October 31, 2002

THE WILD PARTY

 It was a wild party, maybe the wildest.  The girls were wild and wet and beautiful and dangled from the ceiling like chandeliers.  Large handsome scantily clad men were everywhere, sprawled on coffee tables or leaning against counters as if the well-dressed guests had just casually dropped them there like empty glasses or ashtrays.  Only the smartest and most sophisticated people were invited. People who were perfectly able to hang together in large, intimate, stylish groups casually yet flawlessly using words like "germane" or "banal."  Bon mots shot through the crowd like flaming arrows.  Their targets were frequently seen running screaming through the beautifully decorated lushly carpeted rooms. It was just that wild.

As the evening progressed, the night got longer; and things started to happen.  The wine flowed like water, and the guests drank like fish.  In this aquarium of revelry, as the guests got tighter, their clothing got looser.  Eyes met, hands wandered, and bosoms heaved suggestively, restrained only by the faintest wisps of the finest slips of the purest silk.  The women were excited, too.

As the lights dimmed, groups of glittering guests gathered in dark corners and sat and played Kiss the Bottle.  Other groups clustered together and played Spin the Postman.  The host himself had to extricate the dizzied Letter Carrier from the mob of frenzied hedonists and escort him home.  The Bottle, however, remained and had a lovely time.

In the Ball Room, the party reached a fevered pitch, as sporting equipment of all kinds was allowed in.  Men in hockey masks danced wildly with elegant women, women casually sporting some of the largest squash racquets ever seen anywhere.  Elsewhere people glided effortlessly across the slick wooden parquet floor, gracefully dancing arm in arm in groups of nine or eleven and smiling dazzlingly.  One woman wrapped herself sensually around the central stave of the tetherball court and squealed merrily as several men volleyed away with hearty yells of "game," "set," and "match."  Like I'm saying, it was a wild party.

All this revelry was set against the background of a wild, stomping, cool, shouting band.  The band was, to put it mildly, the absolute greatest.  The Immediate Gang had played at many a mad function, but never before had they seen anything as wildly incomprehensible as this.  As the six handsome, high-yaller musicians dressed in matching brass tuxedoes pelted out a throbbing, funky backbeat, the room grew hot, it filled with smoke, the smoke filled with people, and the people filled with the sound of the Immediate Gang .  And the music played on and on and on deep deep into the night and it seemed as if it would never end.

Upstairs far away from the pulsing, buzzing crowd in the still, languid darkness, the most beautiful girl could be found.  She lay there on a bed in the room at the top of the stairs, stripped completely naked, engulfed in her own personal penumbra of passion.  The only thing which she wore was the inescapable thick, musky scent of Desire.  She lay there completely naked, except for the dozens of hats, coats, and handbags that the horde of guests had thrown on her, having mistaken that hazel-eyed, honey-limbed, cinnamon-skinned embodiment of the sins of the flesh for a rather ornate, life-sized party favor.  The hats didn't mind, though.  Not one bit.