If you were given the opportunity to win a date with Joan Rivers — a prospect obviously too enticing to pass up — how would you woo her? The Daily Caller recommends sending her a vial of blood. Just ask Dr. George Flinn, now the Republican candidate in Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District: It worked for him.
Before he was a congressional candidate, Flinn was the winner of the “Find Joan a Honey” contest in 1990, the Joan Rivers Show’s version of The Dating Game, as co-host Harry Smith called it, according to transcripts of the show.
Flinn, then a gynecologist, was reportedly performing amniocentesis when he saw the ad for the contest, and he just had to enter. As one of more than 1,000 entrants, the trick was getting Rivers’ attention, which Flinn had a creative way of doing.
“Well, I said Joan Rivers — I need to be her honey because she’s in my blood, and I sent a vial of red fluid with her picture in it. Now the key was that I put up there: ‘This is not real blood.’ And I think that really caught the comedy writers’ attention,” he said during the February 27, 1990 episode of the show, after he and Joan had been on their date.
“You know, in this age, I look for humor. They better have a sense of humor,” Rivers said of his gesture.
Flinn became one of three finalists, and Rivers ultimately picked him, she said, “because he sounded adorable. He sounded funny and he sounded — and the accent! Southern men have great charm. You hear that soft, Southern accent. They can say: ‘Honey, you are stupid!’ And you go: ‘Thank you!’”
“And I was — and I — it’s a very difficult position, seriously, for someone to be in. I mean, to come into this nonsense and play it with charm and as a gentleman. And he was just wonderful.”
On the date, they took a dog for a walk and then went out to dinner. According to Flinn, it was “terrific.”
More recently, Rivers, now 78 years old, was filmed getting stoned in a parking lot last month for an episode of her reality-TV show. After obtaining a medical marijuana prescription — to deal with the lingering pain from so many plastic surgeries, she said — Rivers and a friend became so high that they couldn’t drive home. Later, the two ended up in a hot tub, fully clothed, before Joan decided to drink some of the water from her high-heeled shoe.
No word yet from the Flinn campaign in response to requests for more information about his dream date.