a post script to Ginny's

Was perusing a newly published magazine and found this letter to the editor~love it on so many levels:  as someone who also migrated here from Seattle sans job/home/connections and for the way the universe, at times, steps in to support a dream.

Three summers ago I moved from the Pacific Northwest to Austin, Texas, in search of a warmer climate. I got what I wished for in spades. By late October the temperatures were still in the upper nineties, and I was unemployed and broke. I had been to interviews all over town and had received polite rejections at all of them.

I was living with a friend from college who worked at a bookstore. One afternoon she and I were doing some grocery shopping — by which I mean she was buying her food for the week, and I was watching her. (She kindly bought me enough ramen noodles to get by.) I was glad just to be out of the apartment, where I’d been stationed in front of a computer all day, obsessively refreshing my in-box in hopes of a job offer.

I was about to tell my friend I had given up and was going home to the Northwest when her cellphone rang. It was a recruiting company looking to speak with me about a job opportunity at a local community theater. (I had given them my friend’s number because I couldn’t afford a phone.) The recruiter wanted me to meet with the hiring manager of the organization in two days. I was elated. Finally things were turning around.

When we got back to the apartment, I had an e-mail from the recruiter containing details for the meeting and some advice: “Make sure to take in a performance at the theater before the interview.”

The cheapest tickets were forty dollars, and I literally didn’t have a penny. My roommate couldn’t spot me the cash either; she had spent most of hers on groceries.
Seeing how despondent I was, she offered to take me out to Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon. Her favorite local honky-tonk band was playing, and she had enough money left to buy us each a beer.

When we got to the bar, we discovered that it was also bingo night — chicken-shit bingo to be precise. You paid a dollar to buy a number on a giant bingo card. After all the bets were made, they let a chicken run free on the card until it did its business. If it hit your number, you took home the pot.

My roommate bought us each a ticket with her last two bucks. My chest felt as if it would explode when I won: $153 in crumpled cash — the most money I’d had in months. I bought my friend a beer and a greasy cheeseburger, and then I went straight to the theater to catch the production.

I nailed that interview and got the job, all because on a hot, dusty night in the heart of Texas, a chicken had defecated on the number twenty-three.

Rian Kochel
Seattle, Washington