Each BINGO card has four separate 5×5 “matrices” on it – four games, four chances to win. Addison is playing with four cards, for a total of 16 different chances to win.
“I’m competitive,” she explains over the amplified auctioneer-holler of the bingo DJ
“You’re multitasking pretty hard,” Robert observes.
“Can you hear him?” she asks, squinting at the DJ
“No.”
We’d arrived just as the weekly bingo extravaganza was starting, and jumped right into the game. The reporters, slacking as usual, were hesitant to separate the daters for fear of losing the bingo magic.
Addison is determined to play bingo – in fact, she was already hovering on someone else’s table when we arrived – so we settle into two bar stools at the counter (daters), and two miscellaneous chairs situated conveniently in the path of every waitstaff in the place and out of earshot of the daters with all our worldly belongings perched comfortably on our laps (reporters).
Unfortunately, this is another one of those “bingo night” dates where we caught very little of the dialogue (Dinea and Norm suffered a similar fate a little over a year ago). While we’re relatively certain it was a fun date, we have very little evidence of why, aside from the riveting game of bingo.
So we apologize to you, loyal followers of the Fortnightly Single, and we ask that you accept our humble offering of biased observations and snippets of conversation. What we had to work with was the equivalent of a beautiful script put through a crosscut shredder and thrown out a window, and our only tools are a roll of scotch tape and a powerful sense of enchantment. And ellipses, which we will attempt to wield with wisdom and restraint.
The first thing they talked about was, duh, bingo.
Then they moved on to other games and sports. Addison has been in hockey and soccer and dance.
“Wait a second!” Robert interjects. “You’re not just saying that cause I was wearing a hockey jersey in my photo, are you?”
Robert and his sister Kellie before one of his hockey games this spring
“No, I grew up playing hockey.”
Robert currently plays hockey in a league in Tacoma: “It’s an adult beer league.”
Addison disappears in search of more bingo cards, so we take the opportunity to grill Robert on the date so far.
“I’m hoping to have a good time tonight,” he says. “I’m hoping to have a conversation after this bingo guy is done shouting numbers. That’s my game plan: win big in bingo, deep meaningful conversation.”
He predicts they will win hundreds of dollars, have three drinks each, and eat entrees. (At least one of those was a joke.)
Addison returns with two additional bingo cards.
“Were you cheating?” he asks.
“…ran out of cards…” is part of her reply.
“GEE! FOUR! SIX! GEE-FORTY-SIX! BINGO LAYDAY!” shouts the bingo DJ.
Robert says, “Oh-seven-one was a big one for us.” Apparently they had O-71 on several of their cards.
“I haven’t played bingo in a long time.” Addison is clearly way into the game.
Robert says he played bingo in high school.
“Competitively?”
“Nah, just once. I won two hundred dollars, though.”
They manage to borrow some menus from a neighboring table.
“This is absurd,” says Addison, in reference to the game. She’s completely absorbed at this point. She waves at the menus.
“I’ll manage bingo, you manage food,” she says to Robert. “You look over the menu, then we’ll switch jobs. We’ll be efficient.”
“I don’t really drink or eat bar food,” says Addison. “I don’t go to bars.” She mostly sticks to tea and fresh foods, and stuff from her garden.
“How was your garden this year?” Robert asks. “Good harvest?”
She got tomatoes, potatoes and kale, among other things.
They order drinks and tacos. This is the first time our daters have ever been carded in the history of the Fortnightly Single.
Robert’s beer arrives, and it’s solid white. At first it looks like a glass of milk.
“Is that really a beer?” asks Addison, staring at it.
“It’s all foam.”
“That’s not how you serve a beer. He’s a bad bartender.” She insists that he send it back. He’s looking at it closely.
“It’s cascading.”
The bartender eventually switches it out for a properly-poured pint.
“…YOU’VE GOT TO COME EARLY, CAUSE BINGO NIGHT IS OFF THE CHAIN,” the DJ admonishes the packed room of sweaty bingo-ers (and, at this volume, likely the entire neighborhood). “IF YOU LIKE MY BINGO AND YOU WANT MY BINGO COME ON BABY LET ME KNOW…”
“…talking but it’s not about bingo… there’s too much concentration…” (Robert)
“…wait, we already did thirty… that’s funny…” (Addison)
“SHE’S ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES A – BINGO LAYDAY!” (one guess)
They do manage to squeeze in a little getting-to-know-you conversation. Addison tells a story about how her dog Dharma caught a squirrel and got bitten by it (“She’s okay, though. She’s got a really good immune system.”), and about her AmeriCorps term years ago.
“So, what were you doing in Durango?”
“…building trails… nonprofits…”
“Tell me about that.”
“ENTHIRTYSIX! EN! THREE! SIX! BINGO LAYDAY.”
“…I don’t live there anymore – Ooh! Come on, we need forty-one! – what we want to do… acquire the land… community space… Montessori school…”
“…community space…”
“Basically. …there was water… ran through it…”
“EYE! SIXTY-FIVE! EYESIXTYFIVE! ALL THE LITTLE CHICKS WITH CRIMSON LIPS GO BINGO ROCKS!”
“… raising money.”
After this little conversation (what was possible, given the all-encompassing voice of the DJ) and a lot of bingo, the DJ declared a break. Addison stacked the used bingo cards. “We lost. We lost again.” We were able at this point to separate the daters and pick their brains.
So, Addison really likes bingo, huh?
“When there’s a game on, I’m really competitive.”
And why would she want to do something like this? What compelled her to be the Fortnightly Single?
“It wasn’t really about the date. I’m just not very social. I’m super independent, and I don’t really enjoy other people. It was more about committing to words. I have difficulty with that, so I just wanted to commit to words and put it out there.”
Is she having a good time so far? She shrugs.
She mentioned in her profile that she hadn’t dated at all really, but had been in several relationships. So how did those relationships start?
“We were best friends first, mostly. I’m never really looking to connect. So it tends to happen when I’m in a relationship where I’m constantly connecting already, where I’m forced to be around someone enough, and we get to know each other really well.”
As an unrepentant extravert, this reporter was developing an almost scientific fascination with Addison’s mile-wide independent streak.
“I don’t have room in my life for extra people,” she continues. “I’m very all-or-nothing. If I’m not completely inspired by someone, I’m not going to half-ass it for their sake.”
She’s pretty good at assessing what someone needs from a relationship, she explains, and if she can’t offer what they need, she will say so. “It’s about being totally sincere and up front with people.”
“It’s either there or it’s not. People who need people – I’m not that person. I’m open to it, but if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t.”
In case, dear reader, you are starting to believe that Addison has given up on romance altogether, read on. 
When she first appeared on the back page of OP&L, she was working at the Farmers Market.
“I keep hoping someone will bring me flowers,” she told folks at a nearby stand. One fellow decided he would – he brought her flowers regularly for several weeks. She beams when she tells the story.
She observes that, since putting herself out there as the Fortnightly Single, she is noticing the way people look now. “It’s not really something I noticed before, unless I knew someone well.”
Robert works for Olympic National Forest, at the front desk: “I tell people where they can camp and hike in the forest.”
He’s the captain of his adult hockey team, and has played for about five years. He grew up in Colorado and came to Oly to attend Evergreen.
“Came here ten years ago. Haven’t left. It’s a good town.” (We completely agree.)
So why did Robert decide to write in?
“Her picture caught my attention, so I read it, and I thought we had a lot in common.”
What does he look for in a relationship?
“Common interests, easy conversation… looking for that spark between two people.”
He’s been single a little while. As he puts it, “my dating history is sparse, in part because I’m picky. Relationships – you have to put a lot of time into them, so you want to be picky about them. And I’m pretty content with my life.”
Any expectations?
“It’s hard to know what to expect when you’re going on a date with a newspaper. I’ve been making a point to not talk about dating.”
The tacos? “Sub-par.”
It turns out the bingo break was really just the eye of the storm.
What follows is a louder, faster, lightning-round style game called “blitzkrieg blackout.” (Word to the wise – it’s just regular “blackout” bingo, where you have to fill in the whole card, except there’s a lot more clapping and shouting.)
“Do those get better as they get cold?” Addison points to Robert’s tacos.
“No.”
“ENTHIRTYEIGHT! EN! THIRTY EIGHT!”
Robert points them out on the card.
“Ooh – good one! We got four!”
“Good eye! I was looking in the wrong column.”
“Are you gonna take those home with you?” We’re back to Robert’s tacos. “You live with other people, right?”
“Yeah. Do you?”
“No, I’m actually going to be homeless in about ten days.”
“GEE-FIVE-ZERO!”
“We didn’t have that one.” Addison is really enjoying the stepped-up bingo. “It should have been like this from the beginning!”
(Someone across the bar is shouting at their date: “It’s like bingo on crack!” Yes, yes it is.)
As the bingo DJ is packing up – no, we didn’t win, yes, it’s sad, let’s not talk about it – we separate the daters for some post-date reflection. We’re especially curious about the conversation we may have missed.
“A little about work, the nonprofit I started in Durango, how he lived there…”
“We were trying to have a conversation while also getting the numbers. It was an exercise in multitasking. Being bingo, we did talk about numbers. We talked about sports, about what numbers we wear and what’s the significance, and what draws us to the sports we play.”
“We talked about that poorly poured beer. I actually took a sip of it to make sure it was beer!”
“She told the story about her dog not killing the squirrel, and the squirrel getting its revenge.”
How was the date overall?
“It didn’t feel like the best venue…but when the bingo wasn’t going on, the conversation went well.”
“He seems like a really nice, easygoing guy, well-rounded.”
“She’s nice. She says she doesn’t like people.” Is there a spark? “No, not yet.”
Will there be a second date? Neither Robert nor Addison made the move (that we know of), but Robert did have some suggestions.
In addition to bingo night, “a rock concert would also be a bad idea. Blackjack. Maybe blackjack would be good.”
This reporter, having been slighted by the waitstaff the entire time, gratefully chowed Robert’s tacos as we left. They were cold, but okay.