PRESS
Warning: 'dinner w/marc' is all for art
Monday, October 18, 2004
By EUNNIE PARK
STAFF WRITER
Marc Horowitz is doing a book about the response to his catalog prank.
If you're still waiting to hear back from Jenny at 867-5309, you might have better luck with this one: Marc at (510) 872-7326.
The name is real and so is the number, which belongs to Marc Horowitz, a 28-year-old artist from San Francisco. While working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel, Horowitz wrote "dinner w/marc" followed by his personal number on a dry-erase board. It appears on Page 89 of the fall catalog.
Since the issue went out in August, more than 3,000 people have called, primarily female. The result: Horowitz hitting the road for a dinner tour scheduled to begin in January and run through March. So far, Horowitz has committed to about 70 dinners in 48 states. (He's also received thousands of e-mails via his Web site, slivanddulet.com/marc.)
The tour may sound a bit sketchy, but Horowitz's intentions are pure. It's an art project - a social sculpture of sort - and the food he and his acquaintances eat and their conversations will culminate in a book and a feature documentary.
His dinner companions get to participate in this creation and experience a break from the generic life exemplified by the Crate & Barrel catalog.
"I'm taking people away from that commercial experience of looking and shopping in a catalog and offering them an alternative," said Horowitz. "A non-commercial, non-profit exchange, where we're just sharing conversation."
Among the thousands who reached out to Horowitz is Christine O'Donnell, a 31-year-old attorney from Fair Lawn. She found out about Horowitz through the Internet and decided to write him when she realized that he did not have any dates planned in the Garden State.
"I'm a lifelong New Jersey resident, and I've always known us to be very hospitable people," she said. "So I decided to jump in and invite him to dinner, not knowing anything about it other than that it sounded fun."
Asking a stranger to dinner is out of her character, she said. Sure, he could have been a total weirdo, but she relied on the catalog's upscale reputation to speak for Horowitz's character.
"He had a Web site, which isn't necessarily protection against being sketchy, but I figured if he worked for Crate & Barrel, he was not very sketchy," she said.
Horowitz's stunt follows a tradition of infamous phone numbers. Since Tommy Tutone's hit song, "Jenny (867-5309)," which spurred endless crank calls, there was also last year's "Bruce Almighty." The film originally used a phone number for God without the conventional prefix, 555, for fictitious numbers in movies and TV. As a result, several people and businesses with that number around the country were bombarded with calls asking for God.
So far, the response has been very positive, Horowitz said. The dinner tour has also attracted a lot of media attention; he's been featured on several morning shows, and received a few deals for books and movies.
Mixed reaction came from the folks at Crate & Barrel. The president requested that Horowitz remove the company logo from his Web site for "copyright issues," but company execs don't seem to hate him, he says.
Despite the obvious implications, Horowitz wanted to stress that he has no romantic intentions about these dinners. He has a girlfriend (who is supportive of the dinner tour) and is not looking to date anyone through this project.
But there have been a few instances where people got the wrong idea.
"Sometimes I do kind of have to say, 'It's not a date - I want to make sure you know that,'&Mac217;" he says. "It's kind of funny that somebody would call a number in a catalog and think that they can date the guy. It's a pretty obscure concept."
E-mail: parke@northjersey.com
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