And BINGO was its name-o

For my mom’s birthday my friend Shannon and I took her to Muckleshoot Bingo where 50 games of the most intense BINGO I’ve ever played followed. Now I do not jest when I say the games where intense, we took to drawing the shapes on our cards so that we knew what we were allowed to stamp. My mantra for the night was simply “this is not relaxing.”

In fact, BINGO is not how I remember it. It used to be that you’d get a line in a row and it was time to yell B-I-N-G-O but that is not the case anymore. You need a stamp of four and a BINGO line. You have your block of 6’s. You have two blocks of six. You have a block of eight and you can’t use the free space. There’s a titter tatter. An M for Muckleshoot. A number 1. The list goes on, because you see, this was a special night at the ‘Shoot. A $50 buy-in gets you 50 games with prizes of $500 a hand, a car and the grand prize of $5,000.

After each game the announcer would say a thank you to the past game’s shape, for example … “Thank you large kite.” Thank you regular BINGO.” Thank you Blackout.” Etc. My mom finally looks over at me and asks if they are thanking people for tipping them and I’m thinking , “no,” until the lady next to us tells my mom yes, it’s for tips. The note worthy part of this is that stupid me thought the announcers were doing some sort of a spiritual Indian thing by thanking the shapes of the game as a way to pay homage to the gambling spirit. I mean really, how was I suppose to know it was for tips, I barely knew what shape I was going for half the time.

As a joke we took troll dolls with us “for luck,” mine was dressed in a dragon costume that I named Growl. Mom had the birthday one and Shan had a military guy who was holding an AK47. A lady at the table across from us got really excited when she saw we had troll dolls and brought hers over to show us them. Shannon refused to make eye contact with me during this interaction.

Oh and BINGO has evolved, even further than complicated shapes patterns, BINGO has gone high-tech. For mere $150 you can also rent an electric device that will track the numbers for you and then you have more ways to win. Well these electronic devices malfunction towards the end of the evening and although we were told to do an X the machine Bingo'd someone with a large kite so the announcer had to take the win. W ell this caused a friggin riot. People started yelling at the announcer, someone screamed, “Let’s tell Jessie (you know for KING 5’s Get Jessie?)” An older lady by us screamed, “Fuck the machines,” repeatedly.

Thank you large kite. Thank you black out. Thank you BINGO.

CW