Sweet
One hundred questions about the first time you did anything, for a table where the food has already arrived.
iPhone. $9.99, once.
On the App Store soon.
Sweet
The first pet whose name you now have to explain.
Spicy
The first belief you held loudly and no longer hold at all.
Extra Spicy
The first big thing you got wrong about yourself.
Fifty sweet, forty spicy, thirty extra, and seventy more behind a small flame for two or three people, late, once the table has emptied.
Read it out. Everyone answers in one sentence, you included. Then you pick who tells the long version, and pass the phone left.
That is all of it. Nobody gets cornered, nobody has to perform, and the quiet end of the table gets the same ten seconds as the loud one. Three follow-ups sit under every question for whoever was picked.
For a different kind of night there is The Blind. Everyone types one sentence with the phone turned away. It shuffles them and reads them back in handwriting, one at a time, and the table guesses who. Then the name comes up.
When one lands, keep it.
One tap makes a card with the question, the artwork, and who it was for. It saves to your phone like a photograph. Send it to the person who was not there.
It is the only thing that ever leaves the table. No account, no analytics, and nothing you type goes anywhere but the phone in your hand.
Made at a table in Charleston.
Andrew Cebulka has photographed food, and the people who cook and serve it, for twenty years. Hundred Firsts began as a way to get past the weather at his own dinners. The questions, the follow-ups, and the artwork are his.
Andrew Cebulka
Photographer, Charleston
iPhone, $9.99, one purchase. Coming to the App Store. Write if you want to hear when, once.
A printed deck is in the works. One hundred cards, a small numbered run. Same address.
The first thing you saved up for that turned out to be garbage.
Tell me when it shipsThe food is getting cold.
