Style Conversational Week 1127: Everyone wants to hang with the Losers
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Notes from the 20th Flushies awards and sillifest

President Obama, looking younger and even slimmer than usual, greets Loserdom at the Flushies: Clockwise from top left: Ann Martin; the Empress and Melissa Yorks; security detail Dave Prevar; Todd DeLap; Mae Scanlan; Dave Zarrow. (Photos by Mark Holt; collage by Valerie Holt)
By Pat MyersJune 4, 2015
A tall, lean but somewhat stiff and, let it be said, rather shallow figure greeted guests Saturday afternoon just inside the front door of Chez Danielle Nowlin in Suburbia, Va. But setting politics aside (and nearly tipping it over), close to 60 Style Invitational Losers and various handlers and orderlies took over the house of last year’s Loser and Rookie of the Year for the 20th annual Flushies award “banquet,” failing to cause more damage than whatever a mis-tossed roll of toilet paper can do to a blank wall.

The 19 previous Flushies — except for one ill-fated assembly in a public park — were held in either restaurants or hotel meeting rooms, some more appealing than others, but all of them requiring the organizers to haggle over room reservations, beg for permission to play music, guarantee a minimum or maximum number of attendees, dicker over food options and charges, etc., etc, etc.

But near the end of the 2014 gathering in an undistinguished room at the College Park Holiday Inn (motto: We Kind of Share a Parking Lot With Ikea), Ms. Nowlin — flush with victory and perhaps a little celebratory wine — approached the Empress and said, “You know, Ryan and I just bought a big new house, and we could host the Flushies next year. If you like.”

ADVERTISING

Yeah, we would like.

And even though Danielle would somewhat misplace priorities and dial back her Losing over the next year, getting less ink because of the distraction of a new baby this past January (she and Ryan now have three children age 5 and under), she made good on her offer, resulting in perhaps the most enjoyable Flushies I’ve been to — and I think I’ve now been to 13 of them.

The Nowlins cleared away the furniture in their spacious living and dining rooms and let Elden Carnahan and his fellow Flushies organizers bring in tables and chairs for the potluck lunch, then set up an ad hoc auditorium for the afternoon’s program of awards, song parodies, and a PowerPoint “Leopardy” game devised by emcee Kyle Hendrickson, the current holder of the Most Cantinkerous plaque, for having the most blots of ink (83) without ever having won first prize.


The attendance by three Losers in particular made the event especially memorable, and each of them was lauded with a custom-written song, each written in part by parody ace Nan Reiner:

First up was the return of Mae Scanlan to in-the-flesh Loserdom after a nasty hospitalization caused her to miss the holiday party in January. For that occasion, Loser Melissa Balmain and Nan penned a rallying pep cheer to Mae’s new pacemaker, set to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” and those at the party sang it into a camera and sent it off to Mae. It cheered her up so much, Mae said, that she asked for an encore at the Flushies. We happily obliged, with Loser Pianist Steve Honley once again handling keyboard duties.

It was my turn, and pleasure, to induct Beverley Sharp as the 10th member of the Style Invitational Hall of Fame; she passed the magic 500-blot mark in February. Beverley and her husband, Dick Amberg, drove up from Montgomery, Ala., to be with us (and to visit others afterward) — and even passed up the invitation to the farewell reunion for her alma mater, the soon-to-close Sweet Briar College, the same day. The crowd laughed heartily at the dozen or so jokes I read from Beverley’s Hall of Fame swag, the booklet comprising all 500 inking entries (a surprising number of them concerning dog poop), and then we joined in with “Wouldn’t It Be Beverley,” written by Brendan Beary and Nan. Hugs ensued.


Have you noticed what’s missing from this event? Snark. The sharply caustic wit that characterizes so many Invite entries is put away for the day — at least toward one another. It’s a bit of a secret, but even the most acerbic Losers tend to be teddy bears in person.

Then there were the awards for Rookie of the Year — Todd DeLap, at his first Loser event; Most Imporved — Jeff Shirley, who wasn’t able to come up from Richmond; and Least Imporved, to Danielle herself; the annual milestone awards of tossed toilet paper rolls for those who’d reached 50 blots, 100 blots, etc.; and finally for Loser of the Year Frank Osen, the Loser poet turned jokester-of-all-trades, who’d flown in from California and boy were his iambs tired. And Frank was serenaded with — what else — “Little Old Loser From Pasadena.”

That wasn’t all the singing: Dave Zarrow and Dave Ferry (visiting from Mississippi) made a partial reunion of the Dueling Loser Band, which played at many an early-years Flushies, and sang several classic-rock parodies with keyboard and guitar, such as “Hotel Where the Brunch Is,” to “Hotel California” (which the Loser crowd sang along with perfectly), and “One Inkblot,” set to the Wallflowers’ “One Headlight” (a little less perfectly). The latter is about managing to score ink in all 23 years of the Invite — something Le Zarrow himself has done, along with several others in the room on Saturday: fellow Hardy Perennials Chuck Smith, Elden Carnahan and Stephen Dudzik, Hall of Famers all.

Kyle, known as Loserfest Pope for the elaborate weekend field trips he used to arrange (and says he may again), recruited three eager and able Losers to play his “Leopardy” game: parody master Matt Monitto (who’d driven all the way down from Connecticut), Latin teacher Ann Martin, and librarian Deborah Hensley, spouse of the Invite-ubiquitous Kevin Dopart. The categories in Single Leopardy: L, O, S, E, R. The categories in Double Leopardy: LL, OO, SS, EE, RR. The Final Leopardy answer: I forget. (I also don’t remember who won.) Not only did Kyle put up your standard trivia questions, but some “answers” required the contestants to act out an abstract word charades-style or to draw it on a whiteboard, using a marker embedded in a giant pool noodle. The whole thing would have flopped like a belly hitting pool water if not for the remarkable talents of both the contestants and the guessing audience. But it rocked.


Finally, Queen of the Door Prizes Pie Snelson called out the ticket numbers, distributing everything from bacon-flavored lip balm to an artificial nose. But Barack Obama rode back in the car with the Empress and the Royal Consort, for future delivery somehow to Brendan Beary, who’d won him in Week 1120.

The Flushies are over for another year (hey, someone else with a house, we’re waiting to hear from you about 2016!) but Loser events continue: This very weekend will be Sarah Gaymon’s Loser Olympics at her home out in Anne Arundel County, and the monthly Loser Brunches resume on Sunday, June 28, at Chadwicks in Old Town Alexandria, near the river, time TBA. As always, we’re always eager to greet new Losers and even just fans of the Invite at the brunches, as well as reconnect with the old-timers. RSVP to Elden here. (I should be able to come to Chadwicks.)

Alternative Reality: The Week 1127 contest
This week’s new contest was suggested by Jeff Contompasis on the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook page, and his example was so good that I just lifted it into the Invite. One reason it works so well: It doesn’t concern arcane details of the series; a reader who isn’t very familiar with the show can get the idea right from the joke. In fact, I’ve never watched “Say Yes to the Dress.”


Note that you may use old TV shows as well as current ones (handy for those of us whose TV viewing has waned), and of course, funny writing will probably be the key to ink.

Rack/tile dysfunction*: The ScrabbleGrams neologisms of Week 1123
*A non-inking entry from Beverley Sharp

The Tile Invitational III happened to feature ScrabbleGrams racks that were designed to yield real seven-letter words, while the previous two installments of this contest used the ones that were supposed to have six-letter words. This made no difference whatsoever in the quality or quantity of entries; we had lots of both in Week 1123.

Once again, the task of judging was made immeasurably easier by the sorting program devised and run by Loser Jonathan Hardis, which grouped all the entries by tile set, and also removed all the material in the e-mails that wasn’t part of an entry — a task I usually do manually every week. Almost all of the 200-odd entrants followed my direction to include the tile set at the beginning of the entry, and not to insert a line break within an entry (so it wouldn’t break apart in the middle during the sorting process). I think Jonathan or I rescued the violators (e.g., someone who used the letter set as a subhead, then followed it by three separate entries using that letter set), but if I didn’t, I’m not feeling any guilt about it.


As usual, I didn’t look up the winners’ names until this past Tuesday, when I was fitting them onto the Invite page; otherwise I’d see how you’d think I was giving a five-ink thank-you note to Danielle Nowlin. And as always, it was exciting to find that a First Offender had written the winning entry; in fact, as far as I can tell, it was Ricardo Rodriguez’s first Invite entry ever. There were a number of entries coining the term “Filefry,” but Ricardo’s was the only one to play on two meanings of “bug.” Ric wins a FirStink for his first ink, along with the Inkin’ Memorial bobblehead, but he’ll have to keep entering if he wants to be a Loser. I sure hope he will.

The runners-up, on the other hand, are well-known names to both Invite readers and the Style Invitational Devotees (who are not, I’ve found, entirely overlapping groups): Jeff Shirley continues his recent squatting in the Losers’ Circle, while Dion Black, who’s entered intermittently in the past couple of years, blots up Ink No. 56, and his seventh “above the fold.” And Jeff Contompasis continues his inexorable march toward becoming the next Hall of Fame member as he nears 450 ink-spatters, almost all of it in the past seven or eight years.

Another well-known Loser name among this week’s ink-blotters, but it’s a different generation: Adam Beland, the young-adult younger son of Russell, of the 1,500-plus inks (and, if a recent Facebook photo is any indication, the spitting image of his father). Adam himself has 11 blots of ink, but most were joint entries with Dad. Bring it on, Adam — you might end up with one of the odd prizes that Russ donated years and years ago but I’ve never given out, like the Alexander the Great action figure.


What Doug dug: Ace copy editor Doug Norwood reports that he “loved the example for the next contest, plus ‘glopess’ [Jeff Contompasis] and both ‘manlace’ definitions, but especially the tattered underwear [Jeff Shirley]. ‘Cellosy’ [also Jeff S.] was clever and ‘ratboil’ [Barry Koch] too.”

The deposed Czar of the Style Invitational also weighed in this week, noting that he literally laughed out loud at “glopess,” “ratboil” and Danielle Nowlin’s “penism.”

Better re-scramble those — the unprintables: Just a couple this week, and they’re not shockers:
ACDILOR => Dicrol: A frankfurter bun (William Kennard)
and HILSTXY=> Lixshyt: The scientific name for a fly (Bird Waring)


Caption contests, continued
As our Week 1126 Bob Staake contest continues, here’s a follow-up to my comments last week on The New Yorker’s contest: I noted that Gene Weingarten had interviewed TNY’s cartoon editor and contest honcho, Bob Mankoff, about duplication of entries, given that thousands of people are writing captions for a single cartoon. Here’s Gene’s latest Below the Beltway column, in which he reveals that his own entry was virtually identical to one of the three finalists. Which counted for bupkis.

Sure, go ahead and enter that contest, people. But the Invite is a lot more benevolent.