Pop-art Pez: One boss's obsession
This entrepreneur's geeky hobby has taken her from Austria to Star Wars conventions.
(FORTUNE Small Business) -- Stacy Blackman runs a Los Angeles-based consultancy that helps students get into college by emphasizing their strengths and airbrushing any unsightly quirks. But Blackman, 36, has her own nerdy secrets: She's been to a Star Wars convention. To collect Pez dispensers. She's even visited the original Pez factory in Austria and the Pez museum in Burlingame, Calif.
She started her 300-strong collection long before she graduated from Wharton and Kellogg, even before she was contemplating her own entrance essays.
"I was about 14, I think, and when I was younger, I was interested in art and pop culture and quirky things," Blackman says. "And you might not think of them as art, but they're pop art, and the way I have displayed them in my house is like a work of art."
Quite a few of them are worth more than $175, but Blackman's not selling, especially now that her son is interested. "He's 4, though, so it's not like he's a collector." Yet. 
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