Rockers and first responders are flocking to this Willow Grove roadie’s popular Zoom bingo night

Whatever lockdown cliché you’ve crossed off your pandemic bingo card in the past year — sourdough bread, a new dog, a 365-day streak in Duolingo — it probably didn’t include actual bingo.

But for Willow Grove’s John Langenstein, who once expected to spend around nine months of 2020 away from home managing security for Jackson Browne and other touring musicians, running a Friday night game over Zoom has become a nearly full-time occupation.

There’s no money in it for the players — regulars include WMMR DJ Pierre Robert and Hooters drummer David Uosikkinen — much less for Langenstein, who started his game last April.

He estimates he’s spending 30 hours a week on bingo, between calling the numbers, choosing, constructing, and shipping the prizes that go to each week’s winners, and booking guests — from ‘90s Nickelodeon star Danny Tamberelli and the Invincible Vince Papale, to a tour guide in Chernobyl — to go with the themes he’s chosen for each week’s game.

No one’s complaining.

“I was thinking I don’t know if I’m going to like this, and I’ve grown to love it,” said WMMR’s Robert of the hour he spends most weeks playing bingo. He’s part of an eclectic group of people the gregarious Langenstein has befriended during decades spent working security for the likes of Browne, Phish, the Rolling Stones, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.

The Hooters’ Uosikkinen plays most weeks, along with his wife, Dallyn Pavey, a publicist who said she’s known Langenstein “for many, many years.”

“It’s an interesting mix of people, but it’s not all rock and roll people by any stretch,” Robert said. Players may also be Langenstein family friends, first responders, nurses or doctors. One regular is a New York City judge.

Pre-pandemic, “playing Zoom bingo ... is something that I would never do,” Robert said. Normally, “on the weekends, I’m in town, carrying on, drinking, and hoping to crawl through the gutter and find my way back to a receptive couch somewhere, or piece of carpet that I can call my own.”

Now, it’s “ ‘What are you doing tonight?’ ‘Zoom bingo,’ ” he said jokingly. “It’s come to this.”

Not that Langenstein ever thought it would come to this, either.

“I was on my way back home when the world decided to stop,” a year ago this month, Langenstein said. He’d just finished working on what would prove to be the only show he’d be involved in for 2020, “which Jackson [Browne] did in New York City, and it was a benefit, with Cyndi Lauper.” That was on March 12, the Love Rocks NYC benefit.

He had expected to head to Los Angeles on April 6 to work with Browne, who was touring with James Taylor. He figured he’d be back in Willow Grove in time for Christmas.

Instead, he spent the year at home with Joy, his wife of 38 years. “Once I realized we were going to be kind of locked in” for a while, he thought about getting some games, he said. “I came across this bingo game,” and thought it would be fun to “get my family to all sit around a table and play bingo. And the first game was on the 17th of April.” They invited a friend, Theresa Kemp, a nurse with a couple of teenage daughters, to join them over Zoom.

“I didn’t understand the Zoom thing. And then my daughter [Kendall], who’s the technical wizard, she’s like, ‘Oh, we can just keep inviting people,’ ” Langenstein said.

And so they did. Since last April, Langenstein’s only canceled the game he calls “Pandemic Bingo” three times, according to the elaborate spreadsheet that lists each week’s winners, theme, any special guests, and his wish list of guests for future games.

The International Space Station was on there for a while, with the notation “holding for NASA,” but Langenstein said that while the space agency “was very kind,” it suggested that he might have to settle for an astronaut here on Earth instead, and he hasn’t yet pursued that avenue.

One early guest was Tamberelli, an actor and musician who as a child played one of the title characters in Nickelodeon’s 1990s, New Jersey-filmed series The Adventures of Pete & Pete, who’s a family friend, Langenstein said, and agreed to come and play bingo one week.

Another was a chicken. “I remember seeing a story about a chicken that played tic-tac-toe,” Langenstein said, which naturally led him to wonder: Could a chicken play bingo? So he got in touch with Peace N Peas Farm in North Carolina, which advertises “farm animal Zoom bombs,” and found someone there who was willing to “teach” a chicken to play bingo, by placing a card on the ground and a bean on each number, as it was called, that the chicken would then peck.

The chicken won. Langenstein sent it a small trophy and a bag of feed.

He found someone to play a game from Wuhan, China, site of the first COVID-19 lockdown, and invited a guide from Chernobyl, in Ukraine, because he’d once toured the area, which was largely evacuated after the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster.

A small number of people remain there full-time, mostly older women. The subjects of a 2015 film, The Babushkas of Chernobyl, they’re of special interest to Langenstein, who has been collecting supplies to send them. He’s scheduled a “Chernobyl packing party” for March 29, “And we’re going to pack it all up and ship it out.”

Papale, the former Eagles player who inspired the movie Invincible, stopped by for “Super Bowl Bingo” week on Feb. 5, and Megan Cavanagh, the actress who played Marla Hooch in A League of Their Own, was there for a baseball-themed game on March 5.

Jamie Kennedy visited Oct. 30 for “Mischief Night Bingo,” to talk a little about his career and especially his role in Scream, after Langenstein reached out to a friend of the Upper Darby-raised actor and comedian to invite him.

Kennedy, who’s currently starring with Jeremy Piven in Last Call, a movie inspired by Upper Darby, said he’s not surprised to still be associated with Scream, which has become “part of the pop-culture lexicon.” That week’s winner received one of Langenstein’s trademark homemade trophies, which had a small plastic figurine wearing a Scream mask and a bingo card spattered with blood-red paint.

New York Civil Court Judge Leslie Stroth has won a few times and particularly cherishes the Beatles Yellow Submarine-themed trophy she won during Rock & Roll Hall of Fame week.

“I never know what I’m getting in the mail now from John,” she said with a laugh. “And just something other than bills, and my daughter’s college tuition. This is something light, and wonderful.”

The judge, who met Langenstein while she was still in law school — ”Jackson [Browne] and his manager, Donald Miller, are old, old friends of mine,” she said — has been handling cases involving commercial tenants and landlords. It’s “been heartbreaking, because so many beloved restaurants and small businesses in New York City have been forced to close. They then still get sued by the landlord, also suffering in many cases, and there’s no good resolution. So pandemic bingo is a wonderful escape after these tough days.”

Also, in a time of “unprecedented divisiveness … it was never political — it was just bingo,” Stroth said.

“On a Friday night, I’ve found myself really looking forward to that hour, because of everything that was going on,” said the Hooters’ Uosikkinen, who’d planned to spend part of 2020 touring, mostly in Europe, for the group’s 40th anniversary. Instead, he’s been working from a home studio, recording tracks for other projects.

For Pavey, Uosikkinen’s wife, the pandemic has been a blow to the restaurant business that’s been the major focus of her work as a publicist and photographer. “I have learned to make bread. And I’ve been making videos for all of my recipes, and [that’s] a creative outlet that I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

But beyond that, she said, “we didn’t do anything with anyone else for basically the past year. So just to be able to socialize every Friday and see some other faces” has been something both look forward to.

“It’s nice to see everyone all hanging in there,” Uosikkinen said. “And it’s a fun hour.”

WMMR’s Robert, who likes to compare his station to “a community center,” said that what Langenstein has done is similar: “It’s a moment of community that people can look forward to.”

With most live shows still some months off, Langenstein seems willing for now to keep the moment going. For most of the past year, the goal was “we play till we get vaccines,” he said. But now, with many of the players having received at least one of their shots, the consensus seems to be that they’ll keep playing, anyway.

“I think it’s great Friday night therapy session.”