This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
03/27/2024 08:30 AMTalk about pressure! Players have only an hour to decipher the clues, crack codes, and follow the evidence to break free. And free from what? Hogwarts Magical Mayhem, the escape room that Sharon Lewis, president of Ivoryton Library board, has created along with Library Director Elizabeth Alvord.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is the fictional setting for the adventures of the magical teenager who never was Harry Potter. However, according to Sharon, knowledge of the books is not necessary in order to make an effective getaway.
“But it doesn’t hurt,” she adds.
This challenge at the escape room, a fundraiser for the Ivoryton Library, runs from Friday, April 12 through Sunday, April 21, giving teams of up to six people an hour to solve the difficult riddle and get out of the seemingly locked room.
It is designed to be solved by participants over the age of 12, but can be configured to include children as young as 8 if the library is informed.
“Families do it. Multigenerational groups do it. It can be a date night. A double date,” Sharon says.
Sharon adds that several businesses have done the escape room as a team-building exercise.
This will be the second time that the Ivoryton Library is hosting an escape event. The library did one last fall, Miss Havisham’s Parlor, based on Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations.
“It’s a library, so our theme will always be books,” Sharon says.
In the Miss Havisham adventure, participants had an hour to decipher clues to find the antidote to the poison tea that Miss Havisham had drank.
“About half of them did,” Sharon says.
There were 19 sessions in the room, but there was much more demand than scheduled time. For the upcoming Hogwarts escape room, Sharon notes that the library can schedule as many as 42 sessions.
The idea for creating an escape room came after Sharon and Alvord had visited one at a library in Ridgefield. While driving home, they decided it was something that the Ivoryton Library could pull off.
There were, of course, unexpected moments. Someone in the Havisham escape room turned over an object and saw a tag that said “Made in China.” ‘Aha, a clue,’ the team thought. But alas, it was a red herring. The object in question simply bore the tag of its origin.
Sharon, who lives in Ivoryton, runs her own business coaching company, although that’s not what she trained to do. Sharon graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia with a degree in biochemistry and ambitions to go into the field of ecology. There is, to be sure, nature in her life now in the form of two cats, five chickens, a tankful of tropical fish, and one each of a gerbil, a chinchilla, and a field mouse.
Sharon started out as a research scientist at a company bought by Pfizer and moved to Connecticut to work at Pfizer itself as a drug development project manager. After Pfizer wanted to transfer her to Michigan, Sharon left to work at another drug company that then had a facility in Wallingford.
Along the way, Sharon not only earned her master’s in business administration, but her goals also changed. Sharon wanted to spend more time with her daughter, now a student at Valley Regional High School. She also wanted to run a business of her own.
Sharon has done just that for the past 10 years as the principal in her own business coaching firm. Sharon says that the work is not entirely dissimilar to her job as a project manager at a drug company.
“It’s strategic planning, goal setting, teamwork,” she says.
Many of Sharon’s clients are small, service-based businesses, some run by solo entrepreneurs without a management team to bounce ideas off. The Small Business Administration (SBA) has just selected one of her clients, Water-Flo, Inc., run by Scott and Brigid Allen of Deep River, as the SBA 2024 Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Connecticut.
In her free time, Sharon likes to work with glass, creating fused glass pieces. She found and purchased a kiln on Craigslist. Sharon says there is a virtue to working with glass.
“If I don’t like it, I break it and turn it into something else,” she says.
Looking forward to the upcoming Hogwarts escape room, Sharon says she has alternately worried that it will be either too easy or too hard. At this point, she rates the escape room challenge as comparable to a professionally created one.
However, participants at the Ivoryton Library have one advantage. Either Sharon or Alvord will be in the room dressed as a ghost to gently help solvers who have taken a wrong turn or missed clues entirely.
Oh, and there is one more thing that should relieve claustrophobic participants from panicking. The escape door, securely fastened as it appears, is not actually firmly locked.
The escape room at the Ivoryton Library runs from Friday, April 12 through Sunday, April 21. The cost is $150 for a one-hour session. For more information and to sign up, visit ivorytonlibrary.org.