sport the stache

Tonight is the third night of WCNY's televised auction, our annual fundraiser that brings in 5% of our station's annual budget while also battering staff with its painfully late nights and unhealthy food choices (I've already had 2 Harrison Bakery donuts, 2 of Tom Murphy's homemade cookies and a handful of M&Ms). Seemingly composed people lose their patience and begin to nip. Everyone becomes aware how little liquor can be found. I find my husband fast asleep each night I return home and slip quietly into bed near 2 a.m. unable to fall fast asleep. TelAuc is a bitch.

To counter the malaise and irritability, I decided tonight to see if I could convince 7 adults to sport one of these "Self-Adhesive Stylish Mustaches." Consider it a social experiment exploring which staff will be most likely to sport the stache! Will it be the high-spirited CEO who already sports a real stache? Will it be the whacky producers or the witty art director or will I find telemarketers spilling out from behind the scenes dying to stick on a stylish stache of their very own? We'll see. Wish me luck... more soon!

Pheww - that was exhausting!

OK, a summary of the results of tonight's experiment:

The NOs: the accountant, the accountant's assistants, the art director (!), the vice president of television, the host of a late-night public affairs program, the entire membership department, the coordinator of volunteers and special events, the already-mustached people, the entire auction department, three salespeople.

The MAYBE LATERs: Surpisingly only one person placated me with this answer, and he was a producer, though one out of his element at the time he was asked and likely to have fallen into the YES category had he not been surrounded by strangers.

The WELL-OK YESes: one salesperson, who randomly took the Grandpa mustache and looked odder than most in the photos; and the producer who fittingly took the Weasel mustache but was never seen with it on.

The HELL YESes: The graphic designer sported the Bruiser mustache, though she looked more like a female Hitler; one salesperson who was ecstatic that the Hollywood mustache was still available and donned it in the blink of an eye; a cameraman who ran camera all night with his Hero mustache on; me, who taped the Sherriff mustache to my lip and looked freakishly like my father; surprise of the night: the gorgeous television reporter who exclaimed "I'm such a dork - I love this kind of thing!" and asked me to take her picture with the Square mustache on!

It's hard to draw a conclusion from these results. Some of the night's NOs have been known on occassion to wax whacky. Membership, for example, is letting me take actual mugshots of them for the next employee newsletter. The accountant entered his fixings into a recent chili cook-off with a giddy competetiveness. And a few of the HELL YESes could have easily gone NO had the night been a bit different for them. For example, the sales guy who nabbed up the Hollywood stache spends most nights working past nine and had I caught him on one of his defeated nights, he might have turned me away. So, this wasn't an experiment that definitively established who was fun and who was not, but rather who I caught in what moment and in what mood.

I guess the only real conclusion that I can come to is that on the third night of auction, with five more nights ahead and only two behind, 7 people were still having fun, or at least desperate enough to make some.

Here's a shot of the crew (I got someone to wear the Weasel afterall!):