I haven’t been to Pink in weeks. I was under the impression that I’d actually kicked my Thursday night addiction, yet somehow got dragged there (I blame the wine at dinner) for Wilhelmina’s Modeling Agency’s 40th Anniversary after party last night. The first thing I noticed as I approached the 27th street strip of debauchery was Marquee’s super-weird new awning-like entrance.


In this picture it looks white, but I swear the atrocity was neon green. It looked like an alien hovercraft had landed on top of the club and Martians had perhaps taken over inside. I doubt this was the look they were going for. Apparently, Marquee was hosting some sort of NASCAR party, but the only thing I saw on the red carpet backdrop were lame ads for Sprint. So who knows? More importantly, who cares? I just can’t believe the city of New York let Marquee extend their already obnoxious entrance into two lanes of traffic. My shocked cabbie had to swerve in order to not collide with the thing. Let’s all hope this ridiculous glowing awning is temporary.

Enter Pink. New phenomena to note!: Men with bright color pashmina scarves. More specifically, men with neon PINK pashmina scarves. Observe Pink’s doorman (sorry I don’t have a better photo, I didn’t bring my camera out and took this with my phone…SEE…proof I wasn’t planning ITAL to going out).



When it started to get chilly in the city, Euro men had some sort of hidden fashion conference and decided to dawn colored pashminas with dark jackets. Most of these guys were sexy anyway, and the spark of color added a little flair to their outfit, while also making them look gay by American standards. Anyway, this started with electric blues and deep reds. That I can handle. Then around Halloween, guys started wrapping orange scarves around their collars. While the orange scarf-look may look stunning on a Helmut Lang billboard, it just doesn’t work in real life.

But now!

Now we have men with pink, that’s right, pink scarves. Last night saw two. One Pepto Bismal pink and the other baby pastel pink. Is the doorman sporting pink accessories because he works at place called Pink and is trying to mesh with the club’s title? That doesn’t even make sense since the cocktail waitresses are wearing gold. And what are the two others guys’ excuse?!

The club filled up around one thirty. The music was entirely uninteresting…dare I say bad. The crowd wasn’t impressive. Roberto assured me Wilhelmina had a 150+ person guest list, and that people were just arriving late since this was the ‘after party.’ I decided to take my tired ass home.

I dawned my coat and just as I walked toward the exit, I saw the most beautiful man I’d seen in weeks. I shamelessly made eye contact with him, and I like to think he looked a bit sad that I had my coat on and was heading to the door. As we proceeded down Pink’s labyrinth-like steps, I saw not one, but five more men of the same caliber.

The male models had arrived.

And they weren’t gross, diaper-wearing, baby models like the ones I recently encountered at The Madison. These boys were clean-cut, well groomed, not-inebriated and appeared to have full possession of all their bodily functions. Pink Elephant also actually cards. So they all had to be plus twenty-one. I immediately took my coat off:

“I’m staying to ogle the man-meat!”

So I stayed another twenty minutes and did some schmoozing, although the beautiful boy I’d first seen never resurfaced. When I finally did leave, I saw Alex Karev from ABC's Grey’s Anatomy standing on the staircase below me.


My first instinct was just to pass by and say to him: “Alex Karev!” But that seemed absurd. Besides, the guy was shit-faced! He looked like a seventeen-year-old baby model who’d gone shot happy with a bottle of booze. From my limited reading of US Weekly, I’d been under the impression he was married and a nice, family guy. Well, he was walking in ‘S’ shapes while a woman (his wife?) bitched about not being able to find something in her purse.

I slid by them as one of the doorman began announcing, “Clear the way. This is Justin Chambers!”

Sadly, his name didn’t elicit any kind of acknowledgement from the crowd. As I exited, Justin pushed against me before wobbling to the left and announced to everyone:

“I have to take a piss!”

The Pink doorman took him by the shoulders and steered him back inside the club.

Charming.

I was done for the night.

DISCOVERY: Plastic glasses are not champagne flutes. Despite what I wrote in jest yesterday, last night on my birthday I, a stunning model of good behavior, intended to remain cool, calm, collected and not drunk like a proper hostess my mother would be proud of. This quest was thwarted: Why? Because plastic glasses are not champagne flutes. This may seem self-evident, but allow me to explain. When drinking in a club or bar one can at least attempt to keep track of how much alcohol they’re consuming. Theoretically at a house party you can do the same. Yet the liquid volume of a champagne flute is miniscule compared to the volume of an even half-filled house party plastic cup. Hence we can construct a mathematic formula that goes something like “every 1 glass of house party champagne = 3 glasses of champagne if we were measuring in flutes.” Unfortunately, the average party-goers brain is not aware of this discrepancy, causing them to think they’ve had 5 glasses of champagne when in reality they’ve had 15. I was a victim of this logic. What can I say? I never made it past pre-calculus. Throw in 3 Bacardi mixed drinks and the occasional shot and you have my mental state last night. I’m actually listening to throbbing house music right now on my iPod to prevent myself from falling asleep over my desk and to wean my body off the party train / the reality that I’m no longer mistress birthday girl of the moment. Even with the music it still feels like midgets are building a fortress with electric drills in the back of my brain.

Flashback to yesterday: After coming home from work, stopping to get another round of liquor on the way (and haggling the price of my Malibu down $2 – go me) I hoped into the shower and began a lengthy beautification process. The majority of this process is always taken up by deciding what to wear. During our pre-party lunch conference, Bartok and I deiced that we wanted to go casual: jeans, a nice top, maybe heels. I even managed to fit in time for a power shopping spree on my lunch hour to purchase a new top. Our overall outfit goal with the casual route was to send the message, “This party is no big deal. We throw fifty-five person soirées all the time, no sweat.” Needless to say, we began trying stuff off and ultimately were both dressed up enough to go pick up Oscars on our way home. Tatas and Bartok ended up in fancy black dresses and somehow talked me into this obnoxiously shiny gold mini-skirt my that (surprise surprise) my Barbie-doll mother bought for me when I was sixteen. Jeans. Who were we kidding?

Since the party was at Mr. T’s place, next we had the delightful challenge of transporting cake, ice, cases of beer and liquor and mixers for fifty-five people to his house without the aid of professional moving men. Tatas had the genius idea of using this ginormous suitcase I keep hidden behind our futon. I only use it when moving between New York and Italy. This suitcase could fit furniture inside. So all the booze and mixers were stuffed into this enormous wheeling duffel bag, which Bartok and Tatas later told me they took TO the liquor store earlier that day to wheel all the gin, rum and bottles of champagne back to my apartment. I’m really sad I was at work and missed that visual.

So we loaded all the stuff onto my building’s bellhop wheeling transportation device and somehow talked a cab into taking us, with all our luggage, just five blocks up into Soho to Mr. T’s. Men on the street would happily approach us eager to help lift the duffel bag (thinking it we were traveling and it was filled with clothes) and then reel when it weighed more than six human bodies. That was highly entertaining.

Only the ever gentlemanly Classic and his friends arrived at the scheduled party start time of nine p.m., but by ten we had a pretty full house. Perhaps the most delightful surprise is that my fabulous girlfriend Safari solved all my woes about whether to serve food or not / what was cheesy and what was not (see yesterday’s entry) and arrived with an entire gourmet rotisserie chicken, couscous, arugala salad, dill, French bread, potato salad, salmon and chocolate meringues. Talk about a good friend! We set up an entire top notch buffet.

A lot of my college friends, most everyone from the New York clubbing circuit, and even a few fellow bloggers were in attendance – the majority of whom brought champagne. At around eleven p.m. we had a vodka shortage, at which point Safari kicked in yet again with a forceful champagne PR campaign. I literally think we had enough champagne to fill the Hudson. Some guests even splurged on the nice stuff – Moet, Veuve and crazy French names that I can’t pronounce. My childish ice cream cake was presented with the appropriate number of candles which I managed to blow out in entirely after having happy birthday sung to me in both English and Italian. Needless to say, the Italians were the life of party with friends of friends of friends from Sicily in continual arrival. They also orchestrated multiple encores of happy birthday and popped a lot of champagne. The Brazilians played their part as well, especially when my friend Classic force fed everyone in the kitchen tequila shots at around eleven thirty. The party plundered forward into the early morning and according to my cell phone text messages, I got home at around two thirty. Many guests headed over to The Box at around one a.m. Thank God they couldn’t convince me to go with them. My night was spiningly joyful enough without getting lost in the vortex.

Like most people in New York I rely on cabs to transport me home after a long night out or take me to the “end of the earth” extreme east and west sides of the city where subways don’t go. Here are my questions for the city’s fascinating drivers who get us where we need to be.

1. Talk to me about your qualifications. Do you actually have a driver’s license like mine or a special “cab driver’s license” that qualifies you to NASCAR-level speed and roll tight corners?

2. What vehicle did you drive in your home country? A truck? A steam shovel? A cart pulled by oxen? How did this prepare you for life as a nyc cabbie?

3. Who are you racing? I’ve had my face thrown up against the cab’s plastic dividers as we screech to a halt one too many times not to be curious. Is this how you guys entertain yourself during a long day’s work or is there an actual underground taxi-driver race going on with secret rules and a jackpot? Can I bet on our cab? What’s the grand prize?

4. On Saturday night when there are five sets of taxi-hopefuls crowding the corner of Broadway and 14th, how do you decide which ones to pull over to?

5. Who takes the pictures of you guys that are posted on the backseat? Is this actually you or does the city just have three generic photos of men in turbans that they’ve rotated throughout every taxi in the city?

6. How do you pronounce your name? Which series of unspeakable consonants is your first name? Which are your last? What do your friends call you?

7. Do you derive pleasure by whizzing past taxi-hopefuls with your availability light on when you’re really off-duty? This is torturous to us who are doing jumping jacks trying to get your attention.

8. Why do you think whenever I empty my purse in you cab to locate my favorite Mac lipstick that I am “leaving trash in your cab?” These are my expensive possessions and I always stuff them back in my purse.

9. PS do people really come with pursefulls of garbage which they dispose of in your taxi? That’s horrific. You think they’d just use one of the many public trash receptacles located throughout the city.

10. Do you have nightmares about the West Village? I do, and I just have to walk there. Is there some sort of West Village cabbie support group? Could I come?

11. How do you manage to be on your cell phones literally every moment that you’re driving? Who loves you so much? Or do you all just have second jobs as telemarketers in your own countries? (Like when I call Compaq for tech support and they transfer me to India, is that call really bounced back to you?) Teach me your multitasking skills.

12. What’s with the new interactive new york city maps/tv screens that have appeared in the back of your cabs for patrons to play with? Does this double as a navigation system that you actually use? Does the city of new york really feel they have to placate new yorkers with an interactive placemat so we don’t get bored while transported from point A to point B?

13. What’s you favorite shift? Daytime: Intolerable traffic, lots of nice business people giving you tips, getting receipts, charging it to their companies. Nighttime: Minimal traffic, drunken people giving you big tips since they’re trying to impress their dates/make up for the throwing up on your car matt. Wait. This time I answered my own question…