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“Win a Dream Date With Aug,” first of a 3 part series…

Rumors of my demise have been slightly exaggerated. If you look closely at the dates on my road diary, you will notice the last entry was made somewhere in ‘05. My lack of correspondence has nothing to do with lack of actual activity, simply an inability to sit at this machine and notate it all. Since that last entry, I’ve moved to New York (city as well as state), signed with an agent, shot two television shows (keep your eyes on Comedy Central), had sex with a porn star and attended my ex-girlfriends wedding with a blind date. Each of these events individually are worth an entry, but today we will be concentrating on the wedding of my ex-girlfriend. You have been warned.

The catalyst of the majority of my comedy has always been current events; there are many reasons for this. When you write a joke about Congress trying to change the constitution so an enormous Austrian bodybuilder can become president, you are dealing with relatively virgin territory . When you write a joke about the differences between men and women, the ground is not only not virgin, it is in fact the equivalent an elderly crack whore that started in porn in her pre-teen years and who could no longer get the pleasure she needed from typical old multiple penetration scenes, so she had to sell herself into sexual slavery in Thailand in order to experiment with the stuff she really wanted to get into. Artists have been commenting on relationships since the first organisms crawled from the primordial ooze, so what do I have to offer to the discussion? That being said, a guy like John Grey can still become a household name as late as the 1990’s by making the groundbreaking statement, “men and women are different.” This proves we are still looking for someone to bring something new to the table, no matter how incredibly obvious, to answer the ancient question, “how do we get and stay together?” So, being your fearless leader, I shall weigh in on the issue:

My breakup with Edie was actually quite amicable; many breakups are not. I ran into a great example of a bad breakup while working in Louisville last year between a radio DJ named John Zigler and a television host named Darcy Divita. It seems Mr. Zigler and Ms. Divita had been on a dozen dates, which Ms. Divita decided was a nice, even number. Mr. Zigler did not take the rejection well and went on the air to shout his feelings to the world, or at least to Louisville proper, that Ms. Divita didn’t wear underwear, has breast implants and was “well kept down there.” Despite the compliment, Ms. Divita took umbrage and sued Mr. Zigler for two million dollars. “Defamation of character,” she clamed. Mr. Zigler countered it was not slander, because it was complete truth. In other words, he intended to prove, in court, that Darcy Divita shaved her pussy. U.S.A!! U.S.A!!

The problem is all this happened two years before the trial, so I would imagine Ms. Divita is probably in disguise by now, like a fugitive forced to grow a beard to avoid recognition. Or maybe she went all Scott Peterson and died it blonde. Either way, the FBI may have to create one of those computer generated time lapse photos they use for missing kids. You know, a “this is what the pussy would look like today.”

Ever since the trial, whenever I see a TV newswoman I think about her vagina and wonder how she keeps it. I imagine Connie Chung sports the Divita, Katie Couric probably has the partial Divita, Barbra Walters the anti-Divita, with all that long grey pubic hair, her vagina probably looks like Einstein’s head.

But I digress. About a year after my breakup with Edie, she announced she was getting married. Since we were still friends, she sent me an invitation that read, “Auggie + 1.” I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to explore the nature of new relationships and announced, on The Bob & Tom Radio Show, the contest, “Win a date to my ex-girlfriends wedding.” Like most things in my life, I did not think this out. The prize that was being offered was a free trip to Portland, Oregon and of course a chance to accompany me to Edie’s wedding, therefore creating the most awkward first date possible.

I set up a website and waited for the entries to trickle in. I assumed that out of the four million or so Bob & Tom listeners, maybe twenty women would be interested. I received over two hundred submissions (U.S.A!! U.S.A!!). Now, I know a lot of you have a fairly grandiose view of Team Aug and how the funny comes to be. I’m sure you imagine a compound, set on a property deep in the mountains, or perhaps a giant bubble, deep under the ocean, complete with dozens of employees constantly bustling with the every day activity of creating setups, punch lines and sight gags. In reality, Team Aug is on a bit of a skeleton crew comprised of myself and whomever I can talk into doing my typing. So I had the pleasure, and at times horror, of sifting through all the emails myself.

The rules were simple: Number one, all entries had to have been born (and continue to live as) a woman. Number two, all entrants had to be at least twenty-one years of age. Number three, all entrants had to be comfortable in the presence of drinking, occasional drug use and all other forms of blatant debauchery. You’ll notice in these rules I neglected to include anything involving not being married, which would come back to haunt me, but more on that later.

It’s a strange feeling being a grand prize. Keep in mind, I’m a man who did not actually kiss a girl until eighteen years of age. When I was fifteen, I got my first drivers license and no kidding, the stats were 5’ 140lbs. Trust me, the 140lbs was not muscle. My formative years were spent on the speech team, and lets face it, normally, to be surrounded by that many teenage virgins you need to participate in a suicide bombing. This did not make for a lady killer. But take heart, young pasty fat boys (my fan base), twenty years and a successful comedy act later, women were quite literally competing for me.

As I read through the emails, I was struck by how many truly appealing women were interested in this endeavor, especially considering the prize, and how many articulate and thoughtful emails I received. Thankfully, crazy was also well represented, which means these two factions would be running neck and neck.

The stage was set. In future entries, you’ll go deep inside the selection process, followed by the actual date and its aftereffects. This ending is called a cliffhanger. I learned this literary tactic from years of sitting home on Friday nights watching “Falcon Crest” while the rest of you losers were wasting your time dating (and kissing) girls.