Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
There was a big winter storm in Colorado today, and bad roads prevented me from getting to Nederland from Boulder for Frozen Dead Guy Days. But the movie went on, and I’ll be there on Sunday with The Newly-Dead Game.
The great folks at the Black Forest Restaurant did get the movie going, showing the hour-long “Grandpa’s Still in the TUFF SHED” documentary. I had the original 25-minute “Grandpa’s in the TUFF SHED” in my bag with me, stuck at a lower elevation.
I tried twice to get up Boulder Canyon, once starting at 7:30 a.m. – the road was closed after I went up – and I had to turn around and come back down by 9:00 a.m. I’ve got a front wheel drive rental that just couldn’t cut the snowy, icy inclines. Went about seven miles up, with eleven more to go blocked by accidents and skidded out vehicles.
There was plenty of company. I tried going up a second time around noon after the road was reopened and got one mile further. If only I didn’t have to stop for the other folks who got stuck, perhaps I could have made it. The Colorado Department of Transportation closed the road again at 3:00 p.m. due to accidents.
Here’s hoping they clear and sand the road well tonight. I’ll do The Newly-Dead Game at 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. at the Black Forest Restaurant on Sunday. The polar plunge and parade of hearses have been pushed back to Sunday as well.
Nederland roundabout before the snow.
Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, funeral planning, The Newly-Dead Game
Three couples played The Newly-Dead Game on Sunday at Frozen Dead Guy Days 2012. Here’s the video. It was tied early on and neck and neck up to the end.
Thanks to all the couples who played the game!
Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, funeral planning, The Newly-Dead Game
This is video of Saturday’s 1:00 p.m. version of The Newly-Dead Game at Frozen Dead Guy Days 2012. I admit, I goofed on some of the emceeing in this go-round. My banter during the 5:00 game was much better.
Many thanks to the couples who played and to the good folks at the Black Forest Restaurant for hosting us with the game and the funny films for funeral planning!
Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
The wind blew wickedly through Nederland today, playing havoc with the outdoor Frozen Dead Guy Day events. The parade of hearses took place, but the polar plunge and the coffin races have been postponed to tomorrow. The wind tore through the two big tents where the music was taking place.
Thank goodness we were inside the Black Forest Restaurant showing the Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed documentary and playing two rounds of The Newly-Dead Game! Here is video of the second go-round at 5:00 p.m.
Many thanks to the couples who played!
Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
Nederland, Colorado is getting ready for the crowds to descend this weekend to celebrate Frozen Dead Guy Days. Driving into town, this ice sculpture created by Cool Hand Ice Carving greets visitors. The finishing touches were just being applied when I came by. The temperature was 20 degrees in town.
Bill and Kay Lorenz (pictured below) are the proprietors of the Black Forest Restaurant, where I’m showing the documentary, Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed. It tells the story of how Bredo Morstoel came to be the Frozen Dead Guy. We’ll also play The Newly-Dead Game at the restaurant.
Volunteers Ozzie and Colleen, pictured below, prepare to sell T-shirts and sweatshirts for the festival. These and other festival goodies are at the Dog House Video store.
Here’s a look at the Carousel of Happiness in Nederland, recorded at last year’s Frozen Dead Guy Days. Stephanie West Allen provided some history about this on her blog.
Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: A Good Goodbye, Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
Heading out to the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Nederland, Colorado this weekend. We’ll have fun with The Newly-Dead Game, funny films for funeral planning, and the documentary, Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed, which tells the story of how this all came to be.
Register to win this cool skull hat, a pair of skull shot glasses, a copy of A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, and the DVD Making Sense of Final Arrangements and Funeral Costs (wow!).
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If the form above does not work, fill it out at this page on my website: http://agoodgoodbye.com/events/frozen-dead-guy-days-2012/
Filed under: Media Interviews | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
The Newly-Dead Game at Frozen Dead Guy Days is in the news! Here’s part of the story by Breanna Draxler in the Boulder Daily Camera/Longmont Times-Call.
Instead of “making whoopee,” participants in one of the newest Frozen Dead Guy Days event will be making funeral plans. The Newly-Dead Game is a comically morbid riff on the long-running TV favorite, “The Newlywed Game.”
Participating couples will be quizzed on all things funerary to find out how well they know each other’s final wishes. The game is one of many death-related activities on the lineup for Nederland’s annual Frozen Dead Guy Days, which runs this year from March 2 through 4.
“My brother knighted me the Doyenne of Death,” said Gail Rubin, the game’s creator and author of “A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die.” “I thought it had a nice ring to it, so I’ve actually trademarked it and added it as my moniker.”
Rubin’s game debuted at last year’s festivities in Nederland and drew a crowd of about 300, she said. This year she will again be traveling up from Albuquerque, N.M., to host The Newly-Dead Game, which is scheduled to take place twice on Saturday and once on Sunday.
“I’d found out about (Frozen Dead Guy Days) from one of the national TV news shows,” Rubin said. “I said to myself, ‘I am going to be there next year. I don’t know how, but I want to be a part of this.’”
The Newly-Dead Game was Rubin’s solution.
“It’s definitely a unique topic,” said Amanda MacDonald, the event director of Frozen Dead Guy Days. The rules of The Newly-Dead Game resemble those of the original game show. Couples compete to answer questions about the end of one’s life. The game’s easier five-point questions pertain to information required for a death certificate, such as a person’s birthplace and mother’s maiden name. Ten points are given for correct answers to questions about epitaph preferences, funeral menus and burial attire. The most random and revealing questions can earn a couple 15 points: “If you were to set up a household shrine in your partner’s memory, what one item would he or she say should be included?”
The game, like most of the weekend’s events, is intended to entertain. But The Newly-Dead Game serves a practical function as well.
“It was good. It was definitely humorous. I think couples actually really learned a lot about each other,” said MacDonald, who recently purchased the rights to the festival from the Nederland Chamber of Commerce, of last year’s game.
Rubin said the game brings light to a dark subject. She said she hopes the game will encourage participants and spectators to start planning their funerals, since choosing coffins and funeral homes can be stressful and costly at the last minute.
“It’s a very fascinating shopping trip and best conducted before you’ve got a dead body on your hands,” Rubin said.
Or in the shed in your backyard.
What: Frozen Dead Guy Days
When: March 2-4, 2012
Where: Various locations in Nederland, including Chipeta Park, First Street and Black Forest Restaurant, 24 Big Springs Drive, where Grandpa’s Blue Ball takes place Friday evening
Info: frozendeadguydays.org or http://agoodgoodbye.com/events/frozen-dead-guy-days-2012/
Filed under: Frozen Dead Guy Days | Tags: Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
Hearse in parade FDGD 2011
Mark your calendars for March 2-4, 2012 for the 11th annual Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Nederland, Colorado! I’ll be at this wild and wacky celebration of all things dead and frozen, bringing back The Newly-Dead Game™ which debuted there last year.
Frozen Dead Guy Days is enjoying a surge of publicity over the past few days. The New York Times recently did a story about how festival manager Amanda MacDonald bought the festival from the Nederland Chamber of Commerce. I love how reporter Kirk Johnson opened his story:
DENVER — It was probably not, in the end, an idea with huge franchise potential or a killer smartphone app in its future. After all, a gleefully macabre weekend celebration built around a frozen corpse — complete with coffin races, tours of the shed where the body is kept on ice and, of course, lots of beer — just might not be as fun beyond the skewed sensibility of Colorado’s hippie-tinged mountain belt.
But now it’s official: Frozen Dead Guy Days are staying put in the small town of Nederland, about an hour northwest of Denver, as are the mortal remains of one Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian man whose strange and unlikely saga in death — and long-term storage — inspired the whole thing.
Read the whole New York Times story here.
Coffin race team in the FDGD 2011 parade
Other media have also been reporting the news, starting with the Boulder Daily Camera. That story by staff writer Laura Snider started out:
Amanda MacDonald knows how to bowl a frozen turkey, toss an iced-up salmon and organize a coffin race.
And those are good skills to have if you’re organizing a winter festival in the quirky mountain town of Nederland designed to celebrate the fact that the corpse of Grandpa Bredo Morstoel is being cryogenically preserved in a Tuff Shed above town.
MacDonald is the new owner of Frozen Dead Guy Days, but this year’s event will be the fourth one she has organized. MacDonald bought the icy affair after the Nederland Area Chamber of Commerce put it up for sale last summer.
“The chamber really wanted to keep it local, and they did make it affordable for me (to buy the event), I think, with this kind of understanding that rather than some promotion company from Denver (taking it over), I wouldn’t really change it drastically,” MacDonald said. “Honestly, I just wanted to see it stay in town. It’s really Nederland’s event.”
Read the whole Boulder Daily Camera story. You can also see this TV news brief on Denver’s local CBS station. Even the Huffington Post picked up the story.
One of the new developments this year is a VIP pass that festival goers can obtain in advance. The pass is a VIP wristband with benefits such as:
• 1 Blue Ball ticket
•1 Dead Guy Tour ticket
• A bottomless VIP cup, good for all beverages, all weekend at both music tents; you must be 21 and be wearing FDGD VIP wristband
• VIP parking pass (centrally located)
• Specialty FDGD VIP long sleeve shirt and your picture in the FDGD 2013 brochure
• Free participation at frozen turkey bowling, brain freeze, frozen salmon toss and polar plunge
• Entrance into Tuff Shed FDGD VIP catered lounge
Such a deal! Find out more at the Frozen Dead Guy Day website.
Couples compete: The Newly-Dead Game in 2011
And last but not least, I’ll be back for this year’s festival, engaging couples in The Newly-Dead Game! It’s a free event at Frozen Dead Guy Days.
Remember the old TV show, The Newlywed Game? The game pitted newly married couples against each other in a series of revealing question rounds to determine how well the spouses knew (or didn’t know) each other.
The game was first on the air in the 1960s and 70s. Now all those newlyweds are long-married couples (we hope). With Baby Boomers sliding into retirement, it’s time to play The Newly-Dead Game!
The Newly-Dead Game debuted at last year’s Frozen Dead Guy Days festival. It’s based on elements of The Newlywed Game, but the questions in The Newly-Dead Game revolve around how well the couple knows each other regarding their last wishes.
Couples who have played come away with a fresh appreciation of how much they still need to know about each other when it comes to funeral planning. Last year, so many couples wanted to play The Newly-Dead Game, a waiting list was started. Register early in the day and come on out for a fun time!
Chillin' out in Nederland
While conducting “The Newly-Dead Game” at Frozen Dead Guy Days on Sunday, March 6, I didn’t realize that one of the participants was a journalist! Richard Carriero and his wife Carrie were great sports when they played the game. Here’s how he opened his story on Associated Content from Yahoo! about Frozen Dead Guy Days:
It’s 3:00 on a snowy afternoon in the Rocky Mountains. My wife and I are under a tent in the freezing cold, standing onstage with two other couples. We’re about to play the Newly Dead Game. It’s not a particularly grand affair, with an audience of perhaps 50, but it’s the content that is unique.
The host, Gail Rubin, author of A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, asks a series of questions, to which we secretively write our answers on large pads with magic marker. Unlike the usual Dating Game queries, these questions deal with how well each spouse knows the other’s final wishes.
My wife and I get the first one right—we know our mothers’ maiden names (a vital piece of knowledge on a death certificate). We get the second—we know that we both want to be cremated. At the third—What is your spouse’s most prized possession and who would he/she want to have it after death?—we balk. My wife partially guesses correctly (my typewriter) but with my literal bent of mind, I fail to guess hers: her memories. As runners up we receive a signed copy of Gail’s book, which I later read in morbid fascination.
Read Richard’s entire story about Frozen Dead Guy Days!
Filed under: Field Notes | Tags: A Good Goodbye, Frozen Dead Guy Days, The Newly-Dead Game
Yesterday, with the help of a wonderful group of friends, I did a trial run of “The Newly-Dead Game” in anticipation of taking it big time at Frozen Dead Guy Days in two weeks.
The general consensus: It’s fun! It’s educational! It’s a great way to get the funeral planning conversation going!
Three couples played: Lenann and Ken, Lois and Ed, and Pat and Jay. They were charged with answering “last wishes” questions about their spouse, such as:
“What song would he or she want played at their funeral?” “What is his/her mother’s maiden name?” What method of disposition would he/she prefer?” “What is his/her most prized possession, and who would he/she want to leave it to?” “Outside of family, who are the two closest friends he/she would want notified first?”
It was quite a point battle back and forth, and we needed an extra tie-breaker question at the end. As with “The Newlywed Game,” some interesting information came out, and all the couples realized there was more information they could share with each other and their families.
An audience of about 25 people gathered in the chapel at Riverside Funeral Home for the event, which included a Q&A after the game. The participating couples all received a copy of A Good Goodbye, and the winners, Lenann and Ken, also received a restaurant gift certificate. Thanks to all who came and participated!
Thanks also to the nonprofit organization Engage With Grace which is sponsoring “The Newly-Dead Game” at Frozen Dead Guy Days. For the five questions that might save your life — or end it… www.EngageWithGrace.org.
