A Shot at $325 Million Brings Out the Dreamers
Kitty Hawkins had that look, that anxious, mildly pained expression of a God-fearing woman about to commit . . . a sin.
“I’m sinning,” she croaked as she pulled a single $1 bill from her purse and headed toward the lottery line. “I’m a sinner. Oh, boy, I’m going to be repenting for this all week.”
Then a devilish little smile crept across her face, and her voice gained confidence and volume. “I tell you, though, $325 million will make all that repenting a whole lot easier. Oh, yes, a whole lot easier.”
If the biggest lottery jackpot in the history of the nation could tempt the devoutly religious postal worker out of a single, you might imagine what it’s doing to others.
With the latest drawing in the seven-state Big Game slated for tonight, folks are taking out loans to become players, mulling over wedding dates and surreptitiously planning mass exoduses from their humdrum nine-to-fives.
Never mind that you are more likely to be struck by lightning--126 times more likely--than to hit the jackpot. Never mind that if you drive 10 miles to buy your ticket, you are 15 times more likely to be killed in a crash than to win, according to Cal State Hayward statistician Mike Orkin. Never mind that standing in line for odds of 76 million to 1 opens you up to mockery by not only professional number-crunchers but by depressingly cynical intellectuals.
“It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive,” wrote George Orwell in his ominous classic “1984.” “Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.”
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Never mind, never mind, never mind.
This is the kind of payout that many Americans find well worth a $1 sin or a $2 dream.
Legal secretary Audrey Minglin sent an e-mail Monday to the other secretaries--and only the secretaries--at her downtown Chicago law office: “Bring your $2 down if you want to quit your job.”
“They flew down, 30 of them,” said Minglin as she queued up at the nearby White Hen Pantry, clutching a sealed envelope containing $60. And they concocted a plan.
If they win, the secretaries will all show up to work on Wednesday wearing sequined gowns and feather boas. And then they will quit, right then, right there, and shut that law office down--at least for a little while--and leave those attorneys to answer some phones.
The jackpot for the Big Game--tickets are sold in Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Virginia--has grown a stunning $95 million since Friday, when no one hit all five numbers and the Big Money Ball.
The previous lottery record, $295.7 million, went to 13 machinists from Westerville, Ohio, in a 1998 drawing of the multi-state Powerball game. Little has been heard from them since.
A study by two University of Minnesota statisticians of that game, which had slightly nastier odds of 80 million to 1, revealed through a serpentine series of calculations that the value of a $1 ticket prior to the drawing was 91.9 cents. Not a bad investment, they concluded, as far as mind-bending longshot bets go.
But the people who poured into the White Hen on Monday were not thinking about odds. They weren’t even thinking about losing--losing was all but certain and required little consideration. They were thinking about winning. Winning warranted some thought.
Minglin would quit and head straight for Rome. “To see [Michelangelo’s] David.” Then to Paris. “For the Mona Lisa.”
She was wearing a dress with a print of the Mona Lisa on its shoulder, and that’s as close as the 41-year-old has ever come.
Eric Hill, a 26-year-old Internet marketing representative who is engaged, was thinking he’d better have a wedding date in mind just in case. He also was considering how much to give his family and friends, the proper amount to make them comfortable and happy without spoiling them.
Anthony Brown was thinking about his daughter as he copied dozens of numbers from a sheet of lined white paper onto the lottery ticket. Bianca, 7, had given him his picks and practiced her penmanship at the same time. He was thinking how thrilled she’d be if the numbers she’d chosen, for no particular reason as far as he could tell, were the right ones, the winning ones.
Brown, seemingly still deep in thought, had finished his transfer of the lucky numbers and was standing in line when a co-worker patted him on the shoulder. It was Hawkins.
The decision to gamble that dollar was really wearing on her, Hawkins told him. The idea of actually making the transaction, handing over the bill and receiving an orange-and-white receipt for her sin would be too much.
Brown smiled. He held out his hand and Hawkins passed him her dollar.
He passed it on to the clerk. “One more, please,” Brown said.