Cheryl (Harad) Pilchik, Barney '84, for snagging a highly competitive job
coordinating invitations for a celebrity-studded Oscar night party.
Pilchik, who runs Invitations Plus out of her home in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., normally specializes in items like wedding and bar/bat mitzvah invitations, birth announcements, and business stationery. But when she heard that Entertainment Weekly magazine was looking for a firm to coordinate and hand-address invitations for its exclusive Academy Awards viewing party in New York City, Pilchik decided to give it a shot. The party was held on March 21 -- Oscar night -- at Elaine's, a Manhattan restaurant known for its celebrity clientele.
To her amazement, Pilchik was selected from among the many companies that submitted bids for the project. She thinks she won the job because of the competitive price that she offered, along with her confidence that she could meet Entertainment Weekly's highly demanding timetable -- she had less than four days in which to print, address, and proofread about 600 invitations! Within 12 hours of being retained by Entertainment Weekly, Pilchik already had interviewed a dozen calligraphers, checked their samples and references, and hired six to address the Oscar party invitations.
Shortly thereafter, Pilchik received a delivery that most celebrity-watchers can only dream of -- a list of unpublished home addresses of the entertainment industry's elite. The list included the likes of Steven Spielberg, John Travolta, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Cher.
"I had calligraphers holding the lists, and their hands were shaking," Pilchik said.
As the mother of 7-year-old Brian and 2-year-old Josh, Pilchik doesn't have much time to watch movies or follow the lives of celebrities. But there was one name on the list that did give her pause. "The one name where my heart did skip a beat was Mel Gibson," she confessed.
Pilchik had to sign a stack of legal documents requiring that she keep the celebrity addresses completely confidential, and when the job was completed, she had to return the guest list along with all unused invitations.
Despite the exciting nature of the job, it was not all glamour. Pilchik stayed up three nights in a row proofreading the hand-addressed envelopes, which were spread out across her living room floor. She had calligraphers on call 24 hours a day in case she found mistakes in the middle of the night -- and she did.
For example, at about 3 o'clock one morning, Pilchik noticed that Raquel Welch's name had been written "Raquel Welsh," because of a typo on the mailing list.
In the end, Entertainment Weekly was very pleased with the work of Invitations Plus, Pilchik said. If she has an opportunity to bid on the project again next year, she thinks she probably will.
In the meantime, Pilchik is back to the business of doing wedding invitations and birth announcements for the non-celebrity crowd. In fact, she has done a number of jobs for friends from her University of Hartford days, and she invites former classmates to contact her at (215) WISHFUL (215-947-4385).
Pilchik majored in marketing at the University, and during her senior year she served as president of the campus chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA). She said the faculty at the Barney School of Business prepared her well for the challenging world of advertising and marketing. One of Pilchik's favorite teachers was Associate Professor of Marketing Charles Canedy III, whom she described as "an incredible educator."
"You never forgot the things you learned in Professor Canedy's class. There were some really tough teachers at Barney who really made you learn," she said. Pilchik, who went on to earn an MBA, worked at a number of advertising agencies and did marketing for a pharmaceutical company before starting her own business after the birth of her first child.
Her brush with the Oscars may be over for now, but Pilchik said she will never forget the excitement of preparing invitations for the stars. She said she occasionally gets a good chuckle when clients "give me their wedding invitation list and whisper that there is a 'famous person' on the list, and that I should be very professional and not divulge this information to anyone. "If they only knew what I've been privy to!"
