TILLAMOOK, OR — The Tillamook Elks Lodge #1437 kept its doors unlocked until 4:30 a.m. Wednesday so that six residents and one off-duty mail carrier could watch the women’s figure skating free skate live from the PalaItalia arena in Milan, a broadcast that — owing to the nine-hour time difference and an NBC affiliate dispute that ate the first six minutes — did not actually begin in Tillamook until 1:52 a.m. Pacific.
The decision to stay open was made unilaterally by bartender Marlene Vossen, who informed the Lodge board by text message at 11:14 p.m. Tuesday and did not wait for a reply.
Vossen, who has tended the Elks bar since 2003 and judged the Tillamook County Fair baking division from 1998 to 2014, kept a personal scorecard on a yellow legal pad throughout the broadcast and awarded both technical and presentation marks using a system she described as “the way they should be done.”
“The Russian one — well, whoever she’s skating for now — landed everything clean,” Vossen said, refilling a coffee at 2:40. “But I knocked her down two points on presentation. The arms were doing entirely too much. You don’t need that many arms for a Rachmaninoff.”
By the start of the third skater, one viewer was asleep upright at the rail. By the fifth, a man named Curtis had begun explaining figure skating scoring to the room, which was not asked for and, according to Vossen, also not correct.
The undisputed highlight of the evening, three of the six attendees later agreed, was a forty-second segment in which the PalaItalia Zamboni resurfaced the ice between groups. “Now that,” said Curtis, “is a machine.”
Dwight Helmke, the off-duty carrier, said he had originally stopped in for one beer at nine and stayed through the broadcast because the alternative was driving home at two in the morning and explaining to his wife why he was driving home at two in the morning. “This way I can say I was watching the Olympics,” Helmke said. “Which is true. I was.”
The gold medal was decided shortly after 4:15 a.m. by a margin of 1.84 points. Vossen, whose own scorecard had a different skater winning by six, declined to revise it.
At 4:31 a.m., Vossen turned off the television, walked to the front door, and announced the official gold medalist by full name to the empty parking lot. Then she locked up and went home.