Last night I spent the evening playing Bingo. Not something I'd normally do, but my wife and my daughter asked me to go with them on an evening of dabbing and munching. In a large room (a glass wall separating the smokers from the non-smokers and there were more smokers than non-smokers) we sat at fold up tables with our large sheets of numbers with our little dabbers. Yes, you buy these ink dabbers that make a circle of ink on the page. These come in many colors with sparkles, pastels and people have nicely crafted bags for carrying them around.
We bought our pads of the regular games, the specials and the bonus games. Then numbers were called and numbers were dabbed. I actually did pretty well by winning one bingo early in one of the games. That was $44 for me!!
I thought the most interesting feature was that this bingo parlor was not a private business but is run by the state. Oregon is a state the runs lotteries and bingo palors. This means that it's main business is running the lottery and not squeezing that extra $10 or $20 dollars from every customer. Thus is wasn't like going to a movie theatre -- the food at the snack bar was reasonable, the cokes in the coke machine were only 50 cents and people brought their own food in.