Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“Lights, camera, action! Here I was in this small little town in this small country landlocked in Central Africa called Zambia. I remember watching the I Love Lucy Show in black and white and I knew one day that I was going to go to Hollywood,” lifestyle guru Colin Cowie told Hollywood on the Potomac. “That’s where I got my first start. I was forever moving the furniture around, so my poor dad eventually painted around the furniture so I wouldn’t move anything again.”
“Zambia is a small town that had one hotel, a couple of restaurants and one country club that we belonged to. I can’t think of a time when we didn’t have visiting house guests. My parents entertained all the time. There were always people over for lunches, dinners, cocktails every evening, so I kind of grew up around the whole idea of entertaining.”
Colin Cowie
Cowie was the guest of honor #ElevateDC, presented by BizBash and its CEO & Founder David Adler at The Ronald Reagan Building. The day long agenda included workshops on event planning: Design Thinking for the 21st Century Event; Embracing Change: You Can Crush Your Fund-Raising Goals 6 Strategic Game-Changers for Your Next Event; Content, Cause Marketing, and the Millennial Generation: What Event Marketers Need to Know; How to Leverage Event Technology Without Breaking the Bank; Sponsorship Secrets: Are You Delivering What Your Client Wants? and Career and Business Mentoring.
David Adler
“We’re trying to elevate events,” Adler told us. “We do this all over the country and we try to allow people to peak over the fence and see what other people are doing. We’re teaching people techniques for event organizing that make them collaboration athletes. Today we’re allowing for conversations. In this room you’re going to have four hundred people who will have probably thousands of conversations. We judge an event not by how many people attend, but how many conversations are curated. We are curating a lot of conversations today.”
Everything was elevated #ElevateDC, including our lunch which arrived in a three tiered glass: Chilled Avocado Soup or Yellow Tomato Gazpacho; Grilled Chicken with Organic Quinoa Salad with Chimichurri Sauce; and Chocolate Creme Brûlée with Hemp Cookies, to be exact. Former Broadway actor and current President of BizBash Media Richard Aaron explained it this way: “There are alternating soups that you can negotiate with your neighbor. You can take off each section and place it around your plate so you can negotiate if you want the Avocado or the Tomato or just take a taste or sample of each as part of the interaction.” “When you come to me,” explained Chef Xavier from TCMA just back from Morocco, “it is a challenge to find something new. The name of the event is Elevate, so here we are with a pyramid of glasses.”
The main attraction was TV personality Colin Cowie who took us on a trip down memory lane from his humble beginnings to his super stardom status. “In South Africa, I ran a private hotel and hot spa, which is also around the whole idea of entertaining. When I immigrated here, I found there were people with walk-in refrigerators and they’re eating in a restaurant five nights a week. I realized there was this whole idea and opportunity to demystify the art of living well. I started in 1985 with a small, little catering company,” he told Hollywood on the Potomac. “Within one year, I was dealing with Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone who all became my clients. Then I did Hugh Hefner’s wedding after having lived in this country for just three years and became known as Mr. Wedding.”
“I think I have an interesting and a unique sense of style from my colonial upbringing and from a strong European influence. I think it’s that sensitivity,” Cowie said of his success. “When I first came to the US, it was the advent of California cuisine where they took a piece of chicken and they beat the crap out of it, and then they marinated it overnight. They put it on a bed of something. Then it had a crispy something on top. It was so over complicated. I just come from the world of angel hair pasta with tomato sauce, enchilada tricolor, and tiramisu. In those days, most people thought that tiramisu was a small country off the coast of Italy. We’ve come a long way since then. Somewhere deep in that past is something that just clicks on with me.”
Colin Cowie
“My first celebrity client was a legendary television producer in Los Angeles. His housekeeper was the housekeeper for Sherry Rivera who was Geraldo Rivera’s ex-wife. She was dating this young dude by the name of Bruce Willis. None of us had heard of Bruce Willis. This was on the eve of Moonlighting. She threw a party, and all of a sudden, Barbara Streisand and Stallone and all these major movie stars were there and I couldn’t believe it. I was like this young kid and I had hair all the way down my back. I was 23 years old. I had the most gorgeous girls, the most handsome waiters, big bonfires on the beach in Malibu, serving the most fabulous meal. They had the best time. That’s what really got me into the celebrity world. I got on incredibly well with Bruce. He was like a brother to me. I went on to take on many other roles with them; I found them housekeepers. I trained the housekeepers. I opened up his restaurant in Sun Valley. I worked very closely with him for many, many years.”
“My best experience is usually the next one because I’m so excited about my life and what’s coming down the line and how exciting it is and the good people I get to work with and the exciting projects that I get to collaborate on. The worst? Oh my God. I don’t think the phone call’s long enough for that. It’s one of those businesses where something always goes wrong, but it all depends on how you deal with it and how you recover. I can’t think of anything that was catastrophic. No one’s lost their lives on any of the jobs I’ve had. Wedding cakes fall down. I’ve had the band go to a different address. I’ve had all sorts of things … you name it, it’s happened to me, but I don’t really focus much on the bad. I just focus on the future and the good.”
“Do you have divorce parties too?” we asked. “No, I don’t do divorce parties, just like I don’t do weddings for a second wife because the second wife never wants what the first wife had.”
Cowie’s World:
