Gambling with Poop

The invitation read "Chicken Shit Bingo."  That was all I needed to know.  I was psyched.  A girlfriend of a guy Willie kind of knows was putting it on as a fundraiser for her trip to Italy.  I told anyone and everyone I talked to that I was going to Chicken Shit Bingo on Sunday.  This was it -- that weird stuff that goes on in the South -- the stuff that was just screaming to be blogged about.  My expectations couldn't have been higher.

Which is never good.  

It was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, and at 2:15, I told Willie we had to leave right then for Chicken Shit Bingo.  The first round started at 2:30.  We couldn't miss it.

We showed up at 2:30, beating the chickens there by half an hour.  When they did arrive, and the set-up was complete, I realized that the bingo part of Chicken Shit Bingo is actually not really true -- it should be called Chicken Shit Gambling.  This is how it works: there are two chickens in a chicken coop, standing on a board divided up into 20 numbers and then covered with seed to help the pooping along.  You don't spell anything out -- you just pick a number out of a bag and hope that the chicken goes poop on your number.  

There were only a few people there for the first round, so we each got to pull two numbers.  We gathered around the chicken coop and watched as the chickens pecked at the seed.  We held our collective breaths, and sure enough,  three minutes in, one of the chickens went poop -- twice -- on square #3.  I was not a winner.

That was the end of the first round.  When the second round got underway forty-five minutes later, the crowd had grown.  So we only got one number this time.  

This go-around, the chickens were not in a pooping mood.  Everyone sat and stood around looking at the chickens who, this time, took 30 minutes before doing any business.  It was square #17 this time, and, given that it was not my number and that I had spent most of those 30 minutes inside the house trying to sneak cookies, it was a bit anti-climatic.  Here is a picture of what waiting around for a chicken to poop looks like:

Two hours after showing up, Willie and I were out of money and covered in mosquito bites. It wasn't Chicken Shit Bingo's fault; with my sky high expectations, I suppose there was no way that the actual game could live up to the sheer joy of the name.  

And it did get me thinking about my own cat's pooping abilities, and if I can't figure out how to parlay her talents into a little money around here.