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Blue Plate Special

August 16th, 2007 by Thompson Lange

For the first time in years I’ve seen the other side of midnight in New York and all it took was a gift bag, free dinner and the ultimate swag, a trophy. And luckily, this time I didn’t need to get nekid.

When Gifts and Decorative Accessories magazine gave us an award a few years ago for our promotional stuff (including that infamous fundraising calendar where Beau and I doffed our duds for a good cause), we had to sit through the mortification of seeing ourselves on the big screen in our discreetly-cropped birthday suits.

Last night at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, the video about our website had the equally mortifying moment of showing our primitive attempts at conquering the internet with our original website.

Don’t get me wrong, at the time we were proud of it. But website design has come along way since the stone ages of the 90’s so when they were talking about how innovative we are, but showing the old site, both Keri and I blanched and flushed. Luckily, though they got to the new site before we could stand up, wave our hands over our heads and yell, “No, no…that’s not it!!!”

Still, they said some very nice things about Keri’s hard work in both the magazine article and in the video, and last night they gave her the recognition that she really, really deserves and I’m proud of her.

She deserves an award for not killing me, too, while we’ve rebuilt and relaunched the site. (I’m pretty picky for a guy who doesn’t know his way around a computer.)

So last night we got to let our hair done and have a good time at both the dinner and afterwards. Our table-mates were fun and interesting (which isn’t always a given at a banquet) and we ran into some partners in crime from the Dallas awards night of mayhem a few years back.

And we’ve lived to tell the tale and shop another day. I’m off to the trenches of the Gift Show to find what I can find, but when I can get Keri to wake up I’ll have her add her spin (and photos).

Thompson Lange

So I slept a little longer than I expected…

And when I woke up, I was back in Rhode Island with over 250 photos to assimilate and organize and prepare into a video spectacular!

panorama of the patio at Tavern on the Green
where the 90th Annual Retail Excellence Awards took place
Sunday August 12, 2007.

Or maybe it was all a dream? Sometimes it’s just hard to tell.
We have their version of the night and OUR version of the night here on the site. Theirs is straightforward, ours, well.

So notes on our video:
The night of the Awards Ceremony, one of the hosts made us pick from four songs which was to be the introductory song of the categories. Of course, the Beatles “beat” ‘em all. I mean - it’s the BEATLES. Who can resist their simple elegance?

And as for some of the visuals:
In my circle we use a lotta different slang for money; mostly because we never have any. For those of you that do not suffer this tragedy and therefore just refer to money as, well.. money, here’s the rundown: cabbage, dough, cash, love, buck(s), clams, bones, green, spinach: all of these terms reference money, and there are plenty more. The Sasquatch was just for fun. Enjoy! I did.

Keri Marion