It takes a village, people!

Micrografx raised a bundle of money last night for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by getting a whole bunch of geeks together to cook chili, race armadillos, and dance to BTO and the Village People. That's the short version of the story.

Beau explains how it happened

The National Center has had thousands of success stories reuniting parents and children through its 1-800-THE-LOST hotline and its Web site. Tonight, one mother and son fought their way through the celebrities--including former baseball slugger Steve Garvey and two over-the-hill Laugh-In comedians--to tell CNET how mother Becky Comeaux found son Beau Arceneaux through the Internet.

Beau's father had stolen him away as an infant, and their reunion 12 years later wouldn't have happened, they told us, without the Net.

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We moved on to another success story in the form of a man doing his best to cast off the albatross of the 1970s by immersing himself in technology. Well, Mr. Chris Knight, a.k.a. Peter Brady, we were sensitive to your plight. We didn't ask one single Brady Bunch question, although we were dying to inquire about the underlying representation of class consciousness inherent in the relationship of Alice the maid and Sam the butcher.

Knight helped found Visual Software, which was bought a few years back by Micrografx, and he's now involved in another high-tech venture, Integrated Micro Solutions. He's staffing the company's booth this week at the Sands.

Guess who else was there?