The Six Different Award

Space Click is honored, flattered, but not at all surprised to have received the prestigious Six Different Award, an award so prestigious it is actually six different awards. The Six Different Award Foundation again held their annual Six Different Award Show Ball, a ball which this year was essentially held in our honor. We sat through an award show presentation before the whole room knew it.

The first award was a beautiful and ornate traditional trophy, which door men gave us hurriedly as we’d walked in, just as every other attendee. Though stunning, the award is not special. It creates excitement in the room, because everyone attending is just five trophies away from potentially winning the Six Different Award.

The second award of the evening was the Howard F. Dunwarder Memorial Award, presented in the field of science, a simple obelisk of a trophy awarded for the most quantifiably cool entity to have existed within any three month span. This award, based in science as it is, is essentially a reminder to the awardee that in order to win the Six Different Award, you must earn all six trophies within the same three month period. That’s how you win the Six Different Award, which is itself a seventh trophy. Howard F. Dunwarder built the device used to this day to determine the winner, and the span of time within one must earn each trophy is known as a “Dunwarder.”

When you go to the Six Different Awards and you get two awards right away, you’ve really got to go nuts. Because right then, your chances are better than everyone in the room, basically. It’s you, or it’s nobody, who is going to get the Six Different Award. And the people around you are looking really glumly at the tiny cup trophies they just received, and they’re staring at your big phallic obelisk, and if you don’t make a show of things they’re going to be even more disappointed.

Space Click, being as cool as we are, prepared an incredibly fly moonwalk to the stage to receive the award, turned quickly into the microphone only to say, “this is for you” to the fans, then humbly walked away and back to our table.

The third award was acquired through a rigged game similar to the dating gameshow Matchmaker. The trophy is a baseball glove, and the plaque under the cast bronze glove says “You’re A Catch!”

By the time the presenters announced and explained the fourth award, Space Click had done a pretty impressive but now monotonous moonwalk to the stage several times. It was decided that we’d play this award fairly humbly, but give a more elaborate list of thanks to the room and world. Unfortunately, while discussing the order that we’d place “God,” “Mom,” and “Hard Work” in order to be the most effective role model to cool kids, we missed the explanation for the award. No matter. We heard Space Click was pronounced winner, and we walked up there and we thanked God, Mom and Hard Work for winning the (looks at the statue) Lazy Bastard Atheist Award. The presenters were a band of ecumenical ministers who would judge quite harshly based off of a basic psychological aptitude test.

Five, The Award, is presented by the Grand Canyon Visitor’s Center, a three-employee small business from the Mountain Time Zone which managed through a well-timed sponsorship to secure exclusive rights to choose a designee for Five, The Award. Their process is the topic of much speculation among those who closely watch the awards show circuit, and one popular theory suggests they are simply filthy rich yet frugal people who abuse drugs and take bribes. Whether the thousand dollars left outside their hotel room door is the reason for Space Click winning Five, The Award mattered, we won the award. No matter. The trophy itself is a five dollar bill made out of gold, which stands perpendicular to a large mahogany base, shaped like a glamorous clothes iron.

We weren’t surprised we had won the Six Different Award, because we’d already won the Howard F. Dunwarder Award and five other trophies at the point that the Six Different Award was announced, at the end of the ball after everyone had been drinking and watching us win trophies.

Award Number Six is a moment of high tension, and the producers of the show know this, and each year they play up this tension. There had only been one year in the 55 year history of the Six Different Award Show Ball, when a winner of the Six Different Award was not announced. The crowd that year, the third year, had expectations of similar outcomes to the previous two years, particularly given the name of the event. But as it were, 52 years ago there was no Lazy Bastard Atheist Award presented. The ecumenical ministers had all fled the country for the shores of Cuba, to help avert the ongoing Missile Crisis. The favorite candidate for the award was also not present, and the popular theory was that he was too stricken with grief at the national news of all the ecumenical ministers boarding a plane for Cuba, not to return until days after his Dunwarder would lapse.

As an important aside: the organizers of the ball let the winner of the Six Different Award know in advance, for security purposes, that they will win. Space Click walked in like we owned the place because we already did. That unfortunate man 52 years ago was likely told he would win an award, only to watch the nominating committee of the Lazy Bastard Atheist Award get on a Cessna headed for a war zone.

And when the moment of truth arrived, we were of course nervous. There had only been one year in which a Six Different Award wasn’t awarded, and that was due to a nuclear panic that we hadn’t yet repeated this year. All that stood between us and trophy number seven was a fluke of history.

Fortunately, there was no fluke, and the auditorium shortly thereafter emptied, the elitists and their disciples left the Sheraton Inn at Myrtle Beach and proceeded to their Toyotas.