No gambling in my blood

I went to my first big-time Tricky Tray on Friday night, and boy, was that a trip. For those of you who've never been to a Tricky Tray -- and up until I moved to the Northeast, I'd never heard of them -- it's basically a super monster mega raffle for which you buy a lot of little tickets, drop them into containers in front of a variety of fabulous, semi-fabulous, and really-not-very-fabulous-at-all prizes, and then sit around for a few hours listening to people read numbers to see if you won anything. Some folks get heavily into this, spending hundreds of dollars to buy tickets to invest in winning what is mostly, essentially, junk. My husband and I just aren't in the spirit, though. We bought some tickets because it benefits the school, played them fairly half-heartedly, and lost everything. Not even the smallest basket of potpourri or paperbacks did we manage to bring home. I'm happy that the school made money, less happy that we spent one of our very rare evenings out together in such boring circumstances. As with so many fund-raisers, I'm left thinking: Can I just write you a check so that I don't have to participate?