what actually happened.

Obviously you can only play one round of it, lest you run out of facts that are sufficiently strange.  So it is a lot of fun to have upwards of a dozen people playing.

Five years ago, I was beginning a one-year hiatus from consulting to take a job as Senior Vice President for a small consulting firm in Virginia.  I did not know the ownership of the company or the other executives very well, having only been with them a month, when the regularly-scheduled annual leadership retreat took place, a two-day planning session for the coming year.

It was led by a "facilitator", a typical structure where an outside person actually conducts the agenda to ensure that politics are minimized and the planning actually gets done, and the agenda items are properly dealt with.

Those types of facilitated retreats -- about a dozen people in our case -- are typically broken up with team-building exercises and head-clearing breaks. And so it came to pass that this facilitator decided to do, as the 2pm team-building exercise on the first day, a round of "Two Truths and a Lie."

At 61 back then, I was the second oldest person there, meaning that I had a lot more life to have pulled stories from, even before my unusual life was overlaid on my age.  So I kind of relished the opportunity to take the allotted five minutes and write down three sentences, realizing that the lie was going to be the hardest to take into account.  And this was what I came up with:

(1) I once knocked Lucille Ball on her backside.

(2) I was at one time a member of the General Assembly in the State of South Dakota.

(3) I have sung the national anthem at five different major-league baseball stadiums.

Now, if you have read through the other 650 pieces on this site as a regular, you will know that (1) and (3) are absolutely true, meaning that, if only by default, the lie had to be that I had never served in the legislature of the State of South Dakota.  Of course, this column didn't start until two years later, so they didn't have that insight and had to guess.

You will also guess that I "won" the game, and you would be right.  Most people thought that I had never knocked Lucille Ball on her backside, which is reasonable considering, for example, the owners of the company were both 39 at the time, and Lucy to them might as well have been a figure of the 1950s and partly fictional.  A few didn't know that I had been a singer, and thought the anthem story sounded like a good choice for a lie.

I've been to South Dakota exactly once, which was when I was waiting for a plane in Sioux City, Iowa, and had three hours to wait.  I just pointed my rental car north (the border was just up the highway a bit) and crossed into South Dakota to say I'd been there.  That was that.  It would be 35 years afterwards before I made it to North Dakota, but in fairness I had actual business there.

But I digress.

So here comes this reference to the "Two Truths and a Lie" game on the TV Show, and I start laughing on the couch.  My best girl asked "what the heck" and I told her the story of the retreat.  Apparently I had never shared that before, possibly because it may have seemed a trivial aside in an otherwise more important and serious retreat then, and possibly because she was neck-deep running her business at the time it had happened.

It is fun to recollect, and fun when it happened.  And it tells us a lot about our lives, doesn't it?  Now that we are living in an area with a lot of people with such stories, I think we'll play this quite a bit more.  Hmmmm, there's a block party in a few weeks ....

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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