Bing-went

I am accustomed to spending my leisure time in coffee shops, but there's only one tiny one in the teensy town I've been staying in, and... the coffee is flavored. Obviously, I had to find a new hobby.

What could the people of this town do for fun?

In my drives around town I've seen one kind of entertainment establishment more than any other: bingo halls. I had to find out what the excitement was about, so on a Saturday evening we decided to investigate. There are a few close to the house, but they start the games at 4:30, so we sought out one with a "late night" game that started at 6:45. It was a magical place.


But not quite magical enough to keep the neon lights on.

I was a little nervous. Neither of us had ever played real bingo before. Would it be easy to learn? Would people be welcoming? We assumed so.

WRONG.

We tentatively pushed the door open and found:


A fluorescent lit room. Dead silence, save a woman on a little platform slowly calling out numbers.
The players nearest the entrance whipped their heads around to stare at us. We had obviously broken their concentration. There was no indication where we needed to go or what we needed to do to join in the game, and no one was giving us any help. After a painfully long couple of minutes, the bingo caller took pity on us and pointed to a door. We went through.

Inside was a little side room with a big desk full of different colored tablets of bingo cards. The Bingo Magic employee working the desk exclaimed, "Y'all missed the beginning!"

That fact seemed to stress her out a lot more than it did us. We said we wanted to play anyway and so she collected up the appropriate cards and handed them over. When I played bingo as a kid, you just got one card. This was a whole other league. We each got a pad of bingo cards and a bunch of other random "bonus" cards and "treasure hunt" cards. We bought in. She hurriedly explained the game in a thick accent. It didn't clarify the process all that much. We followed her advice "Y'all are gonna need some daubers!" Some what? "Some daubers!" and bought the little ink dotters from her for a dollar each.

We came back out to the game room.

Long tables speckled with players. No one talking to or looking at each other, save a couple of mother-daughter teams who would whisper under their breath and pass things back and forth. We hastily sat down at the nearest table amid some staring players.


The caller droned out the numbers, and we used our daubers to mark the numbers. It sounds a lot simpler than it is.


We kept our heads down and tried to catch up. It became obvious that we were newbies because the players to the left and right of us had waaaaay more cards than we did; they had bought in multiple times. Their hands moved like lightning as the numbers were called. The tension in the room was palpable. The real bingo pros had a ring of doo-dads around their playing area, pens, highlighters, and lots of different colored daubers. Stuffed animals, little figurines, keychains, photos...I couldn't imagine what they could possibly need all that stuff for. We later learned that most of them are good luck charms.

Apparently there is a whole bingo-accessory industry, because a good number of them had dauber totes, as well.

You can see one there hiding behind the massive styrofoam soda cup. There was an unmanned snack bar in the corner of the room with some coffee carafes that looked as though they'd been on the warming plates for a minimum of three days, but I couldn't imagine anyone getting up during the hours long game and missing any numbers. In fact no one did get up, even to use the restroom.

The silence and staring and frantic daubing of cards commingled with the heavy cloud of cigarette smoke.


It was a little scary.

We tried to keep up with the caller and the numbers, and as we got the hang of it, we realized that the numbers that had been called were all up on a lit board, accented by a live video stream of the actual bingo balls as they exited the hopper- I suppose that was so we'd know our trusty bingo caller was on the up and up.

In this photo you can see the small glassed in room at the back of the bingo hall. It was apparently a quarantine for non-smokers.

The tension of each round broke only when a meek voice would call out "bingo" from one of the tables. This was followed by the only sound the crowd made: not a congratulatory cheer, but an audible moan escaping simultaneously from the lips of every player in the room. This was accompanied by a chorus of crumpling paper as everyone wadded up their used cards in unison and chucked them in the trash bags taped to the side of every table in preparation for the next round. When a player called bingo, an employee with a fanny pack full of cash would walk over to verify the win and do a payout.


You can see the thrill of the win here:


I don't know what I had expected- maybe a "Woohooo!" or something? But I never got it. The prizes went up to $550 per game, and if I'd won you darn skippy would have heard something out of me. But we were lost in the maze of cards and letters and numbers. The women sitting near us at our table would roll their eyes and begrudgingly harumph some hoarse-whispered words of advice as we clumsily moved from round to round. It didn't help that much, because we didn't speak bingoese: "No no no! You odds up the treasure hunt before we play the bonus round. Ugh! You should have rebought for a dollar. First it's layer cake and then it's fill-in."

Uh... thanks?

We obviously didn't win, but the actual game was pretty fun anyway. When the rounds were over at 9 PM, we got up to leave. The game was finished. Nobody else got up. It turned out all but about three of them were staying for the next series, which would continue until at least midnight. A lot of them had been there since midday. Three more hours of unsmiling grunting with no pee breaks? We went next door to a bar called The Palace for a beer.

When we got there the friendly bartender laughed and laughed about our experiences. She said she's never gone in to play before, even though it's right next door. Some of the other patrons explained more about bingo and what it means in this community. One woman's mother plays four days a week and has missed family reunions and birthdays... they always knew where she was when she wasn't answering the phone. She was down at the bingo hall with a menagerie of lucky stuffed animals and figurines. It started to make more sense as the woman was explaining how important the nights out were to her widowed mother. The bingo hall had indeed seemed to be 90% female. It struck me that I don't know many other places where a woman can go on her own and feel entirely comfortable and safe while having a fun night out. I can't think of anything in Oakland.

The bartender gave us some "bar bingo" cards that we could play for a prize of fifty dollars. We asked why they don't serve beer in the bingo hall, and she looked at us like we were slow. "You can't drink alcohol and gamble at the same time! That's illegal!" We shut our mouths and continued playing our (apparently) non-gambling bar bingo cards. We still didn't win.

All in all it was a nice evening out, but it didn't really compensate for the coffee shop that I am still stunned does not exist here. The bar did have this lovely sign in the ladies' room:


I like how the community is so small that the sheer force of will of the friendly bartender/owner of the bar would be enough to sway the users of illicit substances. It apparently worked because when we walked out to the car there was a cluster of folks loitering under a huge cloud of pot smoke in the parking lot.

Good thing Amy doesn't care what you do outside.