Husband-caller wins with right note

Thursday, August 28, 2003

By DAN RICHMAN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

MONROE -- The 1967 hit "Love is Strange" by Peaches & Herb offered several suggestions on how a woman can call her man.

Start with "Come here, lover boy," they suggested. If necessary, escalate to "Oh, lover boy!"

And if he still doesn't answer: "Baby, oh baby, my sweet baby, you're the one."

Peaches & Herb would have been appalled yesterday had they witnessed the Evergreen State Fair's first International Husband-Calling Invitational.


		Scott Eklund / P-I
	Linda Meyer, left, gets some help from Valerie Lee, center, and Jeanne Grace as they sing their rendition of "Sandman" in the husband-calling contest at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe.

Contestants were judged on the humor, originality and creativity they put into summoning their spouses.

Monroe resident Cheryl Minnick, 49, unleashed the ear-splitting, two-tone call that made audience members wince and compelled judges to name her the first-place winner.

"Shoe-BICK," she bellowed, holding the word's last syllable for a full quarter-minute.

Two minutes later, Minnick was holding $150 in gift certificates and walking away with a grin on her face. The strange call word, she explained, came from a Russian video she and her husband, Tom, had seen years ago. It developed into the call the family uses to find one another on their 15-acre ranch.

Similar calls had been heard Monday at the fair's hog-calling competition.

"Tamer, actually," said fair spokeswoman Elizabeth Grant.

The other two couples in the competition seemed crestfallen. They said they had spent considerable time and thought on their own silly, satirical skits, preparing for a competition that the Evergreen State Fair admits it stole from its Nebraska counterpart.

One wife -- sweetly, though off-key -- had lip-synched barbershop harmonies to her hubby. The other had won her spouse's attention by threatening to have sex with him. Happily, the rules forbade nudity.

The competition's four judges -- a single businessman, a Baptist pastor who performs a lot of marriages, a Catholic deacon who does marriage counseling and a divorce attorney -- were intended to represent "four phases of relationships," Grant said.

The judges agreed that those roles were irrelevant and that the competition said little about marital dynamics within the participating couples. But competing did require a shared sense of fun and the ability to work together, noted Bob Dolan, deacon at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton church in Mill Creek.

Before the performance began, audience member Julie Cwinar of Seattle said she and her family had come just for the contest's entertainment value. But, she noted, the competition might have a point, because "selective hearing is a universal."

To which her husband, Dan Friedmann, promptly retorted, "So I'm wondering where the wife-calling competition is."

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