I just found out that Mike the Pie Man passed away last year and I only just saw this notice written by the LouieLouie blog site:
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We are saddened to report that Pieman Mike passed away a few months ago. While people remember Mike Braunthal primarily as the Pieman, he was also a musician, a poet, a professional gardener, and a generous friend. Mike had this thing where he loved to get his face splattered by whipping cream pies thrown by beautiful women. He labelled himself "pie-sexual." He first felt excited about such things when he was a young kid watching some films by the Three Stooges. "Pie-berspace", coined by Mike, was a unique cream-splattered world promoted with t-shirts, buttons, video and swag for his supporters. By the fortitude of his promotional skills, he even got mentioned in the "Encyclopedia Of Unusual Sex Practices." Championing his involuntary baldness, Mike had a distinctive "avant-garde" look that he took to the stage, performing improvised pie throws in the middle of rock 'n' roll shows, doing occasional photo spreads in fashion magazines and even some acting in a few independent short films. Herb Caen San Francisco's legendary newspaper columnist would sometimes mention Mike's escapades.
Rest in peace, Mike Braunthal May 16, 1952 July 5, 2025.
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MK Tribute: We got to know Mike in 1994. He was a San Francisco based performance artist and he was known for writing poetry about his love for pies and we invited him to come down to spend a week with us in Florida at my ranch, where we shot over a dozen pie videos with Mike and our UK models. Mike's trademark was that he would write poetry and attach his poems to each individual pie, then recite the poem as he delivered the pie to each girl. He was quite a character and was very adept at pulling grins and funny faces to entertain the girls as he read his poems and covered the girls in cream pies. I don't think we ever saw the real Mike out of character because he was always in character and he would talk to everyone in rhymes like a rapper.
A very interesting fellow indeed. Lenny was also attending our 1994 pie shoots and Lenny was the total opposite to Mike. Lenny was very straight laced while Mike the Pie Man was from another planet, but they were both devoted to the art of delivering pies.
Here are some galleries for some of the pie shoots we did with Mike. A great loss to the pie fans community.
Wow, that's a memory jog, alright - I think I missed him by about 10 minutes at a big outdoor kink festival in SanFran in the late 90s when I was there for the tech boom. There was some buzz about a guy who'd chat girls up, then pull a pie out a briefcase or something if they were down to clown, so it must have been him. IDK if the vibe has changed much since then, but fuck me, that was a fun town to cut loose in.
(Found another pic of him online - dude was definitely a Pie-oneer of the fetish, alright.) o7
RIP Mike. Is he the first person to use buttercream pies? In the mid 90's he did a video in a hotel room with a girl named Tiffany(?) and used buttercream pies that totally blew me away.
Love you, too
