’10 Ugly Men’ Fest Raises Cash for Charity
ROCHESTER, N.Y. – It began in 1990 with five kegs of beer, a park grill and an open invitation from party hosts with an unsavory sounding nickname: Ten Ugly Men.
The immediate goal of the Uglies? Drink, eat, meet single women, sway to local bands. In short, get ugly.
The more serious mission – aside from swilling beer? Help out a charity or two.
The daylong Bacchanalia, dreamed up by twentysomethings looking to recapture their more carefree days in college, drew 200 revelers and raised $1,000 for a children’s hospital.
Saturday’s 15th annual bash, a cross between a giant block party, a biker rally, a mini-Woodstock and Nevada’s artsy Burning Man festival, looked on target to draw a record crowd of 8,000 and raise $125,000 for a neighborhood center and a cancer research foundation.
“We never would have grown to the size that we did if our sole intent was just to have a party,” said longtime organizer John Fitzsimmons, an attorney. “We realized it had the potential – just because of word of mouth – to continue to bring in a lot of money.”
Regulars, ranging from yuppies and young families to teen skateboarders and middle-aged bikers, set their summer calendars around the Ten Ugly Men festival at Genesee Valley Park.
“It’s fun. You just see everybody, people you haven’t seen for 20, 30 years,” said Burke McCarthy, a marketing manager for a new, high-speed ferry across Lake Ontario to Canada whose great-grandfather operated a poultry shop in downtown Rochester in the 1840s.
“It drives people crazy who aren’t from here how connected everybody is,” McCarthy said. “There’s a huge small-town feel about this place. Huge!”
At a friend’s neighborhood block party in 1989, Nazareth College graduates Mike Hartman and Pierce Pape got to talking about rounding up the guys and organizing a community beer, food and music hobnob where they might get to meet eligible women. And lots of them.
Pape spun the Ten Ugly Men moniker from the first three letters of Tums, their first corporate sponsor.
The first year, only nine Uglies could be persuaded to part with $150 apiece to ensure there would be a charitable donation. Now, thousands of fun-timers are willing to pay $25 a ticket, or $30 at the gate.
Charity proceeds so far exceed $600,000, and a share goes to a cancer research and treatment fund at the University of Rochester named for Fitzsimmons’ wife, Kim. Diagnosed with a brain tumor hours after giving birth to their daughter, Nikole, in 2000, she died last year at age 35.
The foundation has motivated Fitzsimmons to immerse himself once more in the endless details, from deciding how much beer to order to persuading top-notch bands to play for free.
“It’s really benefited me as well,” he said.
This year, the horde is expected to consume 300 kegs of beer, 3,500 hamburgers, 4,000 hot dogs, 3,600 chicken sandwiches, 500 veggie burgers, 10,000 bags of chips and pretzels, and 2,400 pounds of carrots, macaroni salad and potato salad.
Bands include Lit, Sometimes Three, Puddle, Tickle the Taint and Uncle Plum.
The festival requires little advertising – “the twentysomethings and thirtysomethings all network pretty well in our town,” Fitzsimmons said. Besides, in the Snow Belt, “people get so cooped up in the wintertime that any type of outdoor festival like this, I mean, people go nuts.”
With many of the original Uglies and their cultlike fans starting families and becoming more health-conscious, there are other amusements besides bending the elbow – from a water slide for youngsters and a 5-kilometer race and volleyball tournament for adults, to “goofy events like kickball, dodge ball and boccie,” said Hartman, the man better known as “Founding Father.”
“It’s not just a big drunken fest,” he insisted.
While the median age hovers around 28, the carousers are eclectic, and usually well-behaved. Apart from “one or two fisticuffs,” the crowd mixes surprisingly well, Hartman said.
“A couple of years ago, they were body-slamming listening to one of the bands and that kind of got us a little nervous,” he said. “We’re, like, do we break that up or just let them continue on and release all their aggression? That’s what we did and that was just fine.
“It gets a little crazy late in the day, we shut the beer off at about 7 and the event winds down,” added Hartman, a software salesman who is now 42 and married with a 1-year-old daughter.
In an irony of sorts, Hartman ended up marrying a neighbor he met while walking his Shar-Pei puppy. She had never heard of the Ten Ugly Men and, at first blush, didn’t like the sound of it.
“She kind of looked at me like, who’s this dork?” he said.
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On the Net:
http://www.tenuglymen.org