What will DeJope be when bingo is bin-gone

Can you still call DeJope a bingo hall if you can play bingo there?

Yes, there will still be ingo machines that whirr and chirp and hum. But you can forget about dabbing ink onto a pile of bingo cards. And machines can welcome you back with a hug or congratulate you on a win.

The personal interaction with other players is what regulars at the DeJope Bingo say theyll miss when the bingo hall half of DeJope closes at the end of June.

Its a social thing, said regular player Kim Ary of Deerfield. Youll miss the other people. I know a lot of people who won be coming out here anymore.

After the last ball is drawn at the Bonanza Jackpot on June 30, the Ho- Chunk tribe will fill the bingo hall on Madisons southeast edge with 750 additional class II bingo machines. Tribal spokeswoman Katie Mesa said the tribe won have a comment on the change until Tuesday.

But regulars at the hall got a letter from DeJope Executive Manager Carole Laustrup a week ago that paper bingo would give way to machines at the end of the month.

They say they e losing money on the bingo, said player John Adams, of Stoughton. He said he doubted that he and wife Sue would make many trips to DeJope once paper bingo ends.

We e cheapskates, Adams said. We like to come for half-price Sundays. Where else can you go and have fun for $30?

I don know about you, but a visit to the last days of bingo at the DeJope hall made me feel as old as the hills. I was there as a young reporter back in 1983 when the Ho-Chunk Nation offered its first high stakes bingo game in a pole barn on the edge of the woods between Baraboo and Lake Delton. The biggest game was bingo with a potential prize of $10,000.

Anyone who has been to the mammoth Ho-Chunk casino knows those days are way, way in the past.

So, apparently, is bingo.

If youve been to DeJope, you know the class II machines look like slot machines, sound like slot machines and play like slot machines. Something inside them makes them qualify as bingo.

You may recall that Dane County voters solidly turned down a referendum in 2004 that would have allowed the tribe to turn DeJope into a full-fledged casino. But I have to wonder if what we e really getting is a stealth casino.

Now that its going to be filled with ingo slot machines, whats to stop the tribe from offering ingo card games? Couldn you just invent a card game called ingoker, in which the best hand, called a straight flush in regular poker, would be called ingo the hard way?

And it seems that renaming roulette as ingo ball would be no-brainer.

OK, Im probably being unfair to the tribe, especially since it was the only major gaming tribe that ended poker and other table games following a state Supreme Court ruling that the current gaming compact was invalid.

Maybe Im just cranky because I see my future as a bingo-playing grandma going the way of the horse and buggy.