Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

I was thinking age, not income.  

Ever been to a bingo hall?  There's a German-American club near us
that serves dinner, followed by bingo, on Friday nights.  We'd heard
the spätzle was good, and that they served a mean rolladen.  It's not
members-only, so we gave it a try. (The reports were accurate)

After dinner the bingo began.  The players were mostly older women who
obviously played there every week.  While the seating was "open", it
was clear that some women had their favorite seats and some
chest-bumping (formidable* chests, too!) went on when non-regulars
tried to sit where the regulars wanted to sit.

I sat in amazement (as a spectator, not a player) watching the ladies
pull all sorts of good luck tchotchkes out of their purses and setting
them out on the table.  Some women had a row of wild-haired trolls,
china dogs and other animals, and dolls arrayed in front of them.  

My wife and I would have played, but the pace was too fast for us.
Anyone who, as we would, needed to search their card for any length of
time for B4 was urged to speed it up.  I might be able to manage one
card, but some women were playing as many as eight cards at once.  I
swear they memorized all eight cards and could instantly know if a
call matched a space.  The "cards" were paper and most of the players
used a felt-tipped marker to indicate a space called.    

The caller must have apprenticed as a cookware and knife set
demonstrater/pitch-man at dime stores.  (Remember them?)  He had a
line of patter that was just short of the stand-up circuit and knew
most of the ladies' names.  Complicated games, like "around the
corner", provided variety.  

Most of the husbands were non-players and sat at the back tables,
smoked**, and talked among themselves.  A lot of biographical
baseball-type caps embroidered with the name of ships, military units,
unions, and sports teams.  A laid-back group where Boston Red Sox caps
sat with Yankees caps.  

Except for the food, there was nothing particularly German-American
about the crowd or the place.  It seemed to be a local crowd (far more
people inside than cars parked in the parking lot) rather than an
nationalistic/ethnic crowd.  The place is tucked in a mostly
working-class residential neighborhood

*  Have we done "formidable"?  Some say "form-id-able" and some say
"for-mid-able" (with stress on the "mid")

**This was a few years ago before places that served food had to ban
smoking.