It started with an email in my inbox titled “Take One for the Team.”

Uh-oh.

What followed was a forwarded message from Wade Jones, the proud owner of the famous Elvis cup. Perhaps you’ve seen the story, which has been featured in USA Today, Time, CNN.com, and now the Smoky Mountain News. Jones — who has family in Cullowhee and Sylva — saw the King in Charlotte in 1977, and came home with a Styrofoam cup that Elvis took a few swigs from during the show. He’s held onto the cup for better than 27 years now. Last Christmas, he went on eBay and sold 4 tablespoons of water from the cup — sealed and authenticated, of course — for $455. Now he’s got the cup itself up for auction, with a minimum price of $10,000 and only one buyer he’ll accept: Sir Paul McCartney. My job in this whole affair? Take one for the team.

I have never considered myself Pulitzer material, but when you’ve sunk to interviewing attention-seekers about Styrofoam cups that Elvis once drank from, you know you’ve hit journalistic bottom.

So what was it like to talk to Wade Jones? I don’t know. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and call the man who owns a Styrofoam cup that Elvis once drank from. Instead, I decided to write about the man who owns a Styrofoam cup that Elvis once drank from without actually talking to him. It felt safer that way.

The next question was what tone to take. I could tell it straight, crack wise, or do a bit of both. I could ponder the significance of a culture so swept up by celebrity worship that it gives a damn — even a half-hearted, chuckling damn — about something so trivial as a cup a dead singer drank from 30 years ago. I could even draw a historical parallel to the medieval madness over the splinters of the One True Cross, but that might get me in trouble with the church crowd.

Alternately, I could launch into a dyspeptic reverie about online auctions and the global marketplace for useless kitsch. I could build the story around a Gummi Bear I once owned that bore an eerie resemblance to Smoky Mountain News Editor Scott McLeod. I thought I might auction it off until Eli left it on the woodburning stove one wintry night. Now it resembles nothing so much as a Gummi Jabba the Hut. (Note to Scott: keep hitting the gym, or this could happen to you too.)

Better still, I could take my cue from the woman who sold the miracle Grilled Cheese Sandwich with the likeness of the Virgin Mary on it — another eBay cause celebre, fetching $28,000 — and relate my own efforts in the kitchen to produce similar results. I went through three loaves of bread and four pounds of cheese, I might write, but the best I could do was a silhouette of Dag Hammarskjold and Roseanne Barr sharing a cup of tea at Mount Rushmore. At sunset. An arresting scene, no doubt, but not one that would fetch much on eBay.

I was still contemplating my options when I looked down and noticed I was fast approaching the bottom of the page, and with it, my word limit. I smiled and chuckled and breathed a sigh of relief: 572 words on Elvis’ cup, without even lifting the phone.

Take that, team.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)