Snuggie Fest

Let’s start from the beginning.

Like the rest of you, our lives were enriched in a special way this past winter. First came the strangely captivating commercial.  Blankets are okay, but they can slip and slide. Damn straight.  You were intrigued.  That pleasant elderly man eating his bowl of popcorn sealed the deal.  You had to have it.   You scrambled out from under your crummy blanket, grabbed the telephone and dialed the number.  A mere ten days later, you were the proud owner of a Snuggie.

When it arrived, you opened the box, removed your very own personal piece of fluffy heaven and put it on.  It felt…. right.  It was even better than the commercial promised.  Wow.

Within a short time you discovered that you were not alone.  Your friends and neighbors were Snugging too.  The movement began slowly, stayed underground at first, but quickly gathered steam.  Soon there was no containing it.  First there were intimate Snuggie gatherings.  Then Snuggie fan clubs began to crop up.  Snuggies were being sighted everywhere!  Then came the celebrity endorsements.  Liftoff!  Snuggies had infiltrated pop culture.   Within weeks, a full-blown social phenomenon was underway.  Snuggie Nation was born.

One day in mid February, with the country in the firm but luxurious grip of Snuggie Mania, the founding members of the Snuggie Fan Club of Greater New York (“SFCGNY”) donned their Snuggies and held a meeting at an East Village bar.  The topic: how to create an event that would allow scores of Snuggie devotees to meet, share their common passion, and get very drunk.  The answer was obvious:  a Snuggie bar crawl.

It only took a few minutes of reconnaissance for SFCGNY to make the happy discovery that a group in Chicago was already one step ahead of them:  a Snuggie bar crawl was already planned in the Second City, and the Chicago guys had even set up a website.  Snugtastic!  The Chicago guys were presumed to be similar to the kind folks of the SFCGNY, i.e, fun-loving, light-hearted Snuggie fans who simply wanted to have some Snuggie fun with others. Giddy with excitement, SFCGNY contacted the Chicago guys by email on February 18th to explore the possibility of joining forces.

The deceptively friendly reply came back immediately, quoted here in full:

We welcome all Snuggie fellows with open arms (thank god the Snuggie allows us to do that, it does have arms). We have already initiated a [web address omitted] link. Feel free to pass the word. In addition, we completely welcome your assistance.

The Chicago guys duly added a page to their website advertising an upcoming NYC Snuggie bar crawl and inviting interested parties to submit their email addresses for the purpose of receiving official invites.  Predictably, the response was very positive.  Thousands of NYC area Snuggie fans found the website and requested invites.  Numerous local media outlets took notice as word of the upcoming event hit the streets.  SFCGNY had been led to believe that they would be in charge of the behind-the-scenes organization of the NYC event and were content to leave the advertising and promotion to the Chicago guys.  A vision of a massive multi-city Snuggie celebration was about to become reality!

Or was it?

As SFCGNY began doing preliminary planning for the NYC Snuggie bar crawl, the Chicago guys were concocting nefarious plans of their own.  Per their prior conversation, SFCGNY contacted the Chicago guys to coordinate, but there was no reply.  A few days passed, and again SFCGNY contacted Chicago.  Still no word back.  Another week passed; more emails were sent. Not even the courtesy of a reply.  Finally, after around three weeks of suspicious Chicago silence, SFCGNY gave up on a coordinated event and decided to go it alone.  SFCGNY picked April 11th as the date, chose Snuggie Fest as the bar crawl’s name, and the event was posted on Facebook.  The response was positive and planning for Snuggie Fest ’09 began in earnest.

Wednesday March 25th, 2009 is a tragic date in Snuggieland.  It was on that day that SFCGNY received a strange email from a NYC-based “Event Coordinator,” who announced that she was affiliated with the Chicago guys.   She explained that the Chicago guys’ bar crawl would be taking place in New York on April 18th, and she suggested that SFCGNY cancel Snuggie Fest in a show of solidarity.  Huh?!

It required only a bit more reconnasaince for SFCGNY to discover the sad truth about what had been going on in Chicago.  Since they were last heard from, the Chicago guys had formed a corporation (!), contracted with sponsors (!!) and were selling tickets for their Chicago bar crawl at $20 a pop (!!!).  Also, they had pulled the same disappearing act with Snuggie fans in San Francisco.  And now they were trying to bring their lame $20 shyster bar crawl to New York.

No.

Incensed by the Chicago guys’ slimy opportunism, SFCGNY responded to their NYC-based agent to roundly reject her proposal, telling her (in polite terms) that can can shove her April 18th event up under her Snuggie (in the unlikely event that she even owned one).  SFCGNY wants no part of the Chicago guys’ pathetic attempt to parlay Snuggie Mania into their personal cottage industry.

To the best of our knowledge, Chicago has never done a single thing better than New York, and that’s not about to change.  A couple of dorks with an amateur business plan might be able to trick Chicagoans into paying twenty bucks for the privilege of showing up in a public place, but that sort of thing ain’t gonna fly here in New York.

So on a day that will forever live in Snug-infamy, Snuggie War was officially declared by SFCGNY on Thursday, March 26th 2009.  On that date, the website you are currently reading was hastily created and SFCGNY began its PR campaign.  SFCGNY realizes that it is the underdog in this battle.  Those sneaky Chicago guys received all the initial press and have a hijacked an email list with thousands of your addresses on it.  But we’re not going down without a fight!

In the name of friendship, common decency and hands free blanketed comfort, we implore you—the true Snuggie fans of the greater New York City area—to pass on Chicago’s latest racket and to join us on April 11th for Snuggie Fest 2009.

Sincerely,

David Zeitlin

Vice Chairman
Snuggie Fan Club of Greater New York