Jackpot! Uh, bingo: sky (or $500) soon to be limit at beloved game of chance.
Oh, San Francisco. Where public pot use is routine, peeing in public ignored , transgender hookers shrugged at and the prize limit for bingo? Half of what the rest of what liberal California allows. But that too shall pass.
In a move that can’t but help his well-publicized bid to succeed Mayor Gavin Newsom (and/or Aaron Peskin, according to some) in Room 200 of City Hall, Supervisor Bevan Dufty has, the SF Appeal believes, cornered the bingo vote.
Legislation Dufty authored doubling the prize limit for bingo games to $500 sailed through a breezy committee hearing on Monday.
But sadly, bingo games probably won’t join the O’Farrell Theatre, Hippy Hill and sex dungeons on our list of “places to shock out-of-town guests.” No day-long bingo binges in underground seedy dens of sin for us: bingo games will continue to be held only by charitable organizations, in spaces leased by said organizations.
Included are even strict rules as to how the money shall be banked — in a trust fund, a certain percentage of the gate, and the rest had better be going to the charity, motherfucker! — and bingo games will also be capped at six hours. So a breezier affair than our Friday night poker game, but still quite an investment.
(The reason why SF lagged behind the state? The city police code capped bingo prizes at $250).
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention committee chair Supervisor Bevan Dufty’s masterful mastery of the proceedings. Not only did he get everything through, he got everyone in and out in about 10 minutes, and got his Wizard of Oz on when he asked the SFGTV camera crews to point the lens towards the audience.
This, then, we are proud to say, is what a herd of Monday morning bingo-mad policy wonks looks like:
(Not to be outdone, SFGTV showed us their awesome with a camera angle we’d never seen before — a profile shot of the clerk’s booth, which we were unfortunately too slow to capture).
Bingo freedom, awesome camera angles — this is what makes San Francisco great, people.
