(but it was in a good cause)
Last night I became the owner (note that I didn’t say “the proud owner”) of a piece of Hollywood memorabilia.
Some guys pay tens of thousands for a Batmobile, or for an Italian Job Mini Cooper. Others shell out equally ludicrous sums for the privilege of having Captain Kirk’s chair (or some other piece of furniture from the USS Enterprise) in their front room. Me – I paid a little over a hundred quid for… Borat’s ‘Mankini’ (signed by the man himself, I hasten to add).
No, I won’t be wearing it (and trust me, I have had loads of requests). And no, I didn’t particularly want it either. But rather than looking at this as a crazy impulse purchase, I prefer to see it as a donation to charity – which, actually, is what it was. I bought it at ‘Bidding for Hope’ – a charity auction in aid of the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre.
The auction was organised by Dina Lazarus, a former workmate of mine. When I started at my current job, I was initially covering for Dina while she was off sick, having cancer treatment. When her sick leave ended, we both shared the job for a while. She decided she wanted to do something for the hospital where she’d had her treatment, and organised the auction with help from a few other people in the office.
Quite a few other showbizzy things went under the hammer at Foyles Gallery last night, including a day on the set of New Tricks, and Rod Stewart’s platinum disc for his Tonight I’m Yours album. For film buffs, there were a couple of autographed film posters: one of Black Swan (signed by Natalie Portman) and one of Never Let Me Go (signed by Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and the author of the book, Kazuo Ishiguro). For the more sporty bidders, there was a Nike tennis cap signed by John McEnroe, and a Tottenham shirt signed by the entire team. A £425 voucher for creative writing classes at the Faber Academy went for just under £300. If you’d rather be written about in a book than write one, you could have placed a bid to have the ‘chick lit’ author Freya North include you as a character in her next novel. I was tempted, but very quickly outbid – as opposed to when Lot #14 went under the hammer, and everybody mysteriously stopped bidding after the third bid… (which is how I ended up with you-know-what)
But hey, it was for a good cause. And even as I write, Mr. Baron Cohen is in LA somewhere, autographing the lime green undergarment which will soon be on its way to me. Altogether the auction raised £11,750 – £8,200 in sales of the auctioned items, and the rest in donations. Another small financial victory in the ongoing battle to kick cancer’s butt. Now, that can hardly be a bad thing…
…and no, I will NOT be posting any pictures of me wearing it. I’ve already said that a million times since last night…
POSTSCRIPT
Saturday 29 June 2013, 4.22pm
On Monday morning, we received the sad news that Dina passed away on Sunday. A handful of us from work attended the funeral on Tuesday afternoon.
In the last few months of her life, Dina would occasionally pop into the office. Now if you look at the comments at the end of this blog post, you’ll see that an old friend of Dina’s came across this post by chance (nearly two years after I wrote it!) and asked me to help her get back in touch with her again, which I did. The last time I saw Dina alive was the last time she popped into the office. She told me how this lady was an old friend of hers, and thanked me for helping her get back in touch with her. And those were the last words she said to me.
Rest easy, Dina. I only knew you for a short time, but that was long enough to see that you were a really loving, caring person.
GEORGE LUKE 