Adrien Grenier Hosts Annual charity: ball Fundraiser

Set up an open catwalk in the middle of a party in Manhattan, and you can bet there'll be plenty of partygoers eager to take a strut and indulge their Project Runway/America's Next Top Model fantasies. In fact, that's exactly what a number of guests, dressed in their finest suits and designer dresses, did at last night's fourth annual charity: ball, a fundraiser for charity: water hosted by Entourage heartthrob Adrien Grenier.

But this was no ordinary catwalk. The translucent white-lit floor was covered by stark black letters calling attention to the reason all those party guests were there: To help bring clean drinking water to the millions of people who don't have access to a basic necessity we take for granted every day.

The statistics are startling. One black-lettered passage noted that 4,800 people die each day from lack of access to safe water and basic sanitation. That's equal to 11 jumbo jets crashing every single day. (Imagine the press that would get!)

Party guests who walked the catwalk didn't have to read to get the message, though. They could feel it. Their price for getting a moment in the spotlight was to carry two big plastic yellow fuel jugs full of water down the length of the runway with them — similar to millions of jugs that people around the world (often women and children) carry back and forth each day for hours just to get any source of water, let alone clean ones.

How much do two jugs of water weigh? Eighty pounds.

Watching strong, healthy men and women in skirts and suits struggle to make that journey from one end of the catwalk to the other drove home a very simple point: What charity: water does is important, and real. And the nearly $800,000 that party guests contributed over the course of the ball Monday night will go a long way to changing the lives of real people all around the world.

As of Monday morning, charity: water's efforts had helped more than 970,000 people get access to clean water, primarily through drilling wells right where they're needed. After last night's ball, the organization had raised enough money to push that total to over 1 million.

Before the auction that raised the final dollars needed to hit that goal, Grenier made an interesting plea to the crowd. A plea that obviously worked.

From a stage at the front of the Metropolitan Pavillion, he praised charity:water's founder, Scott Harrison, and talked about a conversation they had about happiness. Perhaps happiness, he said, is living a balanced life: Equal parts giving, and receiving. "It's often easy for us to do the receiving," Grenier said. "Tonight we should all follow [Scott's] lead — take an accounting of our scale of balance. Tonight, hopefully, you can give a lot."

For those who weren't in New York, and couldn't make the ball, there's still plenty of time to give. Today. Tomorrow. Every day. Try it. Once you start, it's as easy as turning on the faucet.

Be sure to come back to Tonic later this week to hear from actress Alyssa Milano, who's giving up gifts for her 37th birthday in order to raise money for charity:water, and has already raised more than $50,000...

Video for Tonic by Michael Trainer and Adam Barton.