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Last night, people watching the premiere of the “Bank of Hollywood” program on E! saw the magical balloon maker from West New York win the money to fund a special tour of hospitals where he will entertain children with serious and terminal illnesses.
As Gadino put it, the show’s celebrity panel of judges, “all voted in one unanimous, simultaneous, enthusiastic ‘YES!’ “
The usual game-show agreement forced Gadino to keep his lip buttoned.
“I did tell the Florida mom contestant who also won,” he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “She got 30 thousand for her daughter’s flight school.”
Emails have come in “from Facebook friends and balloon peers,” Gadino said. Traffic on his website, jayjaytheballoonguy.com, also is up.
“The next step is to send DVDs of the show to hospitals and see which ones are interested,” he said.
“Bank of Hollywood” features contestants trying to persuade a celebrity panel to fund their dream.
More than 60 requests over the season’s eight episodes produce a total sum “in the seven-figure range,” said Ryan “American Idol” Seacrest, one of the show’s creators.
The trick for the panelists — including Pussycat Dolls singer Melody Thornton — is sniffing out the bogus requests from the genuine.
Gadino, who was flown out to Hollywood seven weeks ago, told him of his dream “to travel the country doing balloon animals at children’s hospitals for sick kids.
A graduate of The New Jersey Institute of Technology with a Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Management Information Systems, Gadino worked for several companies — among them, Sony, AT&T, American Express, and J. Walter Thompson — for nearly 20 years. He ran thousands of computer training classes and wrote more than 100 computer-tech training manuals.
At the same time, he was “Balloon Guy” at countless parties, while DJing at weddings.
“It finally became clear that entertaining only on weekends just wouldn’t do,” he wrote. “My computer training classes became infused with such an entertaining flair that everyone could see my true calling clearly reached far beyond the world of PC training.”
After 9/11, Gadino “left the warm safety of corporate computer training classrooms for a full time career as an independent children’s entertainer.
Gadino is also a member of OceanTroupe, formerly the Ocean Players, a collection of creative and performing artists who stage productions along the mid-Atlantic.
“I am a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of person,” he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “I’m hoping this will give me some tremendous exposure and God only knows what doors this may open up as an actor and as a balloon entertainer and/or both…hopefully more roles on TV/movies as a balloon guy.”
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