LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMPOut: One Armed Bandits |
by Fay Jacobs |
One armed bandits, pork ends and a slippery noodleit's autumn! "What do you do at the beach after the summer?" If you live here year round, you answer this question a lot. People must think we hibernate with a stash of soggy beach fries and a tin of stale caramel corn, fending off Nor'Easters and waiting to be liberated on Memorial Day. Oh, how not true. Between mid-week restaurant deals (there's so much great food here off-season, we tremble at the thought of June), cheapo locals night at the movies (all the first runs right away; and stand in line? Never.) plus shopping until we drop every spare cent we have, there's hardly time for Will & Grace. My standard answer also includes the news that while there were a million things to do in the DC area, I actually did damn few; here, there are fewer things to do, and I do them all. Recently, I set out on a 24-hour adventure (co-incidentally the 24 hours just prior to Letters deadline...) for a quintessential Sussex County weekend. We hopped in the car Friday night and headed West to Harrington for the Slots at Midway. While I'd been there once before to look around and lose a quick $25, I'd never really made it an evening's destination. Some advice: eat before you go. I know I came there to gamble, but I didn't realize I'd be starting with dinner. Following the international buffet you can ask for Maalox in several different languages. After the carbohydrate loading, I went to check out the casino's nickel slots. Ordinarily, I would have started with quarters, but I'd brought the contents of my piggy bank along and the nickels were weighing me down. Not for long. Turns out that there are only a few nickel machines for cheapsters like me. Fortunately, one player had to stave off uremic poisoning and finally go to the bathroom, so I took his place. From the look of the other nickel junkies, the only chance I'd have to inherit their seats would be in probate court. Of course you really can't bet just a nickel. That's because each slot machine has seven or nine different pay lines. Heaven forbid you only used one nickel and two lemons or Lucky 7's came up on another pay line and cost you the chance to collect another pound of nickels. So really, I was playing the 45 cent slots, which is not as snappy sounding, but clearly the truth. In fact, on these machines you have nine different ways to lose. It seems mathematically impossible, but there are nine different ways not to get a pair of lemons, limes or Midway Slots logos. Sure, every once in a while, two or four nickels come plinking out of the machine, but mostly you just keep feeding the thing. Meanwhile, an annoying cacophony of bells is going off as people all around are scooping up silver and carting it to waiting Brinks trucks. Relieved of my heavy metal, I moved on to the quarter machines, which, as we have all now learned are really $2.25 slots. Here I am, plunking nine quarters at a time in a machine and, unlike our beloved parking meters, I'm not even going to get to leave and have a nice dinner somewhere. Suffice it to say that it didn't take me long to rid myself of all coins, have a few laughs and head back out to the parking lot. And I'm glad we bought the truck 'cause we fit right in. Saturday morning dawned and it was time for the 9th Annual Bridgeville ("If you lived here you'd be home now") Apple Scrapple Festival. Oh my. Apples I've had, but scrapple is an entirely different matter. I'm sure it surprises no one that prior to Saturday I was a scrapple virgin. Yes, I've heard Bonnie's tales of farmer Granny frying scrapple, but thus far I'd avoided having to sample any myself. Frankly, you know something's up when you ask normally glib people what scrapple is and they stutter. "Um, pig mush." So there I was, with 40,000 other people, in line for a scrapple sandwich. Well, it wasn't awful. Bonnie insisted that it should have been crispier. I was not doing badly until I looked up and saw the 40-foot Rapa Scrapple Company sign listing the ingredients as Pig's snouts and lard. At about the same time, the Hog Calling Contest began and grown men and women started wailing Suuu-eeeee, Suuu-eeeee, which was roughly the same sound I was making trying to spit out my pig snout sandwich. Wisely, Bonnie grabbed my arm and steered me toward a vendor hawking kosher hot dogs (which, if dissected, are probably the Hebrew National version of snouts and lard). Between hog-calling and scrapple scarfing there was the scrapple carving contest. A tent full of scrapple sculptors had fashioned everything from a three little pigs tableau to a hot looking woman's torso. Actually, raw scrapple is a pretty good carving mediumthough as the day got warmer, the stuff started to droop and that torso aged twenty years. I think the winners should have been honored not so much for what they carved, but that they were willing to put their hands in that stuff. Sadly, we were due at our next event in the early evening so we had to leave Bridgeville (If you lived here you'd be home now) before the Scrapple Chunking Contest behind the high school. It's a good thing those football players wear protective gear, because I have a feeling they'll be throwing that pigskin through a field of pig snouts till spring. So home we went, thoroughly scrappled out, to get ready for the weekend's final event: the chicken and dumpling dinner at the Lewes Grange. Once again, I was in virgin territory. "Haven't you ever had slippery dumplings?" asked a member of our party. No, can't say as I have. Six of us converged on the Lewes Grange building at 6 p.m., paid our seven dollar per person fee and got right down to the business of piling our plates with slippery dumplings, thick white gravy, potatoes, green beans and chicken. For the record, what I thought was going to be exotic foreign food was essentially the same as the noodles my grandmother served with beef brisket. And equally delicious. We were stuffed to the dumplings in just under twenty minutes and back out on the street again before anyone could lobby us to change our political affiliation or join the Grange. Dinner was great and we were happy to support this community organization. But our biggest concern was wondering what we were going to do for the rest of the evening. Hey, 6:30 and dinner's over. That never happened in D.C. Or on Baltimore Avenue for that matter. Of course, it left me plenty of time to write about my local adventures. Pass the slippery dumplings and save me a seat at the nickel slots. We're getting ready for Jazz, Sea Witch, and Independent films and we haven't even thought about Thanksgiving yet. By January I'll be ready to hibernate for a while with my stash of frozen boardwalk fries and leftover crab cakes. Hold the pork snouts. Editor's note: Too bad Fay didn't know about the "Turkey Testicle Festival" mentioned on the radio recently. Now that would have been fodder for a column or two. Fay Jacobs, a Vice Versa award winning columnist, is a regular contributor to Letters from CAMP Rehoboth. You can find more of her CAMPOut columns at www.camprehoboth.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 14, Oct. 20, 2000. |