A winning 'red' carpet moment

Kevin Cowherd

September 28, 2008

Maybe you're like me: You've never won anything in your life.

Never won a contest or a sweepstakes. Never hit on a lottery ticket. Never even won a lousy door prize.

When the old guys manning the Knights of Columbus table wave you over to buy raffle tickets for a new Pontiac G6, sure, you fork over a few bucks.

But you know you'll never see that baby parked in your driveway, even if you bought enough tickets to wallpaper a room.

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If this sounds like you, Mr. or Ms. Perpetual Loser, I give you hope.

And this hope is the saga of Ronnie Teich.

Teich, 54, an accounting technician from Ellicott City, just returned from a whirlwind $4,000 weekend in Hollywood after winning OK! magazine's Red Carpet Sweepstakes.

She walked the red carpet at the world premiere of the new MGM animated movie Igor and chatted with Steve Buscemi, John Cusack and Arsenio Hall, a few of the stars who did voices for the film.

And she'd never won much of anything, either.

"I'm an online contest junkie," she told me. "But I'd only won little things: T-shirts, DVDs, pens."

You won a PEN!? I thought. I never even won that.

But Teich's luck changed last September when she entered the Red Carpet Sweepstakes put on by OK!, a celebrity mag.

A few months later, she arrived at her office in Rockville to find a voice-mail message from one of the magazine's flacks saying she'd won the sweepstakes' grand prize: a glamorous trip for two to Tinseltown for the premiere of a movie to be named later.

True to the mindset of the perpetual loser, Teich immediately thought someone was yanking her chain.

And she had a pretty good idea who the chain-yanker was.

"I have an ex-husband and he's nuts," she said. "When people say they see Elvis at the Dairy Queen, believe it. Because I married Hitler."

When another voice-mail message arrived on April 1 - yes, that would be April Fool's Day - saying the trip had been changed to Las Vegas for the world premiere of Deal, starring Burt Reynolds, Teich thought: OK, Hitler's REALLY getting creative now.

But it wasn't the nutty ex-husband playing tricks. Because a few months later, a letter arrived with an OK! letterhead that essentially said: "Forget the Vegas trip. You're headed to Hollywood for the Igor opening!"

Only then did Teich truly allow herself to get all worked up.

"I'm a big TV and movie buff," she said. And now she was off to her dream destination.