Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The Gambler

Last Wednesday, I flew into the Kansas City airport from Baltimore and Mother of Ken was there to pick me up. We went to dinner at the Argosy Casino because Mother of Ken wanted to play the Hee Haw slot machine that she found when she and Father of Ken went to the casino on Memorial Day weekend.

Casinos around here are pretty interesting places. Since none of us frequent them regularly, we are always astounded at the kinds of people who do. First of all, they are filled with smoke and people with various kinds of physical handicaps. It is not uncommon to see someone inching along in a wheelchair with a cigarette in one hand slowly moving toward another bank of slot machines. Most of these people look like they don't have enough money to eat dinner, let alone gamble all day long.


Anyway, this was my first time gambling at a casino, so I didn't exactly know what I was doing. We had to search for the Hee Haw machines and then we were kind of lost because this casino is basically one giant room full of machines, lights, noises, and smoke. When we found the Hee Haw machines, we sat down to play--I don't really understand the particulars of this game, but apparently corns, Roys, and barns are good. I also got a few "Pickin' and Grinnin's," which gave me free spins. This machine does all the voices and everything.





Mother of Ken getting into the groove and pressing the spin button like a zombie:








The pictures aren't great because I had to take them with my phone, but I was determined to blog about my first casino experience.




Me pushing the spin button:





I think that these were some of my free spins:




Action shot!




More of Mother of Ken playing Hee Haw:



After we lost on Hee Haw, we went in search of something else to play. Mother of Ken found a Munsters slot machine and I sat down to play Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" machine:


Kenny helped me win big--I did quite well on this machine even though I have no idea how I did it. Kenny kept praising me, so I kept pushing the button. I don't remember how high it went, but I think that I was up to about $38 by the time I decided to cash out.


We decided to try some patriotic triple seven machines before we left in honor of July 4th and I ended up winning $15 total. As we were playing these, Mother of Ken made friends with a man who wasn't doing so well--he had been to the casino twice that day and was way down. I observed a woman at an octagonal bank of dollar machines, sitting between two of them with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other and blindly pushing the spin buttons on both machines alternately.

I have to say that I felt under dressed. I really think that you need to wear sparkly clothing and metallic shoes to patronize these places and I was wearing conservative navy and white. We had fun, but we smelled like ashtrays when we left. With my winnings, I bought breakfast on Thursday morning. Uncle of Ken was insanely jealous of my Kenny Rogers winnings, too.

2 comments:

Leah said...

If that lady had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, how did she press the spin button? Did she use her nose like a bird?
And also, I'm very disappointed that it was a spin button and not one of those super cool arms that you pull down.

Melissa said...

Don't be disappointed, Leah, even the casinos have gone to high technology. What caused my excessive ponderance was how people would just insert their credit card (now they use pre-paid casino cards) into the machine and just keep hitting spin all the live long day. As Taryn pointed out, these people don't look like they have enough money to live, let alone gamble.