On any given weekday, Cindy Roig knows she will make a minimum of $3 in quarters at the senior center at Millbrook Houses. With a larger crowd of 12 to 16, she makes $6. Her job? She’s responsible for calling the numbers in Spanish at the daily center’s bingo game.
Roig, 74, is one of the many seniors who, after lunch at the senior center, play bingo from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. five days a week. The activity began last summer and has been a crowd-pleaser. It nets some seniors as much as $6 a game, a percentage of which goes to the community center for funding other activities.
The players come straggling in, some carrying their own matrices printed on paper; others pick up cardboard laminated bingo cards from the senior center’s supply. The plastic multi-colored chips are stored in plastic cups and orange prescription medicine bottles. There is minimal conversation and movement from the audience in the Millbook Senior Center until someone screams “Bingo!”
Roig’s voice and the tumbling generated by the ball cage are the only sounds heard during the duration of each game.
“Ge cuarenta y nueve,” Roig enunciates, pronouncing “Ge” — Spanish for “G” — as “hey.”
“Bey Alex Rodriguez,” she says.
The reaction is instinctive. Everyone knows that the number on Yankee third-baseman Alex Rodriguez’s uniform is 13.
“Bingo is very good because you relax,” says Roig. “A little bit money that you win, they feel good, they relax and they love it.”
The arithmetic: At the beginning of every game players pay a quarter for every board they use. Almost all of the players play with two or more boards. The money is collected and a percentage, $1, is given to the senior center for fundraising. The bingo winner also gives 25 cents to Roig as a thank-you gesture.
Four months ago, Roig was a player herself, until one day the bingo caller was absent. Someone volunteered Roig and Roig rose to the lucrative occasion.
“Since then they like my calling. I tell them clearly; I tell them how many games we’ll have. I guess they like my voice, especially he,” she says, pointing to a man with hearing aids, who is sitting next to her.
Her days are busy. She shops, takes part in the walking club, has lunch and by 1 p.m. duty calls – bingo time.
“I’m a busy woman. I like to move around a lot,” says Roig.
And she makes time to catch movies, go to the casino, read books and do puzzles.
“This is one of the activities they like the most,” says Angel Paris, the coordinator of activities at the Millbrook senior center.
Accuracy is key and the self-proclaimed winners have another player confirm their bingo cards before the winnings are appropriated.
“It’s not an art, it’s just luck,” says Paris.
Art, chance or luck –it is a lottery for these seniors.
The game over, the room clears in seconds. Another group, this time children, come to use the facilities.
Very nice!