Late 1964, Rex Labor and I were part of a group of Peace Corps trainees on the island of Hilo, Hawaii, whom the Peace Corps decided it could survive without.  They gave us airline tickets back to the mainland, but Rex and I left the plane at Honolulu, planning to go to India on our own, deck hand on a sailboat bound for Australia, something.

Here’s what happened next:

Next day we went looking for work.  Rex took a newspaper and headed down to check out the openings on Waikiki.....I headed for the bars on Hotel Street looking for a job or a hooker to prime me for my job search.  Tomorrow I'd go down to Waikiki to find my busboy job at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.  Today I had more pressing matters.

In a while, I came to a booth with a pretty Gypsy lady; flirted a bit, talked around the issue.  Was certain she was a hooker.  Finally, she demanded, "You want a gypsy good-time?"

"Yeah!  A Gypsy good-time!"

She took me into an attached room with nothing but a cot, sat me down.  "$10"....she took my money and assured she'd be back in a moment.  I sat there and knew when she brought in a snaggle-toothed crone that I'd just lost a sawbuck for another of my lessons in life. 

"Here it is!  A Gypsy goodtime!"  She and the crone danced back and forth in front of me, all of us laughing. 

My life has been rich in gypsy good-times. I've been a man wealthy in Gypsy good-times, but that one was best.

A Gypsy-good time when the coconuts fell beside us and mangos piled high under the trees blocking the sidewalks where Rex and I grumbled in our cots picking off sunburned skin to throw to the giant roaches. 

We were young in that country.

From: Day of the Lost Souls
Copyright©2003 Jack Purcell

Rex Labor became a lifelong friend.  Today he’s in China teaching English to adult Chinese.

But the point of this yarn is to convey that I, and maybe a lot of other lottery players obviously don’t mind a Gypsy Goodtime if it’s well conceived and executed.  Probably most of us could even appreciate it.

Probably that crone is dead sometime these last forty years.  Even the younger Gypsy woman’s probably lost to history, not available as a consultant to major lottery operations.

I’m suggesting the lottery management needs to go to the pros, if they want to make a good job of this sort of thing.

There are still plenty around.

Jack