May 11, 2009, 10:37 AM by Jean Bentley Poor Annie Duke.
All season the momentum’s been building to a Joan Rivers victory, and Annie surely saw it coming. Or maybe not: Just take a look at the chart Jim Cramer provided us with last night. Annie had more victories (7 to Joan’s 6), more wins as project manager (2 to Joan’s 1 win/1 loss), and she raised the most money for charity. She’s ”a brilliant strategist” and ”all about business,” but apparently that’s not enough to compete with Joan, who’s ”all heart.” When it comes to numbers and playing the game, Annie won. But she must’ve missed the day when the competition went from ”finding the best businessperson” to ”finding the most loyal friend.” Last night on Donald Trump’s My New BFF, the final challenge was to throw a silent auction combining the branding power of Kodak’s EasyShare digital picture frame, Cirque du Soleil’s Wintuk show, and the contestants’ charities of choice. Annie picked Brande, Dennis, and Tom to be her helpers, and Joan picked Herschel, Clint (really), and Melissa. The teams were charged with ”doing silent auctions of THINGS. You’re gonna get people to donate THINGS.” No further explanation on what these THINGS were, other than the fact that the Donald’s inflection really emphasized them. (Each team correctly assumed ”THINGS” meant ”fun celebrity-driven packages for people to bid on.”) They’d be graded on five criteria: the amount of money raised, the Kodak product integration, the charity integration, the celebrities in attendance, and the overall guest experience. On Team Annie, the personalities didn’t seem to mesh well. Brande and Annie worked well together, as was expected. Dennis seemed reluctant to participate at first (though when does he ever seem committed), but soon brought in $20,000 cash courtesy of the Detroit Pistons and the L.A. Lakers. Tom had good intentions, but his laid-back, jokey style served to piss off ”All Work, No Play” Annie rather than calm her down. As Tom said, ”I don’t know if that style, being that acerbic with people, would work that well in the real world necessarily. I think everyone would quit.” For the actual auction site, two event planners from the same firm were hired to design the spaces — one to each team. Annie got along fine with her planner, Nicole, and devised a pretty-sounding design with ice sculptures and soothing colors. Joan’s planner, David, however, seemed douchey from the start. Putting aside the fact that he resembled Jason Bateman doing an impression of a designer so I couldn’t take him seriously, this guy seemed to be a major tool and was continually shown spouting buzzwords instead of coming up with an actual plan. When he called Joan later on and all she could say was ”blech” and ”eeuugh” instead of being happy with his boring-sounding idea for the room, maybe he should’ve asked Joan to come up with specific things she wanted instead of her vague-sounding ideas. Eventually, Joan told David she wanted to bring in one of her designer friends for him to work with, and he got so offended that he called her back and quit. In all fairness, I don’t think Joan treated him badly, but she didn’t actually vocalize anything that would’ve helped him understand exactly what she wanted. As the owner of a design firm, you’d think David had worked with a couple of clients like that before and he’d know how to pull the information he needed out of them. Instead, he got huffy and quit, and, as the owner of the firm, made Annie’s planner quit too. Of course, he did this the really classy way and didn’t have her call Annie to explain the problem, instead choosing to ignore her calls, have his assistant push away the cameras when they came to his office to sign some contracts, and only told Annie what was happening in a pow-wow off camera. Annie, understandably, was pissed, since she had less than 12 hours to pull together an auction space from scratch and it was already after 5:00 on a Friday night. She frantically called everyone she knew to find people who could help her put together a room, and eventually assembled a team of three people who helped her create the ”classy” space she wanted. Joan decided to call the men of her charity, God’s Love We Deliver (”They’re wonderful, they’re terrific, they’re artistic, and they’re gay.”), who then enlisted their events team to create a fun, welcoming space.
Aside from the usual last-minute frantic scramble to finish everything, the events seemed to go off without any major issues. A Joan Rivers impersonator (Joan’s team) and Dennis Rodman in drag (Annie’s team) greeted guests on the red carpet. While Annie was able to attract her famous pokah playah friends (they are loyal and they did pull through for her), famous boxers (including Joe Frazier), and famous (not in the past 15 years, so debatable) ice skater Oksana Baiul, Joan pulled in actual names like Kyle MacLachlan, Kathy Griffin, and various Broadway stars (the cast of Chicago, Tony nominee/American Idol finalist Constantine Maroulis). Joan’s charity was very involved behind the scenes assembling the auction space, but Annie’s charity, Refugees International, was featured prominently throughout the space. Joan went for an obvious Kodak branding scheme, having guests walk through a gigantic frame to get inside, while Annie went for a more subtle approach, playing Refugees International videos on the Kodak frames.