REVIEW: Queer Bingo @ Capulet

MY EYES ARE DOWN HERE

MONDAYS amiright? You're weary after the weekend's excesses, just nurturing back those first few burgeoning molecules of serotonin to help you through the start of another week. What will the next seven days bring? What? Yet MORE unexpected extreme weather conditions added to the city’s already-crowded meteorological calendar?! Climate gods, you’re really spoiling us!

Last Monday, though, Up All Night dragged their creaking old bones down to the always-wonderful Capulet for a spot of Queer Bingo. What IS Queer Bingo and will I need a special outfit, I hear you say? I’m glad you asked, and the answer to the last part is very much up to you (you’re not going to be turned away or mocked however you rock up, there’s no strict feather boa policy but this IS New Orleans, so go hog wild if you’re feeling it).

There’s a five-pronged strategy of delight, operating in a pincer movement that makes it almost impossible not to have a fun start to the week. First of all, it’s bingo, and who doesn’t love bingo? SOCIOPATHS, that’s who.

Secondly, there’s multiple prizes on offer, from cocktails to food plates to bottles of wine (and Capulet’s A-grade menu means that these are all great wins for a FREE contest). The remaining triage of treats are all down the evening’s hostess, queen of the bingo balls Siren, who rules over the proceedings with a bawdy panache that is a singular delight. Resplendent in finery that frankly, Monday nights don’t really deserve, it’s almost like being at a free, one-queen show that incidentally has bingo going on.

Siren runs four or five games depending on time, with classic bingo, a four corner variation (four corners is unarguably the queerest way to win a bingo) and the infamous ‘tight rim’ of a whole square around the middle one - always labeled FREE (BRITNEY).

But hold onto your hats, dear reader, because the best is yet to come.

After every couple of rounds, Siren will break out from her throne and lip synch/dance for your pleasure, a soothing drag balm if you were just one square away before someone rudely announced their own completion. The music is excitingly esoteric, and we saw Siren spin and sashay to Macy Gray’s ‘I Try’ and Dolly P’s mistressful version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Meanwhile, the cards eschew simple numbers and instead go for topics that inspire casual therapy session chats with the audience, such as ‘A Delight to Have in Class’ and ‘Everyone Brought Hummus to the Potuck’.

We didn’t win, though we came close to the tight rim. But in a sense, given the game, prizes, funny chat, drag finery AND performance breaks, we really ALL won. (Bin)Go and support this lovely evening, or be forever an unmarked square. 

Queer Bingo with Siren: Monday nights at Capulet from 7pm, no cover. 

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