The happy folks at the GoldenPalace online casino turned over $28,000 Wednesday for a headline-grabbing grilled cheese sandwich half, with a bite missing.
Diana Duyser, the jewelry-designing seller, is convinced she cooked up an image of the Virgin Mary over breakfast 10 years ago. After more than 1.6 million hits on the eBay.com auction site, the aged cheese and white bread creation is hitting the road, first for Las Vegas. The world tour is next.
Steve Baker, chief executive officer of Cyber World Group, GoldenPalace's Quebec-based parent, said he expected "minimum value, and we'd all get a laugh and a hoot about it." But his company's cheesy way of grabbing 15 minutes of fame turned him into one of the converted.
"It's taken on more of a life of its own than we ever imagined," said Baker, whose Web casino is best known for tattoos on the backs of boxers. "It represented something that we believed to be a piece of Americana pop culture."
Duyser, 52, happily posed for pictures during a ceremonial check exchange at the Seminole Indian's Hard Rock resort casino a few feet from the framed sandwich, complete with security guard and a velour rope railing to unsuccessfully keep the gawkers at bay.
Fingerprints are visible on the glass protecting what has been dubbed the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich, or VMGCS for short.
There are plenty of doubters.
The Virgin Mary?
"It's hard to say. I'm a Catholic. It's unusual, let me put it that way," said Mike Scarano of Hollywood, who read that the sandwich would be on display before changing hands. "I don't know it it's the Virgin Mary, but there's something there."
EBay drew more attention to the sandwich by halting bidding, then starting it up again after Duyser assured the world, "This is a serious auction." The BBC teased its story about the "holy toast."
Antigua-based GoldenPalace's Web site promotes it as a "religious icon" with a "mystifying image."
An online spoof went for the guffaws by pasting an image of the dashboard-style statue of Christ with upraised arms and "Cheesus" over the Velveeta logo.
Internet viewers of the image see a more modern incarnation. Mary Pickford, one of the Gish sisters of silent movie fame, Barbara Stanwyck and Marlene Dietrich are all in the running because of the way the mottled bread resembles a bobbed-hair blonde.
The image already has spread to T-shirts. Duyser is wearing one with the words "Passion of the Toast" superimposed at the bottom of the sandwich, near where she took her only bite before seeing the image.
"I spit it back out," she recalled. "I was just shocked. It scared me, really."
Jim DeFede, a barbed-edge columnist for The Miami Herald, is intrigued enough to volunteer to drive the framed 'wich to Vegas over the Thanksgiving holiday. A stop along New Orleans' Bourbon Street is highly likely. And another visit to the casino may test the luck of the holder.
Hard Rock employee Ira Gallon thinks he will be blessed in Wednesday night's $60 million Florida Lotto drawing after rubbing his ticket on the sandwich's shadowbox glass.
"Why is it sacrilegious?" he asked. "I can give part of it to charity. I will get myself a Cadillac out of the deal. That's my pledge."
Hoping to double up, the Hard Rock handed over a platter of bread and cheese to give Duyser another chance at a culinary feat.
"You only get one shot at this," confided Duyser, an Ohio-born, Florida-bred Baptist. "I'll miss her greatly because she was a comfort to me in times when it wasn't so easy."
"After 24 years of marriage, this makes everything special," said her husband Gregg, who has emphysema and walks with a cane. Diana Duyser reached out to grab his hand.
"By taking her all over, other people will have some of the pleasure that I did," she said.