BINGO! Sport of The Disabled

So I escaped the house tonight. To do charity work. But hey, it’s still NOT fixing dinner at my house and doing the bedtime routine. An escape of any ilk is still emancipation from the pattern - that one I’ve been sucked into. Suck, suck, slurp and there goes my brain, being vacuumed right outta my wee little head. Anyway -

Our Relay For Life team does an annual bingo fund raiser for The American Cancer Society which garners great numbers and is in honor of a courageous gal from our town who passed away from cancer, leaving two young children behind and THAT should be illegal. I am a cancer survivor myself. (Diagnosed in 1977 with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma which had a nasty survival rate so they gave me odds of 1000 to 1 to survive. HA! Showed them, eh?) Don’t tell me I *can’t* do something….even like, survive. I’ll kick your ass. So I’ve had more chemotherapy than anyone I’ve ever met, hundreds of spinal taps and bone marrow extractions, yadda, yadda, yadda - they inflicted theee most prehistoric chemo on me. Dumped the entire kitchen sink into my veins, and then some. Radiation from hell. No surprise I’m a nut job - I glow in the friggin’ dark. Nothing quite as fun as being a bald 15 year old albino girl. Well, I’m not a true albino but I’m a mere gene twist away. But I digress!! I am not talking about cancer survival in this blog, on-account-a I figure I could write a friggin’ book. What I want to talk about is the phenomenon I’ve observed about BINGO and it’s place in American weeknights.

It’s the sport of the disabled. I say this because of who plays bingo. Gandy’s (my sister-in-law’s slang word for the elderly. I’m not sure where she got it, but we use it around here. Example: Someone’s creeping slowly down the road in front of you in their floater-mobile such as a Towncar or Crown Vic and they are wearing a HAT and they are drifting ever so slowly within their lane to every extreme - so as to not cross over any line but yet you can’t predict exactly where they are going to float to next. You can either call them a “hat driver” or a “Gandy”. It’s a thing. Anyway, Gandy’s play bingo and that’s an internationally known fact, I’m not being prolific here. But who else plays? O.K, I’ll tell you, because I know you are fixin’ to wet yourself with anticipation….People who drag their oxygen tanks behind them, that’s who! And they arrive extra early to get the best seat at the cafeteria tables with the institutional metal chairs. I mean, I’m setting up the kitchen food (I always work the kitchen at this event) - Jeeeesus, I guess I don’t actually get out of the kitchen EVER, do I? Anyway, so here they come, pulling their little tanks of life. They are followed by the “Limper’s”. They are in walkers, using canes or in wheelchairs. They gimp in and make camp in choice locations. As I observe these poor folks, I realize that my daughter who is currently in a wheelchair could also participate. Why, this could be HER sport! She’s 9, not 90, but the crippled-up part applies. Even after her accident where she tried to get killed by a riding lawn mower, bingo was the first thing they dragged her to in the play room at Johns Hopkins. She had 3 out of 4 of her limbs down. Only her right hand escaped the ravages of that goddamned mower. Sigh. Cry. My Stella. Moooovin’ on…..don’t get caught there tonight, you are too tired. In addition to the Gandy’s, the Barely Breathing’s and the Limper’s are the….now DON’T get your panties in a wad over this, but let’s just put it delicately and say the “larger” Americans. By large, I mean they have their own zip code. No lie. I feel sorry for them, as they squeeze their way between the lines of tables and chairs but I also feel sorry for those damn chairs, - stop it! Not nice, not nice. The metal chairs release squeaks of pain and strain as our larger friends take a load off. And of course I’m standing back there in the kitchen/snack bar area with my head into my 3rd helping of nacho cheese dip and chips so who the hell am I to talk? As the evening progresses the irony strikes me that we are here to raise money to cure and help prevent cancer and the entire place is full of colon cancer nominees and I’m serving them hot dogs, nachos and soda pop! To be fair, we also had fruit cups, fresh veggies w/ dip and home made chicken salad that was not too evil. One guess as to what item was most left over at the end of the night? Aw, you got it. Fresh veggies. I finally had to break down and eat a fruit cup and some veggies because I could actually hear my arteries beginning to harden from the cheese sauce I was inhaling.

These people are also very serious about their bingo. They are “hard core”. They do not joke when they play, they do not look as if they are having any fun at all. (Just like people at slot machines who always look like they are at a wake or really boring church and I’m always hopping around at my money sucking machine shouting, “Come on baby, mama needs a new pair of Sunday-go-to-meetin’ shoes” and other highly obnoxious quips that amuse and entertain me.) Do NOT get between these Gandy’s, Barely Breathing’s, Limper’s and Larger’s and their bingo for they have perfected the art of the death glare and they are heavily armed with bingo blotters. Or dobbers. Or whatever the hell they are called.

So as we age my darlings, we can look forward to a fabulous sport that’s tailored to our special needs. A sport that mandates you sit on your ass, eat snacks, and only requires one good hand to make it happen. BINGO! My future awaits. And I hope it waits a long long time.

Yours,

D. Feisty Housewife

Sidebar: Geneva cannot play bingo. The scanning and dobbing specific numbers is simply too much for her brain. She’d have greater success sitting inside the bingo ball blower trying to catch the numbered orbs as they flew by. In fact, she’d rock that out. I’ll probably need to find her a job like that in about 5 years or so….