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Tupperware Party Hostess 'Aunt Barbara' Is Quite The Character

MASSAPEQUA, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- The top Tupperware seller in the Northeast is from Long Island – and you might call her a real character.

Aunt Barbara is known as a Long Island homemaker, top-selling Tupperware consultant and media sensation. She is also a product of the art of female impersonation, developed by Robert Suchan of Massapequa as a new and creative way to sell Tupperware.

"Tupperware kind of had a reputation that people really didn't want to go to the parties," Suchan told 1010 WINS. "They thought they were boring; they were going to be conjured into buying things, and I thought, you know, if she just turned it into a little bit of a show, and she had another reason for people to come, the Tupperware would just sell itself."

Suchan said he went to one of his sister's Tupperware parties back in 1995, and decided to take his acting skills in a new direction. He came up with his character modeled on his own Aunt Barbara and turned it into a schtick that has been hard for customers to resist.

As Aunt Barbara, Suchan now sells more than $250,000 worth of Tupperware a year. And Aunt Barbara comes up with some creative uses for the products too.

"The products that Tupperware sells are fantastic, but there's always alternate uses for these products, and I think Aunt Barbara just comes up with some fun and alternate uses that people laugh at and enjoy, and I've just sort of created a little show around that," Suchan said.

Among those alternate uses is putting martinis for the beach into a shaker designed for pancake batter, Suchan said.

A company spokeswoman told Newsday that Tupperware has four consultants around the country who work in drag, and all of them are successful.

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