Local bartenders strip down for charity
Posted October 4, 2013 9:11 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – You might be shaken *and* stirred by a new charity calendar being released by a group of Vancouver bartenders.
They’re stripping down to their swizzle sticks to help fight prostate and breast cancer.
Bambudda barkeep Sean Hewlett — or Mr. February — says each month has a different theme and, yes, there are carefully placed items so you get the martini, but no olives.
“Certainly there are one or two of us in there where the bottles are placed very strategically,” he says, though he won’t reveal whether they are tall boys or stubbies.
More importantly, does the night-working, club-hopping lifestyle of the bartender lead to the kind of physique you would want to see bared for all? “I think it depends who you ask,” Hewlett laughs. “Certainly the gentlemen in the firefighters calendars are in much better shape than we are. But I like to think we hold our own.”
The bartenders are “holding their own” in a variety of scenarios from month to month but Hewlett won’t spill the beans ahead of the calendar’s release.
“We allowed each of the bartenders to come up with their own theme for their month. Rather than just having us shirtless behind the bar, each bartender brought a little bit of creativity to the photo shoots. Some will be tied into months, like Halloween, and there are ones that were picked out of the blue, like ‘edible delights’ and ‘lumberjack'”. Hewlett is the lumberjack, by the way, but he says it’s for a good cause.
“We decided to split all the proceeds, everything made, by the calendars between prostate cancer research and breast cancer research.”
At $20 a piece, they hope to sell all one-thousand calendars, raising $20,000 for the BC Yukon Breast Cancer Foundation and the BC Prostate Cancer Foundation.
Ahead of the launch in November, the bartenders will be holding two fundraisers to cover the calendar’s production costs.
“Everyone in the calendar — myself, the creative director, the photographer, our make-up artist, our stylist and all the bartenders — no-one is being paid for this, everyone is donating their time. We’re holding the fundraisers to cover printing costs and once we have the calendars printed we will throw a launch party.”
So if you want to Mr. February to sign his “axe”, you’ll get the chance.
