Cake Bingo Is Everything
By Rossland Telegraph
Forget Christmas. You do your best to be greedy at Christmas, but next to your behavior at Cake Bingo, on December 25th you’re a regular Bob Cratchit. Forget your romantic dreams of Valentine’s Day, too. You may try for passion on February 14th, but nothing can compare to the sensual hormone rush you feel when you win a triple layer chocolate cake in front of an envious crowd of Rosslanders. Forget it all! Cake Bingo is coming back. And Cake Bingo is everything.
Picture yourself in the RSS auditorium on a winter’s evening. Snow swirls around outside, but inside the room is heated with desire…for cake. Your Bingo caller cries “Under the B, 11!” and with trembling fingers you slide the final tiny plastic window, completing a diagonal line across your card.
“Bingo!” you scream. Bingo.
You never thought you were the bingo type; you always thought Bingo was the purview of seniors, played in smoky halls and church basements.
But that was before Rossland threw cake into the mix.
In all your life, there has never been anything like the feeling you get as you stride forward to the row of tables weighed down by several dozen home-baked confections, the like of which commercial bakers can only dream. With shaking hands you take the cake.
You take the cake.
The caller smiles slightly, nods austerely, and you feel transformed. A bigger person, a nobler one. See yourself as you take your chocolate, your mint, your strawberry-festooned prize and slowly saunter back to your seat, glowing in the silent envy of your friends and neighbours. This is Cake Bingo and this is all.
Is such a thing possible? In Rossland, it is. Do you doubt me? Then come to RSS next Wednesday, January 14, from 6:30 to 8:15 PM and see for yourself. For a mere $2.00 per card you can leave the old monochrome world behind and enter the realm of colour.
This momentous event is sponsored by the RSS PAC; cakes will be provided by grade six and seven students and their families. Proceed will go to fund these students’ year-end field trip, though one can only imagine that that event, when it comes, will pale beside memories of…Cake Bingo.
To quote William Shakespeare on the subject:
This day is called the day of Cake Bingo:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name Cake Bingo.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Cake Bingo:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Cake Bingo day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What treats he did eat that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as apple fritters
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Cake Bingo day shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that fills his card with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That daubed with us upon Cake Bingo day.
