Using cakes to pick up guys? A Nashvillian's bar adventures lead to a movie with Bette Midler

Cake-in-bar adventure No. 1: The Roger Room in West Hollywood – gingerbread apple upside down cake

The guy sitting near us with a backwards baseball cap who had been watching the football game on TV, (and who I assumed would have zero interest in talking to us), suddenly interrupted [our conversation}.

"What are you guys talking about? You seem, like, really intensely talking about something."

Ding. Meet Joey.

Not only did Joey not ask what kind of cake I'd made, he even let me take a picture of him eating it….

He talked to us for an hour … and was only too happy to complain about his broken arm, and show us the damage under his shirt.

While Joey was not an ideal candidate… ("Do you knit while you watch TV?" "Um, no, Joey, I don't"), he was all the encouragement I needed in continuing the experiment.

In 2012, Nashville native Audrey Shulman was trying to break big in entertainment in Los Angeles — and she also was tired of being single.

After a birthday party at a bar for her close friend and roommate — Shulman baked a cake for the bash — she and the birthday girl cooked up a plan to meet guys: In the next calendar year, Shulman would bake 50 different cakes and take them to 50 different bars and use the baked goods as ice breakers.

The adventure took a tragic turn after several months when Shulman's "cakebarring" partner, Chrissy Osmulski, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. But Osmulski insisted the two continue hitting up bars with cakes, both as a fun distraction from cancer treatments and as a way to try to land her roommate a boyfriend.

Osmulski died about 15 months after their last cake-in-a-bar outing.

In her grief, Shulman — daughter of former Nashville Vice Mayor Jim Shulman — turned her adventure with her roommate into a blog, a book and a movie, all with the same name: "Sitting in Bars with Cake".

Amazon Prime streaming service released the movie — with stars including Bette Midler, Ron Livingston and ABC Black-ish's Yara Shahidi — in September, where it hit No. 1 on the platform for several days in its first week out.

Shulman sat down with The Tennessean earlier this month to share her memories, her thoughts on movie making, her future plans and several of her blog posts.

Even a CrossFit trainer ate her cake

Cake-in-bar adventure No. 18: Edendale Restaurant & Bar in L.A. - blue velvet cake for Chrissy's birthday

While our fantastic friends were mostly the ones consuming the cake, I did offer a piece to a friend's friend from Tennessee, and a native Angeleno in the music business who told me he's a foodie.

Maybe it was the fact that I had finished my entire drink (a big deal for me), or that I was about to have a panic attack from a cat running away under our care, or that my best friend was celebrating such an important birthday, but I freely shared our entire scheme with each of them while they ate the cake. And these boys were actually very interested.

Tennessee guy said he would follow the blog just so he could keep eating the cakes-- and get this, people. He's a CROSSFIT TRAINER. Cakebarring wins over people who exercise for a living!

When she was 19, Shulman gave campus tours at her tiny liberal arts school, Bennington College in Vermont. And she just loved the low-key, super-artsy, easy-to-talk-to, kind-hearted counselor, Chrissy Osmulski, who she ran into in the admissions office.

Osmulski always made candy art, like crowns made out of Peeps at Easter or peppermint candy sculptures for Christmas. She also was obsessed with cupcakes, and Osmulski regularly offered her futon for any friends who needed a place to crash.

"You know how some people are magic and you gravitate toward that person?" Shulman said. "That was Chrissy. She had magical energy. Everyone wanted to be friends with her."

When Shulman graduated, she moved to Los Angeles, and Osmulski moved there a year later. Shulman pursued screenwriting and Osmulski to recruit West Coast high school students to the Vermont college. The two got a place together, and they hatched the "cakebarring" plan to find a boyfriend for Shulman soon afterward.

If nothing else, Shulman thought, she'd be able to launch a blog about it and try a different kind of writing. She quickly found out, though, that cakebarring elevated her confidence.

"The first night, it was a really amazing feeling," she said. "I could go up to any guy at this bar because I have cake in my hand."

Plus, her longtime friend Katy Stumpf said, it was a great hang.

"Yeah, it was fun when we talked to cute boys, which happened a lot," Stumpf said, "but it was the most fun being together with Chrissy and Audrey and other friends who came along."

In the yearlong, 50-cakes adventure, Shulman connected with only one guy she dated for a month before he "ghosted me," she said.

In May, Osmulski had a seizure. In June, with Shulman by her side, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. The roommates cried together, but rarely talked in any depth about Osmulski's illness.

"We didn’t even want to go there. I know I didn’t want to go there," Shulman said, adding that she was following Osmulski's lead. "The cakes were an excellent diversion."

Unlike in the fictionalized movie version, Osmulski didn't die until more than a year after their cakebarring adventure ended.

Huffington Post, New York Post and Rachael Ray

Cake-in-bar adventure 22: Spin Standard ping-pong room/bar at The Standard Hotel in LA – best chocolate cake

By 12:30AM, I still had one giant piece of cake left. I really didn’t want to bring it home—I always feel better when I’ve given away every single piece, like I’m trying my hardest or something—and then I noticed a guy in a suit playing ping pong.

Who was really good at ping pong. Turns out he’s a tennis player….

It only took me 22 rounds to get a kiss at the bar, and have this guy try to feed me some of my own cake. Since I accidentally just called him while re-reading his nice text message, we will see if I ever hear from him again.

Shulman's "Sitting in Bars with Cake" blog started getting noticed by media outlets, and that opened doors for her.

Shulman wrote for Huffington Post, and the New York Post and Los Angeles Times wrote about the cakebarring adventure. Shulman appeared on TV chef Rachael Ray's syndicated show and Ryan Seacrest's radio show.

"By the end of the [cakebarring']," Shulman said, "I had a book deal but no boyfriend — but I’d rather have a book deal."

Though she was getting sicker, Osmulski brought home ideas from bookstores and had conversations about what might work and not work with Shulman's cake-baking book. "She was very supportive and involved," Shulman said.

The publisher wanted her to leave out her roommate's cancer battle, saying they wanted a fun, upbeat recipe and cakebarring adventures book.

Osmulski died in 2015, the day after she saw an early run of her roommate's book.

"At that point, she couldn’t speak," Shulman said, "but I’m hoping it registered, and it was special for her.

"Chrissy was such a selfless person, so the victories of her friends were victories for her. Even if she didn't really absorb the book, I know she was excited for me and proud of me. I felt it was a shared success for both of us."

'I would happily marry any of them'

Cake-in-bar adventure 32: (Now closed) No. 308 in East Nashville – Tennessee Jam Cake

[I] noticed four (straight) guys dancing together with total, reckless abandon. In that moment, I fell in love with all of them.

"Sorry to interrupt y'all," I said, waiting for a break between songs. "Would you guys like some of our cake?"

"YESSS!!" They cheered, and followed me back to our table. Here is what followed:

"Why are you giving us this cake?" "'Cause she's the nicest person ever." "This tastes like a gingerbread man crawled into my mouth." "It's a long story, but I can't eat any regular food." "This looks scrumptiolescent." …. "This cake is homemade? You don't buy dreams, you make them." "Are you on cake boss?" "Cheers to the best cake I've ever [voice cracking] had."

These are the people I bake for, because they are exactly the kind of boys I'm hoping to find: friendly, silly, appreciative sugar consumers who would dance with their guy friends at bars. I wrote my name down for them on a receipt with lipstick. I would happily marry any of them.

Shulman, who worked on reality television shows in Los Angeles, wrote a TV pilot based on her cakebarring experiences, but she got no nibbles.

"Crickets!" Shulman said, smiling.

Then her boss connected her with a movie producer, Susan Cartsonis, who had coffee with Shulman and said her story should be a film, not a TV show. Cartsonis also was enthusiastic about the idea of including her friend's battle with cancer in the movie.

In a phone call later, "Then she said, 'I want to make this as a movie. Do you want to write it?'" Shulman. "I'm like, 'Yes? Please!'"

Shulman wrote the script in a year, mostly at night and on weekends. "It was challenging and exciting and painful and cathartic to write that script."

Among the challenges: Producers said the story would have to be fictionalized, in part because Shulman and Osmulski were too similar personality wise. And, Shulman said, "It also became clear the Audrey character was going to have to have a bigger arc, much more growth in her life. In a way, writing it was freeing."

The Amazon Prime streaming service bought it in 2018, and it took five years to make. The producers kept her in the loop on casting decisions and invited her to the set for several weeks.

And on Sept. 8, 2023, in the middle of a writers' and an actors' strike, which prevented much promotion, Amazon released "Sitting in Bars with Cake."

'5 billion calories later....'

Cake-in-bar adventure No. 50: (Now closed) Stone Fox in the Nations in Nashville – Vassilopita cake

Katy turned to me, somewhere before or after midnight. "It doesn't even matter that we didn't give out that much cake," she said. "It's that all these people know about the blog and wanted to join you."

For someone who spent a lot of my growing up time feeling excluded and eccentric, this was a very, very sweet thing to say. Maybe this is why cakebarring has turned into more than just a boy baiting project; Chrissy has referred to it as more of a hospitality movement….

Before last year, I had never felt comfortable in bars. I was just this person who loved baking birthday cakes for my friends and wanted to write.

And I was also really tired of being single. So 50 cakes, 41 bars, and 5 billion calories later, I'm proud of myself for making an effort to take my dating life into my own hands by embarking on this insane baking spree, willing myself into bar after bar, and approaching people I was interested in talking to.

I went on almost as many dates as I have in the past 26 years combined, building up an impressive collection of phone numbers and text messages from guys I met in bars while making small talk over cake.

Amazon doesn't release numbers on how many times shows or movies are streamed. But Shulman saw that her movie was listed as most watched on the streaming platform for several days in the first week "Sitting in Bars with Cake" was released.

She's back in Nashville, married to a guy she met through work and mom to an 18-month-old child. She's working on a new script, grateful that she has been able, even in a fictional way, to introduce the world to a friend she deeply loved and admired.

"I was flooded with incredible messages from people I know, from people I didn’t know, from people I went to school with who knew and loved Chrissy," Shulman said. "It was a surreal, overwhelming experience in the best way possible."

Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Amazon Prime: New movie based on Nashville woman's trick to meet guys