I’m all for keeping your inner child alive and going retro and whatnot. Organized sports are fun, too. But Wednesday night Tag on the Plaza seems a little silly to me.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On a moonlit night on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, a slender young woman darted in the dark just south of the J.C. Nichols Fountain. Other players moved away from her like polarized magnets, running in circles and at right angles.
They were the hunted, she the huntress.
Creeping like a tiger, she spied her prey. Zooming left, she thrust out her arm.
A lunge. A swipe.
A touch on the shoulder.
There’s nothing unusual about children playing tag. What was unusual is that the child in this game was 23 years old, and many of her playmates hadn’t been kids for decades. Tag for adults? Why not?
In May, Kate Schurman, a Kansas City law office manager, founded the Tag Institute, a grown-up group of tag enthusiasts who get together at 7 p.m. every Wednesday on the Plaza to chase each other silly….
“There have been times when I’ve really had a rough day and I’ve had to make myself come to tag,” said Susan Schurman, 52. “And it really works. It changes my whole attitude.”
Not a natural athlete, Kate Schurman (pronounced SKER-min) was never much for traditional sports. Like most people, she enjoyed playing tag as a child. But when she grew up, she stopped playing. Everyone did.
The more she thought about it, though, the more it bothered her. Tag was fun, good exercise and a wonderful way to meet people and make new friends. Why did it have to go away just because she became an adult? Then it came to her: It didn’t.
Schurman decided not to be bound by convention. She didn’t care how old she was. She didn’t care what people might think. She was going to play tag on the Plaza.
She called her sister Elizabeth and her mother.
“You’re coming,” she told them. “‘Cause I can’t play by myself.”
She called friends, talked to neighbors, put up fliers in coffee houses and placed a notice in the newspaper’s calendar section. She even drew arrows with sidewalk chalk pointing the way to the game and pulled strangers off the street….
Adults playing kids’ games? What does it mean?
It’s simple, said James Twitchell, a pop culture expert from the University of Florida. Increasingly, people have isolated themselves the past several decades. This is an indication that the pendulum has now started to swing back the other way.
“We’re not together like we used to be,” he said. “What do you blame it on, the automobile, the television, the computer? It doesn’t matter. To me, this is a celebration of what we’ve lost and are trying to get back — namely, a sense of community….”
For Schurman and her friends, tag fills the void.
Let’s puff it up just a little more. It’s a game. It’s not like she overcame paraplegia to play or it’s the Next Big Thing in the urban tribe era. It’s fun and a neat idea, just the article itself sounds really really stupid.
