In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm. One afternoon Pastor Henry O’Donnell was in his office taking a break from writing his sermon with a game of computer solitaire when church secretary Tammy Billings poked her head in. “The Little Old Ladies are here to see you,” Tammy said.
O’Donnell sighed. The “Little Old Ladies” was a nickname for three of the older congregants: Henrietta Miggins, Betsy Davis and Celia Simmons. Like many dangerous, predatory creatures, they looked deceptively cute and cuddly and often travelled in a pack. When one of them dropped by his office during the week it usually meant he would soon be developing a stubborn headache. When all three dropped by… well, maybe he could go home early today.
The three women marched in and arranged themselves in chairs across from the pastor. “What can I do for you ladies?” O’Donnell asked, fingering the aspirin bottle he kept in his top desk drawer.
“We’d like the church to start a weekly bingo game on Tuesday nights,” Henrietta said.
That didn’t sound so bad, O’Donnell thought. But he had enough experience with the Little Old Ladies to know that there could be hidden dangers to their request. “Don’t you usually play bingo at the senior center on Tuesday nights?”
“Not anymore,” Henrietta sniffed. “The director there is an incompetent. We need somewhere else to play.”
“We couldn’t offer cash prizes,” O’Donnell pointed out.
“That’s okay,” Betsy said. “It’s more of a social activity. The senior center just gives away little gift baskets.”
“Usually filled with donated items nobody wanted,” Henrietta sniffed.
“It could be a fundraiser,” Celia chimed in. “We could ask for donations to finally get the new robes the choir should have had last year.”
“Let me look into it,” the pastor said.
After the Little Old Ladies left, O’Donnell went out to Tammy’s desk. He knew she volunteered at the senior center so he asked her to make a friendly call to the director – the one Henrietta had called an incompetent.
“They were banned from the game,” Tammy reported when she got off the phone. “There was an incident over cookies. Apparently the center decided to buy a different brand to cut costs and Henrietta wasn’t satisfied with the quality.”
“And for that they banned her?”
“Apparently it was the way she expressed her dissatisfaction.”
“I can imagine,” O’Donnell said. “What do you think?”
“I know the Little Old Ladies are a handful, but bingo might be fun,” Tammy said. “If you want, I’ll organize it.”
“Thank you,” Henry said with a smile. It looked like he wouldn’t need his aspirin today after all.
A few days later Tammy interrupted Henry in the midst of another game of computer solitaire. “Missy Moore wants to talk to you,” she said.
Missy was a rotund, cheerful woman in her mid-forties. Normally you couldn’t remove the smile from her face with a pickaxe, but today she was scowling as she slammed a flyer announcing the bingo game down on Pastor O’Donnell’s desk.
“What’s the meaning of this,” she demanded.
“Um, well, bingo is a game with cards with numbers on them…” O’Donnell began.
“I know what bingo is. It’s gambling!” Missy shouted. She pulled a stack of papers from her purse and began quoting statistics on the damage gambling addiction does to people and society.
O’Donnell felt the familiar tightening in his skull that meant he’d be needing his bottle of aspirin. He spent the next forty-two minutes trying to convince Missy that a church bingo fundraiser with token prizes was not really gambling while she tried to convince him he was throwing open the church doors to the Devil himself. It seemed Missy had an aunt who spent a large portion of her social security checks in bingo halls. It was kind of a hot button issue for her.
In the end they reached a compromise. Missy could pass out anti-gambling literature at the door to the bingo game as long as she was polite about it.
On the night of the first game Pastor O’Donnell arrived early and planted himself in an out-of-the-way location with a good view of the front door. Missy Moore also arrived early armed with a stack of pamphlets she’d secured from an anti-gambling association. O’Donnell was pleased to observe that she kept her promise to be polite.
Tammy had prepared the social hall nicely using a semi-professional bingo kit she’d ordered from a party supply store that included packets of disposable playing sheets and a large tumbling cage filled with lettered and numbered ping pong balls. She’d also set up a nice refreshment table and made sure to include the brand of cookies Henrietta liked.
The game turned out to be a bigger draw than Pastor O’Donnell had expected. In addition to the Little Old Ladies and their ilk, it drew many of the younger families, including Kevin and Jill Boyer and their two little girls, four-year-old Mary and two-year-old Susie.
The Boyers signed in and Tammy handed them their playing sheets and ink daubers – plastic containers of ink with little sponges on the end for marking the sheets. Mary grabbed her dauber eagerly and tested it by stamping a mark on the back of her sister’s dress. Jill quickly disarmed Mary and handed the dauber back to Tammy. “The girls can use colored pencils to mark their sheets,” Jill said, ignoring Mary’s protests.
When everyone was settled, Tammy began the game. She had drawn only four numbers when a cascade of piano music rang out through the building. Moments later a piercing soprano voice joined in.
“What in the world is that?” O’Donnell said.
“Missy Moore booked the choir room to practice her special music selection for church on Sunday,” Tammy told him.
“And you didn’t anticipate a problem with that?”
“I didn’t realize her selection would be so…boisterous. Besides, do you want to tell her she can’t practice a song for worship because it’ll interfere with our bingo game?”
“Good point. Carry on.”
Tammy drew the next ball and announced the number, “B-17.” And at that very moment Missy hit a particularly piercing high note.
“What?” Celia yelled from the back, “I can’t hear you.”
O’Donnell headed to the choir room where he found Missy and choir director Shane Reed hard at work. “Do you mind if I close the door?” O’Donnell asked.
“As long as you don’t mind if I open it again once you leave,” Missy replied.
O’Donnell looked at Shane who just shrugged as if to say there was no way he was getting in the middle of this.
Then O’Donnell noticed a portable amplification system gathering dust in the corner. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll just borrow this then.” He grabbed it and dashed away before Missy realized what he was doing.
In his absence, the bingo players had converged on the refreshment table. O’Donnell put the amplification system on the adjacent card table Tammy was using and crawled in between the two tables to plug it in. Unfortunately, O’Donnell was a larger man without the best coordination, and his shoulder inadvertently banged into the refreshment table. The blow caused the coffee urn to tip over and send a tide of hot coffee toward the gathered crowd.
Fortunately the congregation proved more coordinated than their pastor and everyone managed to scramble out of the way of the spill. However, Mary Boyer took advantage of the resulting chaos to acquire one of the ink daubers she had been so unfairly denied. This exponentially multiplied the chaos as Jill and Kevin chased Mary around the room, pursued by little Susie who loved a good game of chase.
Thirty-seven minutes later Mary was disarmed, everyone was settled back in place and the bingo game resumed. The good news was the amplifier made it easy for all the players to hear Tammy over Missy’s rehearsal. Which proved a moot victory a few minutes later when Missy wrapped up the rehearsal and went home.
The bingo game ended a little before 10 p.m. By 11 p.m. the Little Old Ladies had finished enumerating their complaints about the evening to Pastor O’Donnell. After they left, O’Donnell surveyed the scene in the social hall. The floor was littered with coffee stained bingo cards and anti-gambling pamphlets. The refreshment table would need a thorough scrubbing. And Mary had artfully decorated two thirds of the north wall with colored ink blotches.
He turned to Tammy who was tallying up the contents of the donation basket. “How’d we do?”
“We raised sixty-seven dollars toward the choir robes,” she told him. “Of course the refreshments and prizes cost forty-five dollars. Factor in $272 for the bingo kit and we’ll need quite a few more games before we break even.”
O’Donnell rubbed his aching head. The next day he arranged to finance the refreshments for the senior center’s bingo games – including the cookies Henrietta liked – in return for them lifting the ban on the Little Old Ladies. It just seemed financially prudent.
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