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Big Surprise in Crate & Barrel Catalog
Don't throw out that new Crate & Barrel catalog! There's something fun in it that totally slipped past the eyes of any executives who approved it before it was published. You have to look closely, but one photo of a home office contains the following written on a dry erase board: "dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326."
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Marc is real. It's not a joke. Marc Horowitz, a San Francisco bachelor and performance artist who worked on the catalog as an assistant photo editor, snuck his phone number in there as a joke. Although Crate & Barrel granted its permission for the phone number to be written on the board, the C&B suits didn't know it was a real number. "Everybody just thought it was hilarious at the time, and so we did it," Horowitz told WTOP News in Washington, D.C. "And it made it into the catalog." That would be 1 million catalogs to be exact. He admitted to the D.C. radio station that he thought he would get about 15 calls. Right now, it's 3,000 calls and counting. "I had no idea that it was going to be to this extent," he confessed.
See a photo of Marc Horowitz. This shot show how this man thinks and acts differently than your average Joe.
So far, 70 of the callers have actually had dinner with Horowitz. Now he's planning to take a coast-to-coast trip to meet the people who are calling him. What started out as a ploy to get a date has turned into something quite different. Horowitz is meeting America on what he has dubbed the National Dinner Tour II. "I'm meeting with a gay couple in Arizona," he told WTOP. "I'm meeting with married families, I'm meeting with people with disabilities. I think it's kind of going to gain a snapshot of America through these people." He said he hopes others follow his lead and spend time with strangers. What does Crate & Barrel think of it? A spokeswoman told Crain's Chicago Business, "Fortunately, we all have a sense of humor. "I'd say he owes us all dinner."
It's easy to laugh when you read these funny (and real!) signs.