why adults don't play tag....

Freeze tag, flashlight tag, tv tag - all derivatives of regular old tag, and all have provided children across the globe with countless hours of giggley, screamy, fast-paced, frolicky fun for god knows how many years. Last night, on the eve of the eve of the anniversary of the illustrious birth of my friend mic jones (not the rapper, the original), a pack of ladies suited up in their running shoes, jeans, sweats, hoodies and gloves, and, armed with their stealthiest and most aerodynamic flashlights, met at dark on a grassy knoll snuggled up against Lake Merritt, to call upon the spirits of their child selves in an all-out battle royale grown-up game of Flashlight Tag.

The rules were concocted by Mic's lovely mom who came up from LA just for her daughter's birthday, and the rules were this: There would be two teams: the law and the civilians. The law would consist of taggers and jailers. The taggers ran around tagging the civilians and freezing them. Once a civilian was frozen, the tagger had to call for the jailer to come and fetch the frozen and haul them off to the prison (an area in the center of a triangle of trees). Once they were inside, the prisoners teammates could come bail them out of jail by running up and tagging them inside their cell, but they had to get past the jailers first. Once all the civilians were put in jail at the same time, with no one left to bail them out, there would be a regime change; a coup, if you will.

Once everyone was briefed on the rules, we set up some spatial boundaries, gave the civilians a 10 second head start and we were off!! We were all over the place, running, yelling, arresting, incarcerating, people were sick with power! Aaaaaand about 5 1/2 minutes later, people were actually sick. Coughing, wheezing, shouts of "I can't run anymore!", "Stop! Stop!", "I lost my earring!!", and "I'm gonna barf!!!," filled the night sky.

The game dissolved shortly thereafter into a huddle of grown ass women holding themselves up on each others' shoulders and backs asking, "Holy Shit, how do kids play tag all day????" We ended up doing a revival of Red Light/Green Light, just to prove to ourselves we weren't quitters and we still had a firm grip on the last threads of our youthful energy as we reluctantly or joyfully slipped into our mid to late 20's, and then someone asked, "So where we goin for cocktails?"