July 23rd, 2007

Shareef don't like it... but Graham do. Graham like it very much.

There is a law, solemn and unbreakable, that every ad agency must have at least one Arabian Nights summer party, which must be called "Rock The Casbah". I believe this to be true for every agency on the face of the planet, with the obvious exception of agencies in Dubai, where it's more exotic to dress up as Canadians in plaid flannel shirts, dance to Celine Dion and drink maple syrup from soapstone cups fashioned by Inuit to resemble polar bears.

Ours was last year, roughly a week before Ogilvy Toronto's identically-themed "Rock The Casbah" summer party. They had camels and we had male belly dancers who wore outfits very similar to Jamie's. I was dressed much as you see me, pointy shoes and all. There are pictures out there, right now, of me in that outfit. Worse, there are pictures of me out of that outfit, dancing in the torrential rainstorm that came later.

The year before, the summer party had strippers. This year, the theme was the Seven Deadly Sins, complete with nude models painted to resemble Lust... and whatever the other six are. For some reason, I remember them all as Lust. Which brings me to my next point: Was the drunken, sexually charged atmosphere of office parties so insufficiently dangerous that we had to start adding naked models? The whole thing reeks of an entrapment scam run by HR.

-Graham

P.S. I just noticed the bottle. Subtle, Jamie. Real subtle.