"I vish I vere a vitch vith wiolet, welvet, vings!"

Tonight I laughed harder than I have in a long time. I convinced my parents to play a game because they were being more civil to each other than usual. They agreed. It's always a good night when they're not arguing. We played Clue and it was epic.

Dad's awful at Clue, he always has been. He banishes his logical mind and frequently guesses weapons and suspects that he already knows about, which leads him to explain, "Ah yes...I was just confirming my knowledge." and chortle whole-heartily in an I'm-a-chimney-sweep-from-Mary-Poppins accent.

Mom is slightly better, but since I know how she plays she's not much of a threat unless she rolls really high numbers. Mom does, however, like to poke fun at dad for sucking horribly at Clue in her posh English accent.

For some reason we always revert to dialects and speech patterns foreign to America such as Russian, Chinese, African, etc. It's one of the highlights of living in a Wilson or Appleton residence.

{Quick side notes deserve the cool looking brackets. My immediate family all have different last names. Mama Wilson, Daddy Appleton, my sis Jessie Thompson, Jessie's dad Ted Orzech, grammy Alice Clunie, and then the whole rest of the family we never see: the Fairfields. How weird is that?}

Halfway through the game mom speculates out-loud, "The violet-hued Professor Plum in the dining room with the wrench." Upon hearing this color dad blurts out, "I vish I vere a vitch vith wiolet, welvet, vings!" in a voice resembling Count Dracula. Mom and I were baffled as to what he was saying. "Are you saying witch? -or bitch? Wait dad wouldn't want to be that..." "No, I vish I vere a VITCH vith wiolet, welvet, vings!" Seeing the two of us stare at him in utter confusion, he leaps up, clasps his hands together in from of himself and parades around the living room. "Sumo wrestler?" "Buddha!" "No, a VITCH a VITCH!" he exclaims. This vague manner of confrontation wasn't succeeding, so he picked up a guitar and began to ride around. "Oh, a vitch!" "Wait, so what's he saying?"

Dad was running around while perched on the guitar, cackling like the wicked witch of the west from The Wizard of Oz. Mom was muttering incoherent nonsense about dad's clever joke, purple vs. violet, and the Schuyler White song. (She had this stuck in her head all day and asked me on numerous occasions to serenade her with something non-Schuyler and/or the color white related.)

The entire scene was hysterical. That's when I said "I'm going to have a blogging extravaganza tonight!" Good thing I chose to exploit some of cyber-communication's many drawbacks. You can't hear the tones, the accents, the joke, and you can't see dad looking completely ridiculous. Plus mom's laughter is funnier than the new season of Paris Hilton's my new bff. (at least the first one was good, but this one actually has straight men. What the hell's up with that?)

For all of those who don't yet understand what dad was saying, if you replace the v's with w's and vice versa it states "I wish I were a witch with violet, velvet, wings!" Dad ended up hearing this hilarious phrase from his brother during their childhood and it stuck with him all these years. Good thing, too, otherwise we would've missed out on life. Spontaneously-planned family game nights are always worth talking about.