Excuse me but did you just teach my teenager a variation of strip poker?

So about a month ago, I was sitting at my block party chatting with the teenage girls in my neighborhood about Twilight (for those of you living under a rock, this is a guaranteed generation gap equalizer). We were all expounding on the fact that despite the suckiness of the movies (and our raging disappointment in Bella as a protagonist), we still found ourselves lining up with the masses to get our tickets for each subsequent film on opening night.

Just as I was starting to feel smug about my ability to meaningfully communicate with teenagers, I mentioned A Walk to Remember. (Yeah, you know it, bad boy Shane West must choose between juvie or community service with virgin PK Mandy Moore after he talks some kid into belly flopping into a quarry. He grudgingly chooses community service, falls in love with Mandy Moore and ultimately marries her after finding out about her leukemia diagnosis. It's a Nicholas Sparks classic TRAIN WRECK and get's a Christa Craptastic rating of 3.5 stars).

My apparently outdated AWTR reference resulted in the immediate dispersement of the teenagers. Eager to correct my faux pas, I mentioned that I was writing a YA novel. Well, for some reason, this sparked quite a bit of interest and suddenly I was inundated with questions as to the content of the book.

Without going into too great of detail (I do, after all, want to publish my novel one day), I explained that it was about a group of teenagers playing a game. After describing the game at length, one of the girls said to me, "So it's kind of like strip poker?"

Uh yeah, I guess. Well, no, not really but I was fascinated that this was how these girls saw the game. It also made me realize the power of words and story. And the responsibility that comes with writing something that would be available for these impressionable teenagers to read.

Unfortunately, the girls also thought it sounded like fun and suggested playing it at some party later. Crap. I'm going get calls about this.