When I was about eight years old, I walked up to my dad and casually asked, “Hey, can we play the naked man game?”
My dad immediately froze.
Trying not to panic, he calmly asked, “Uh… what’s the naked man game?”
I answered innocently, “It’s the one we play when the babysitter is here.”
At that point, he told me later his heart nearly stopped. His mind was racing, trying to figure out what on earth I was talking about while also trying to stay calm.
Instead of reacting, he asked me to show him exactly what I meant.
So I led him down the hallway to the closet where we kept our board games. I opened the door, pointed up to the top shelf, and proudly said, “Right there!”
Sitting on the shelf was the board game Operation.
If you’ve ever played it, you know the patient on the board is a cartoon man lying there in his underwear while you try to remove silly objects from his body with tiny tweezers.
To my eight-year-old brain, that was simply “the naked man game.”
My dad later told me that in those few seconds before opening the closet, he had mentally prepared for the worst possible explanation.
Instead, it was just a board game.
He said the relief nearly knocked him over.
