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Welcome to the House of Fun

8/26/2013

 
Welcome to the House of Fun
   I was introduced to the concept of a fun house during my visit to the fabulous location of Spirit Lake, Iowa. It was erratically constructed (they had obviously employed the same builders I had used in Britain for my kitchen extension) and had the added bonus of being free - so I bowed down reverentially and ventured in through the rhombus shaped door. 
  I instantly found myself groping and stumbling my way around the angular undulating floors, like a crew member lurching on the bridge of the USS Enterprise in an old Star Trek episode - after being hit with a particularly large photon torpedo. I have actually lived in English houses built in the mid to late 19th century that actually conform to this concept – where you start on one side of the bed and find yourself slowly slipping down to the other side during the course of the night. Where peas decide to migrate across the table from your plate and sheets of Velcro are required to stop kiwi fruits doing the same. 
   Using all available handrails and posts (like a trained gymnast) I clawed and grappled my way through the madness; they had the patina of stickiness from the years of candy covered children’s fingers that had gripped them before me - everything was tacky except the floor, which was actually required to be sticky. As children sped around me (they had obviously not cut their toenails in several months) I struggled to gain the necessary purchase needed on the mountainously steep wooden floors to make any progress.
   I came out dazed and confused and with a green complexion (not unlike the flight that brought me here from Heathrow) – this was in part due to the fried cheese curds I consumed just moments before I entered; there must be a lesson here somewhere, but I can’t find it!

Bingo Lingo

8/6/2013

 
   I decided to visit the Jackpot Junction Casino in Morton – this complex is the largest Casino in Minnesota; it was first opened in 1984 as a bingo hall so I decided to try my luck at the game - having never played bingo before. In Britain Bingo is solely the refuge of the elderly on a Friday night.
 I purchased an expensive loose collection of different colored tickets (reminiscent of the Sunday newspapers mixed with a year’s supply of junk mail) and sat down - poised and ready with my shiny new dabber. It was then, as the whole process got underway, I realized that half a lifetime of schooling and further education had failed to pick up a debilitating number dyslexia - as the digits on my paper danced around with mocking assignation, like a numerologist’s nightmare version of Disney’s Fantasia. Numbers came and went with alacrity and I barely got my dabber moist before bingo was called somewhere in the auditorium. I tried to focus harder and my brow became furrowed as I concentrated on the task in hand - with the kind of apprehension and frustrated application that transported me back to an exam I once took in a cold school hall (somewhere in east London during the summer of 1981).

 It was then I realized what a uniquely mischievous instrument of hilarity the bingo dabber actually was; I suddenly recognized that great sport could be created by unleashing a completely unwarranted ink circle attack on any unsuspecting player within my vicinity. Blue Smurf kisses proliferated exposed skin as the azure dabber landed circle after circle of permanent ink onto my victims. Retaliation came fast as dabbing fever gripped our senses and after a maniacal minute everyone on my table looked like an extra from the film Avatar. Numbers came and went as did the life draining out of the elderly that had chosen to spend their last days (and their pension money) on random numbers and colored paper. I won ten dollars - this allowed me to gain back a seventh of what I had outlaid on the experience. The odds of me winning always appear to be large, yet the odds of somebody winning always appear to be small. 

 My grandmother entertained herself royally for the last 20 years of her life by making several weekly trips to the local bingo hall. We discovered shortly after her passing that one entire bedroom of her house was dedicated to the winnings she had received in that duration (it was obviously not the prizes that kept her going). We stumbled in through the small opening afforded in the bedroom door and witnessed many wonders – like five electric toasters still in their boxes, random soda streams in numerous amounts, kettles in abundance, answering machines in aplenty, alarm clocks in overly sufficient adornment (and most bizarrely) a large box of assorted colored electric light switches (it must have been a thin week). 

 The contents of the wardrobe in this room were just as amazing, it contained almost every conceivable household object within its closed doors, still all packaged and wrapped as the day it was won. I ventured in further and considered the possibility of stumbling across a lion or even a witch brandishing a juicer - but all I had to fear was a proliferation of unused sandwich toasters. 

 The sandwich toaster plugs straight into my Arian psyche, it is the all or nothing approach that teases my neophilic nature. It resides at the back of an unloved, unnoticed cupboard, like an olive in an empty glass of gin and tonic - waiting next to the fondue set and that odd shaped bottle of unnamed alcohol that was purchased on a distant holiday to the Greek islands - that has some sort of reptile floating in it. Then the sandwich toaster is rediscovered during a spring clean and is pressed into constant service; I will spend a solid week eating nothing but toasted sandwiches of every known combination and type – then after I have exhausted my kitchen supplies and my imagination it returns to whence it came, ready to jump back into action at a moment’s notice; in fact I will go and look for it now - I wonder if I have any bananas and a tin of tuna?

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    Adrian Lee

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