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Something about the Pool Party at the
Surfcomber on the Saturday of Winter Party Festival brings to mind
Hugh Hefner’s
Playboy
Mansion. Our version of it, anyway.
The car glides under the porte-cochere of the
Surfcomber, and a doorman gets the door—and then you wander through
the lobby, packed with boyz in various states of undress—and out
along the landscaped loggia, this year dressed to the nines by RKM
Boys in various shades of orange and yellow—and already you can hear
it: the music and the buzz of hundreds of boyz in full Saturday
afternoon “Boogie Nights” mode. It’s an all-afternoon porn
shoot—with boyz in the pool and boyz in cabanas and boyz on the
dance floor.
Like that—except this year, the Pool Party was
amped up exponentially. There were flocks of
New York
snowbirds who’d barely managed to escape nine inches of snow—in
search of another nine inches… And while RKM Boys have always done
a superb job with the décor, this year seemed even more
over-the-top, with their orange-and-yellow spangled and polka-dotted
décor stretching way beyond the pool and nearly to the ocean. And
while attendance has always been high, something about this year’s
Pool Party attracted more people than ever. As Alyson Calagna put
it: “Beautiful Day.”
And it kept on getting better. “It’s insane,”
someone said to us, gazing around. Because it was—it didn’t seem
possible that so many people could be there, without there being any
sense of overcrowding. Instead, the energy just kept on
building—and every time you thought the party had peaked, it was
amped up another notch.
And that was Alyson. “Now let me see you werk,”
she said. She read the crowd—and let them have it. She tuned them
perfectly, tweaked them repeatedly, and played them like Midori
plays a Stradivarius. As one of her voice-overs had it, “Who’s that
playing that sexy house music? That’s Alyson Calagna.” She made
you pay attention to what she was doing; she made you listen and
move. She kept the boyz happy and the dance floor overflowing down
onto the sand.
There was “Shackles,” for example—a song long
associated with Winter Party and South Beach with its lyric “Praise
you”—and also “Strings of Life” with its swelling strings and
hopeful romance. It was the perfect setting for a birthday party,
for an adorable Superman—and his beautiful posse.
And it was a perfect grace note to Matt
Foreman’s stewardship of the Task Force. With this his final Winter
Party as Task Force head, Matt leaves the Winter Party Festival on a
solid foundation—and it could only have been gratifying for him to
look out over the insanely happy crowd of merrymakers, local
shakers, and tastemakers.
There were cocktails—and swag—by Bacardi—as
well as underwear by Undergear. In fact, there was an underwear
scramble as word got out. Out in the courtyard, it was a feeding
frenzy as undie-deprived queens (and one Surfcomber maid still in
uniform, on her knees with open garbage bag) pawed through boxes of
Undergear, stuffing eight and ten pairs of the latest edition of
Undergear in their gift bags, in their pockets, in their
already-stuffed briefs. “There’s only Small and Medium left”
someone moaned—which said something about the crowd—or their own
ideas of themselves. (And need we mention which waistbands were
most in evidence that night at Hilton Wolman’s party at Karu&Y?)
It was a beautiful party—and no one wanted to leave. The sun had
stayed out, but never too hot—and always there was the ocean and the
palms, and the pool filled with beach balls, and Alyson’s sexy house
music, and boyz at their peak, with everything anticipated, all the
rest of Winter Party Festival still ahead, yet to come. What’s not
to love about that?
Best always,
Mark and Robert
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