Photos courtesy of Village Dermatology.
Participants in last year’s Beauty Week Bingo celebrate good times.
The doors open at 5:45, and by 6:30 the tent outside Village Dermatology is loud.
Several hundred women, two bingo cards each, prizes on the line, hors d’oeuvres circulating. The first week this October will mark the 15th Annual Beauty Week Bingo, and for Dr. Jenny Sobera it is the night the whole year anticipates.
“This event benefits The WellHouse, and it’s the one I look forward to all year,” Dr. Jenny Sobera said. “It started as one night — hundreds of women competing over prizes and helping a local charity. It became such a good night that we eventually built a whole week around it, so patients could celebrate with us and take advantage of our best pricing of the year. But Bingo is still the heart of it, and it’s still. ”
The event has grown into a Mountain Brook fixture, held in October at the practice’s Office Park Circle location. Registrants receive two bingo cards, picked up at the event, good for all games. Sponsored VIP tables seat eight and include reserved placement and Village swag.
Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Village Dermatology provides patients with a wide range of skin care products.
Two other pieces run alongside the games. A silent auction offers skincare and treatments from the practice, with bidding in person at a tent during the event and winners announced that evening. And a limited run of mystery boxes — skincare, assorted goodies and a neurotoxin treatment — sells until it is gone.
Every dollar from those boxes goes to The WellHouse.
The Alabama nonprofit provides emergency shelter and long-term restorative care to women who have survived human trafficking. It has expanded steadily over the past decade, including a home for trafficked minors, the first of its kind in the state.
“Our work is about helping people feel confident and at home in their own skin,” Sobera said. “The WellHouse does that at a level we deeply admire. They take women who have survived trafficking and give them safety, dignity and a real path forward. Supporting them felt less like picking a charity and more like supporting an organization already doing what we care about.”
It is an unusual pairing on its face — a dermatology practice and a trafficking shelter — and Sobera does not smooth over the distance between the two.
“It’s humbling,” she said. “We spend an evening playing bingo and eating hors d’oeuvres, and it turns into safe housing, counseling and second chances for the women of The WellHouse. Knowing our patients showed up for that is what stays with me long after the night is over.”
Fifteen years in, the format has not changed much. The doors open, the cards go out, someone shouts bingo and a room full of women in Mountain Brook spends an evening laughing and playing a game that pays for somewhere safe to sleep.
Registration and details are available at villagedermatology.net.
