01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 15, 2004

Scenes from what might have been:

It's Jan. 17, 10 p.m. The temperature is 7 degrees with a windchill factor of minus 22. The snow is piled in gray, trash-specked mounds along fences, Dumpsters and the walls of deserted, boarded-up stores.

In the parking lot, a woman screams at a man in the brutal chill, her breath steaming around her hard, accusing words.

Inside, in The Quahog Lounge, a guy who recorded two top-20 songs in the early '70s is singing both of them in his greatest hits medley, clapping his hands and urging the crowd to join in on the chorus.

The crowd declines, opting instead to continue moving loose change among the small beer puddles on the tabletops.

At the bar, a woman named Ginger tells a guy named Freddie that he looks a little lonely.

At the curb near the service entrance, the driver of a van from an assisted-living facility checks his watch for the 25th time and quietly curses the residents who were supposed to be back on board by 9:30. Two of the residents, meanwhile, are in a geriatric rumble in the smoke-free Wizards Room, slapping and scratching in a dispute over the rights to a seat at the Make-a-Million poker machine.

Across the street, a woman can be seen through the window of an all-night pawn shop, removing her wedding ring.

In the lobby, near the fountain, a man swipes his card through the ATM machine for the 10th time and swears for the 10th time when it tells him the well's run dry.

All of it could have been ours. It could have been here in the heart of Rhode Island -- the fun and the glamour running side by side with the misery.

But it looks as if it might not happen. It looks as if the casino proposal, which has been dragged through Rhode Island like bait through the water, is going to come up empty. Again. The line might be thrown back in. The trolling for suckers might resume.

But for now, the promise of hot nights in January in West Warwick has faded.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court, in an advisory opinion, has ruled that the proposal, and its place on the November ballot, are not constitutional. That put the question in Superior Court on Friday where arguments were made to follow the Supreme Court's lead and take the casino question off the ballot and away from the public.

It's a blow to many people, including those who sell advertising for radio, television and newspapers. If the casino question had gone on the ballot, the effort to win the support of a majority of Rhode Island voters would have been nonstop and high priced.

Millions of dollars would have gone into the effort to spin a minor league casino into the source of economic salvation and glamourous nights out in the Pawtuxet Valley.

And at least a few bucks more would have gone into the effort to paint the whole thing darkly -- as a giveaway to Harrah's and the Narragansett Indians that would undercut those "sort-of" casinos at Lincoln Park and Newport Grand.

But it's also a setback to those who saw the casino in West Warwick as a possible Rhode Island crossroads, a place where rituals playing out all over the state could be brought under one roof and enjoyed from a single barstool. All kinds of high rollers and hangers-on, the genuinely famous and the self-appointed, could have had their own clubhouse. We would have been drawn to it not by the action at the tables and the slots, but by the action around them.

It would be a disaster, of course. Every dreary scene described above would take place. And putting a place built on hard luck in the middle of a hard-luck town would create the kinds of problems -- social and criminal and economic -- that would extend well beyond West Warwick.

But it would be a show, one that would have nothing to do with a lounge singer croaking out his dusty hits.

The casino would be the one place to stop before deciding how much time you wanted to spend in the rest of the state. I feel badly that I won't get to write about it.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr [at] projo.com.