B-I-N-G-O

I'm not much for Mardi Gras. In general, I just can't get into it. Apparently, St. Louis has a pretty big one, but I've never gone. It just sounds like a lot of slogging through big, sticky, obnoxious crowds. Sort of like New Year's except less fun. Sort of like a combination of New Year's and Fourth of July, with a dash of St. Patrick's Day. Anyway, I've never tried to go and don't really see myself doing so.

Which makes it even funnier what happened Monday. The evening started out with me, Kia, Kelly, and Julian going to this Greek restaurant in our neighborhood. It's good food, but Kia had an alterior (ulterior? allteeereeeeor?) motive -- to get a recipe for a potential wedding dish. Well, the waitress wouldn't spill the beans, as it were, with regard to the recipe, but she did give Kia the basic gist. So this eggplant and spinach rice dish may be part of the menu in June.

Next, we went to have ice cream, and Tal and Rachel met us. Kia discovered that chocolate raspberry ice cream is not so good with Twix in it. At that point, it seemed like things were wrapping up for the night when Julian suggested we go to BINGO at a gay bar. Now, if there's one thing I love, it's gay BINGO. And if there's one thing I love more than that, it's gay BINGO where the letters are read by a drag queen. Yes indeed, what better way to spend Mardi Gras eve?

Off we went. Getting off the highway, I can't say any of us were real thrilled by the surroundings. But we took Julian's word, got out of the car, and walked in. As we walked in the door, we received a big book of BINGO sheets and a welcome from the BINGO caller. We found a table in the back and settled in, big markers in hand ready to mark off the letters as they were called.

I especially enjoyed the way the caller enunciated each letter-number pair. "B-Niiiiine......Beeeeee-Niiiiiiiiiine". He also found numerous opportunities to make sexual innuendoes and make cracks about people he knew in the audience. The first game we were there for required one to get all of the squares around the edge of their card filled to win. No luck, none of us managed to win that one. At this point there was a break, people started milling around, and old Wham! videos came on the TV screens. Kia noticed a sign on the restroom door indicating that if more than one person were caught together inside, they would be asked to leave the bar.

After the break, Tal won a game, for which he was given a chance to pick out Mardi Gras beads of his choice. He chose ones with rubber chickens on them. Classy.

The next game was a birthday cake game - get the squares all the way across on the top, middle, and bottom. This my game. I was in the zone. And indeed, I was doing well. But well enough to win? Only time would tell. Well, I'll ruin the suspense for you. I did indeed win. Being from the same table as Tal, who had just won, people maybe started to wonder. I started to wonder myself. Given the fact that Tal and I were probably the only two straight guys in the bar, what are the chances that we'd both win? Anyway, I proudly made my way to the front, to meet the drag queen in person, and he/she kindly checked my numbers, then told me I could pick out beads of my choice. I saw a number of options, but eventually took the ones with big plastic monkeys on them. They're classic. I'm disappointed that we're having problems getting pictures off of the camera, because this would be a great time for a visual. Anyway, I took them with pride, and was given a Mardi Gras poster on top of it. Not a bad set of loot from a free BINGO game.

I felt bad that we chose to leave right after that. It was sort of like we had gotten what we wanted and were now going home. Perhaps we'll go back.

Oh, so to tie it up with the part at the beginning about not liking Mardi Gras - it's ironic that I won Mardi Grad beads.