Madonna and the Grilled Cheese Freak Show

Editor-at Large:
THE POWER OF CHEESE, GOD & THE INTERNET

Still seeking a holiday gift for the person who has everything? Too late. Some nut in Canada already bought it. Or was it nutty to pay the price of a nice new car for a half-eaten piece of trash? In America, you never know.

It is hard not to weigh in on the grilled cheese story that attracted so much media ink recently. It speaks, after all, to what makes the Internet the new paradigm. Try to imagine a time before eBay.com when a person could sell half of a 10-year old toasted cheese sandwich for $28,000. Definitely, a freak show.

What were the chances, before the Web, that a person crazy enough to see the face of the Virgin Mary on a sandwich could find someone in the world crazy enough to buy it? Two million people, by the way, were crazy enough to look at the auction online. I’m proud to be one of them.

Grilled Cheese VIrgin Mary The miracle here is not that a bunch of toasted pixels look like the Mother of God. That is the way the human brain works; our mind makes sense out of whatever pattern our eyes see. I see the face of Marilyn Monroe on that sandwich instead. I saw a dinosaur the other day that turned out to be a bunch of trees moving in the wind. I went to pet my cat in the dark last night and it was a pair of shoes. I challenge you to cook me up a toasted cheese sandwich that does NOT look like something or someone. Now that would be worth serious money.

What matters here is the way we communicate. Countless millions of people have seen that sandwich now, on TV, in the newspapers and online. The story got an extra bump when eBay temporarily removed the item from its auction, then let it pass. A 52-year old Florida jewelry designer sold a piece of garbage to a Canadian casino company and wham – our entire culture shifted two beats to the left. It was a match made in heaven, and we got to watch.

As fast as the story happened a tiny subculture bubbled up around the edges like, well like cheese toasting in a sandwich. Spin-off products include a picture of the sandwich inside a Christmas tree ornament, a toasted cheese lunchbox and a wooden replica of the original item. I got the great picture at the top of this page from a Staten Island designer selling parody T-shirts. A lot of clever people jumped on the bandwagon and kep the joke alive. "Virgin Mary Sandwich," one copy cat product announced, "It Sacrelicious!"

A Boston Globe article called the event a "media frenzy", but it wasn’t a frenzy at all. It was the Internet doing what it does so well – changing our perceptions rapidly and globally as we share information. The perception was not that God, who has always spoken in mysterious ways, is now speaking to us through cheese sandwiches. The perception was that anything – and now we mean ANYTHING – has commercial value if you can find the right pitch and the right medium and get enough publicity.

PT Barnum, the man who sewed half a dead fish to half a dead monkey and called it a "mermaid", would be proud. Barnum knew that people will pay to see lies if you make them fun. I’ve been reading about a guy who hauled a mummified corpse around the country for years claiming it was the body of John Wilkes Booth. If he came to my town tomorrow, I’d pay a dollar for a peek.

As it turns out, neither the seller nor the buyer of the grilled cheese Mary are idiots after all. The seller gets $28,000. The buyer plans to tour the sandwich now made forever famous by the cultural burp it created by its own purchase. The new owner has already gotten his money’s worth in publicity for his online casino web site. I went there too, thanks to the Virgin Mary.

And if that sandwich ever comes to town – I mean the real authentic one, not some fake version – I will go see it. With any luck it will be displayed on a dark and rainy night in the back end of a truck trailer in some sleazy part of town. Lightning will flash. A tiny man in a plaid suit sipping from a flask will take my dollar with his claw-like hand, then raise the flap of an old musty blanket. A two- headed mouse will skitter by. The sandwich will be sitting in a glass case, wired with an intense security system and lit by a single bulb that makes the face of the Madonna glow beatifically. On the left will be the Elephant Man, wheezing and sniffling. On the right will be Monica Lewinski smoking a cigarette and wearing something dark and sheer from Victoria’s Secret.

Life has always been a freak show. That’s what makes it interesting. The Web only makes it freakier faster.