A tale of queens that go boom at the bingo

BY PETUNIA PAP SMEAR

The road to the Bingo Hall of Fame is fraught with danger and excitement.

As many of you know, I am a member of the Matrons of Mayhem and we conduct drag queen bingo for charity every month. Years ago I used to hear the word “bingo” and immediately picture the dining room in a senior citizen center with rows of long tables filled with a bunch of old ladies hunched over their bingo cards, elbowing their neighbors and asking what number was just called because they couldn’t hear since the batteries in their hearing aids were dead. Well, at Matrons of Mayhem Bingo nothing could be more dissimilar. Over the years, I have come to discover that bingo with the Matrons is a full-contact sport and I have accumulated the battle scars to prove it.

One time I was descending the stairs from the stage in order to harass (shamelessly flirt with) a very cute boy sitting at table nine. It seems that my high heel shoes were not designed for such heavy-duty use. Since I am a queen who is a lover of food and to whom exercise is not a common occurrence, at the top of the stairs, under the strain of supporting my Rubenesque physique, the structural integrity of the shoes failed. Not one, but both heels broke free, thus throwing my immense center of gravity drastically forward. This caused me to perform what could best be described as a flying belly flop down three stairs to crash land on the floor at the feet of the Utah Bears. The entire building shook as if there had been an earthquake. The pendant light fixtures began to swing. Clouds of dust were shaken free from the rafters. The wind was knocked out of me. I lay there, stunned and in shock, expecting the Bears to be chivalrous and jump up to my rescue. BUT NO! The Bears remained sitting in their chairs, looking down on me as if studying a dead spider. Not even the other queens came to my aid. I was left to roll my own rotunditude over to the stairs, and then crawl up two of the stairs until I was upright enough to finish standing. Bastards!

Another time, the charity of the night was the Great Dane Rescue. They brought four of the massive dogs to bingo to show them off. It just so happened that I was running a solo party foul and running back and forth repeatedly across the room between the tightly placed tables. Well, there were a bunch of people waving dollars in the air on the far side of the room, so I ran to gather them up. In the process, of running between the tables, I neglected to see there was a Great Dane lying on the floor hidden from my view. I tripped on the beast and landed with my full voluptitude on top of the poor defenseless creature. He cushioned my fall, but I nearly crushed the life out of him. It took a whole pizza and seven hot dogs to calm him down again.

On one occasion Pansy, a most problematic weed in my garden, challenged me to a race from the back of the hall to the stage and the winner would receive all the glory and accolades of an adoring crowd. Always a competitive queen, I immediately kicked off my high heels, gathered up my skirt in my hands and assumed a sumo wrestler stance in preparation to run. Someone yelled “go” and off we ran. I achieved a pretty good head of steam and broke into an early lead BUT, the limits of physics were being stretched past anything Einstein could have imagined. Somehow, under the strain of being in a running posture, my lighted breasticles made me front heavy and began to pull my torso forward faster than my feet could keep up. I began to slowly tip forward, eventually losing my balance. I hit the floor, skidding at least ten feet. Friction from the wires in my underwire bra scraping the floor caused sparks to fly, before coming to a stop. Luckily, the fumes from the fart that I had secretly let fly a few minutes earlier had already cleared or the sparks would have caused a natural gas explosion. Again, I lay there dazed and confused. Pansy kept running to the finish line, and returned to stand triumphantly over my poor lifeless corpse. With much help, she rolled me onto my back. I lay there dazed and confused. The heels of my hands were scraped with road rash. My knees were both bleeding profusely. The lights in my right breasticle had ceased functioning, but the ones in my left breasticle kept blinking like a lighthouse as if to say “Here! Here is a beached whale.” I lay there writhing in pain, waiting for a bunch of polar bears to smell the blood and come to and finish me off.

Upon investigation, both breasticles had dug deep, long gouges into the vinyl flooring. They ended up having to replace the entire floor. I shall always wear sensible shoes from now on.

This story leaves us with several important questions:

1. Who knew there was a weight limit on shoes?

2. If I had been carrying a pizza in my purse, would the Bears then have helped me up off the floor?

3. Do I need to begin packing food treats in my purse to bribe the Bears?

4. Is it wrong that I was jealous that the dog got a pizza and seven hot dogs that I felt I deserved?

5. Is it wrong that I was upset that I got dog hair on my skirt?

6. Does my bloody crashing to the floor put the “smear” in Pap Smear?

These and other eternal questions will be answered in future chapters of The Perils of Petunia Pap Smear.