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| illustration by Chris Gash |
Our foray into carnie capitalism started in 1997 on Bondi Beach, near Sydney, Australia, and ended with me lying in bed, covered in hundreds of lottery tickets, screaming at the TV.
To begin, Lulirama. This was a company I owned with two partners. We specialized in putting small toys—think Cracker Jack prizes—into packs of Frito-Lay chips worldwide. The company, named for my German shepherd, Luli, did quite well, operating in some 40 countries and grossing nearly $30 million in our best year. Our logo, a cross between the actual dog and Marmaduke, became known in promotional circles throughout the world.
Back to Bondi. As we sat barefoot on the sand, enjoying a beer, my Australian partner said, “Y’know what would go good in the States? Show bags!” If only a tsunami had hit at that moment and kept me from asking what a show bag was. “In Australia, we have these shows, agricultural shows. The farmers bring their best livestock, and the wives put up their best jams and jellies, and there are carnival rides and games.”
“I believe we have something like that in Dallas every October,” I replied.
“Well,” he said, “they sell bags of products at these shows, done it myself. You buy up a bunch of closeouts from Chinese factories and put them in bags with themes—sports, boys, girls, Halloween, etc. It’s all cheap crap, but there’s lots of it, 10, 12 bucks worth of stuff for a dollar or two. With our China connections, we can make a fortune.”
Thus the State Fair Show Bag was born. Never mind that the beach conversation took place in May and there was no time to buy and ship goods from China. “This is a test market, so we should expect to lose money.” Ah, yes, the wildly understated mantra at the center of this fiasco.
Still, and the only thing I’ll offer in our defense: there really was no other way to test this proposition but to do it. And since two of the three partners lived in Dallas, the State Fair was the logical place to see if the concept would work in the United States. Decision made, we turned to renting space, building our booth, buying merchandise, and staffing up.
Turns out, you don’t just pop over to the Fair and rent space. There are long waiting lists. Sometimes leases are passed from generation to generation. But, mostly through the intercession of my good friend, uber-publicist Carol Reed, we had the misfortune to be granted a prime location just on the Midway side of the Automobile Building. The $4,000 rent was about the only thing we didn’t overspend on.
Beginning with the booth itself. Our vision was to make as much of a splash as possible, and we created something that stood out even against the visual and aural cacophony of the Fair—bright colors, our own music, and three selling counters, each featuring a window display crammed with merchandise and festooned with blinking chase lights and banners. No one who came near could miss it. The booth was fabricated and lit by Dallas-based Syncrolite, a leading designer of traveling shows, from Kenny Chesney to Madonna, and lighting installations from the St. Louis Arch to the Pyramids. None of us, including Jack Calmes, Syncrolite’s owner, can remember what it cost, but this was a test market, so we should expect to lose money.
My assistant, Kathy Kucera Miller, was in charge of personnel. Kathy brought on Patsy Sale Bond, a former Shreveport debutante, as a sort of straw boss. The way Bond put it, Kathy staffed the booth with convicts and Hockadaisies. Certainly, she hired family members and many friends and acquaintances acquired during a lifetime of active combat on the Dallas social scene. To these she added workers obtained through the employment office at the Fair, and the curious blend of day laborers and Parkies got along surprisingly well. Convicts? An exaggeration, but a couple of parole officers did make regular visits, corny dogs in hand, to observe their clients at work.
Since there wasn’t time to import our goods from China, even at wholesale prices, much less as closeouts, I did lots of shopping along Harry Hines, paying less than retail but at least triple what the stuff would have cost had we shown a little sanity and waited a year. But this was a test market, so we should expect to lose money. Next, we hired a warehouse and crews to stuff the specially printed bags.
Which brings us to Coyote Ned and the Luli Suit. I had just produced a CD called Blues for Kids, featuring the talented composer and singer Coyote Ned McDonald. It seemed logical that if we got him a gig at the Fair, we could cross-promote, with Ned plugging the booth at his shows and us selling the CD at the booth. We booked him for six shows a day on the patio of the Old Mill Inn, near the booth. He worked for free, which is to say, he was paid by Lulirama, but this was a test market, etc.
“The eyebrow.” It’s a term used by comedy writers, a metaphoric extension of a vaudeville bit in which a woman pencils one eyebrow, tries to even it up by extending the other eyebrow, then back and forth until she has made a total mess, smearing color all over her face.
Lengthening the other eyebrow, we invested about 10 grand in an NBA-quality mascot suit. How better to call attention to the Lulirama brand than to have a 6-foot-tall embodiment of Luli strolling the Midway, appearing onstage with Ned and “barking”? Well, Luli couldn’t actually be heard under all that fake fur, but the handlers who kept him from bumping into things provided a steady stream of carnie patter.
The inaugural deployment of the Luli suit was undertaken by Kathy’s son, Henry S. Miller IV, in a trial run in the air-conditioned comfort of NorthPark. Henry actually wore it at the Fair a couple of times, but this extremely tough job was mostly undertaken by a team of young men hired specifically for their endurance. It was unusually hot that October, so we had to keep Luli’s shifts short and provide lots of salt tablets, Gatorade, and hazard pay. One of the actors, a kid named Fred, proved to be particularly dedicated and, when he worked at the booth, was a singularly talented barker. Ned described it as a yodel. It sounded something like: “Gidushowbayee, shobaay, shobaay, gdushowbayhee!”
In one bizarre incident, a drunk approached Fred-as-Luli and punched him in his furry face. The encounter was brief but spirited. Fred’s handler cold-cocked the guy, and two cops who happened to witness the event hauled him off to the pokey.
For all the effort, we sold precious few bags, taking in maybe $300 a day. An essential element of a test market is pricing, so we were constantly adjusting. Sometimes you sell more when you charge more. The merchandise alone cost us about $6 per bag, but, hey, this was a test market, etc. Nothing worked. One little girl approached the booth, glanced at the bags, and said, “Three dollars? Are you kidding?” I chased her down the Midway, thrust the bag into her hand, and bellowed, “Take it for free! Just tell me if you think $3 is too much or too little!” The kid’s father grabbed the bag and handed it back to me, then put his arm protectively around his daughter and marched her away.
Toward the end, I began taking each day’s receipts and spending the money on lottery tickets.
Our conclusion: in America, people go to fairs to see cars, play games, and eat stuff that’s bad for them. The only trinkets they want are the ones they win, and they certainly don’t want to schlep bags around. According to our best guess, it cost about $200,000 to obtain this information.
At Christmas that year, our clients received cards announcing that we had given 60 skids of toys to Toys For Tots, at least a million small toys. A Marine colonel told me that this was the biggest gift in the history of the program.
And, oh yeah. At the end, I had all those lottery tickets I’d been buying each day. On the night of the drawing, I am lying in bed with hundreds of them. The prize is something like $70 million. The balls drop. The first ticket I pick up matches five out of the six numbers. I reason that this has got to be worth enough to make up our losses and present myself at the lottery office on Monday morning. The reality: about $1,500.
The IRS sent me a tax bill for the winnings.
