A reader pointed out earlier that the story about Stephen Sondheim's mother giving a clued cake to players seemed unlikely due to the bad blood between the two. My source for the story stated that he could no longer find where he heard the story. However, after a lot of searching, I found it!
The New Yorker ran an article on March 8th 1993 which they have recently posted in their online edition. [Puzzalot note: It no longer appears to be online.] ‘Stephen Sondheim's most famous game took place in Manhattan on Halloween, 1968. It required twenty people (preferably young theatre Turks like Herbert Ross, Nora Kaye, Lee Remick, Mary Rodgers, and Roddy McDowall), four limousines, complicated maps full of numbers and arrows, and a sack of perplexing props: scissors, bits of string, pins. Each team of five had to drive to a spot designated on the map, and there they would find a clue telling them where to go next; the trouble was, the clues were numbers, and there was no way of knowing how they might be revealed. One destination was a bustling bowling alley in which the last lane was curiously empty; there stood a single enigmatic pin, which you had to bowl over in such a way that you glimpsed the number written on the side. Another site proved to be nothing but a nondescript door with a mail slot. But if you stuck your ear near the slot, you could hear the faint voice of Frank Sinatra singing "One for My Baby" - which might still have stumped you unless you recognized that the lyric begins, "It's a quarter to three." A quarter to three: the number was 245. Then there was the vestibule of a brownstone, where a small elderly woman (actually, the mother of Anthony Perkins, Sondheim's fellow game designer) would beckon you upstairs for some coffee and a slice of cake. Those who actually ate the cake stood no chance of winning: the clue was drawn in the icing.
"That was one of the last of the big game parties," Sondheim says. "Toward the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, I don't know, it just stopped. Everybody outgrew them except me."’ - Deconstructing Sondheim, The Stephen Sondheim Society quoting the New Yorker
So it wasn't Sondheim's mother: It was Anthony Perkin's mother. How's that for spooky?
Labels: history, stephen sondheim, The Game
