Madison Avenue's Got (Freaky) Talent

When you work in a building full of professional creative types, sometimes you have to do unusual things to get noticed. Things like dancing around to bluegrass music with colored flashlights up your nose.

That was the winning act at ad agency Euro RSCG's third annual talent show, held last night. Amid a bill that was heavy on musical numbers and other, more traditional performances, Chris Andrews, who works in client services as an account manager, mounted the stage to the tune of "Also Sprach Zarathrusta" (better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He then inserted a keychain penlight in each nostril and performed what he calls "an improvisational style interpretive dance" to the tune of Dueling Banjos. (Check back later for video.)

Mary Perhach, Euro's director of communications and one of the show's five judges, said Andrews' act was "one for the record books." Richard Notarianni, another judge and the firm's executive creative director for media, said he will measure his life in pre-Chris Andrews and post-Chris Andrews time.

Needless to say, Andrews took first prize. He beat out, among others, a family band that played "Proud Mary" and Livin' on a Prayer," a rapper from facilities and operations, a poet, a pair of duetting receptionists, and a woman from the print studio who sang "The Greatest Love of All."

Andrews says he has never performed a dance, interpretive or otherwise, with flashlights up his nose before last night. The inspiration for his act was a bit of serendipity: Just before he received the email announcing the talent show, he'd been looking at YouTube videos of fancy Christmas-light displays programmed to music.

"It was just sort of an inspirational creative masterpiece, if you will," he says of his shtick, a bit immodestly, but by all accounts accurately. "If feel like everybody in account management should be at least slightly creative."

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