Case files closed on the Kiss & Fly cone saga (sort of.) I finally decided to have a serious chat with the bathroom attendant and almost tripped into the sink when she revealed that she ASKED someone to put a cone / cone(s) on the toilet.

“The toilet is not broken,” she emphasized in our chaotic interview. “The door is broken. You can’t close that door.” She pointed to the wooden panel that would seal off that bathroom, currently open and held in place by a trash can.

As per usual, it was too loud and sweaty with too many girls retouching make-up to prolong such an absurd conversation in an attempt to clarify. The gist of her rationale seemed to be that women had been trying to use that bathroom, but couldn’t close or lock the door. My questions:

a) Since when is privacy valued in a club setting? A place where girls share stalls and friends guard friends’ bathroom doors anyway?

b) Why can’t they get the door fixed? Geez. That would be even easier and less gross than repairing a toilet.

A new mystery revolves around this crazy vodka called Snow Queen. Can someone enlighten me about this beverage? In the dark, cradled in a bucket of ice, it looks suspiciously like Grey Goose. I guessed Snow Queen was some generic vodka Kiss & Fly economically chose to pawn off on promoter tables. It tastes frighteningly like nothing (allowing for unconscious mass-consumption) and gave me the worst hangover of my life. So I did some research and found that Snow Queen vodka’s the new quality product from Kazakhstan. According to their website and wiki, it’s also won some awards.

Side question: Who bestows liquor awards? I’m assuming a panel of judges who get to drink all day? That’s a great job.

So now I don’t know if Snow Queen vodka is super classy or super trashy. Is it the new Grey Goose or is it distilled from the tears and old bathwater of Kazakhstani senior citizens? Anyone who’s a liquor expert, fill us all in.

On a separate yet related Kiss & Fly note, this Go-Go girls’ outfit isn’t really working for me. I think the Kiss & Fly dancers had a much better things going for them when the feathers were on their chest instead of their rump.

Promoters: the species of social leeches endlessly harassing us for our free time. I love writing about these New York party organizers because I find their tactics (mass text messaging, Evites, mass emails, personalized emails, facebook harassment, casual texts, guilt-trip texts, phone solicitation) endlessly fascinating. I thought I’d seen it all. I thought no promoter text message could have the power to shock me.

I was wrong.

I wrote a past article about fromoters (deluded friends who harbor the illusion they’re a hot city promoter, doing this dirty job voluntarily, sans pay). I’d like to introduce another category: The no-moter. This is the promoter you’ve said no to a thousand times. The promoter you perhaps never even went out with in the first place. Who you perhaps don’t even know! How they even have your number remains an enigma. Yet they text you daily anyway.

I’m doing a [insert famous sports team] celebrity event tonight with [insert semi-celebrity name] and [insert a rapper’s name] performing at [Marquee / Tenjune] with [insert DJ you’ve never heard of] from San Tropez. Say my name@door, tons of bottlezz. Are you coming?

You’d think after sending a target messages like this for 367 days with no response EVER, the promoter might remove the prey from their phone’s intricate mailing system and save everyone the AT&T charge of ten cents. But no. Promoter lists are kind of like a tramp stamp. They’re with you for life. And don’t bother texting the no-moter about getting yourself removed from his mailing, because not even he knows how to remove you. His phone’s hooked up to computers which are hooked up to interns which are hooked up to facebook which relay some technical code which births crazy digital mailing lists that only an IT guy from India could understand. Finding a needle in a haystack while drunk and blindfolded would take less time than locating your name in this jumbled promotional spamming method.

I’d like to preface the following incident by reiterating that no-motors are not bad people.

They’re just people you don’t know. I, like many, happen to have very close friends who promote. My loyalties are therefore tied. The ‘no’ answer (or rather non-response) isn’t because I think I’m too good to go out with you, I just have a prior allegiance to people I actually know.

In an iPhone mishap in which I meant to call a friend of mine we’ll call Tim, I accidently called no-motor Tim. It took a solid five minutes of me positing ‘why does your voice sound so different?’ and ‘why do you keep harping about Pink Elephant?’ until I realized I wasn’t talking to my friend Tim, but Tim the promoter I never go out with. I explained to no-motor Tim in the nicest was possible that I’d actually contacted him by mistake, yet he still interpreted my phone call as me finally coming around and craving to go out with him that night.

I’ve only met no-motor Tim a handful of times, but he seems to take the constant rejection of promoter existence more personally than his younger, hotter promoter counterparts. While I’d definitely be open to going out with him, partying doesn’t pay me. My two jobs pay me. So I need to be energized and lucid which translates to only go out occasionally. And when you’re going out occasionally, chances are you’re going to want to spend it with your friends.

Despite my best efforts at clarification, no-motor Tim insisted that I was making an appearance at his party that night, which of course I didn’t because I had plans with my friend Tim, the person I’d actually meant to call. No-motor Tim consequently got angry.

The promotional text I got the next day:

MB, I heard from a girl that you gained weight. I’m deleting you from my phone list. I’m sorry. Clubs want me with skinny girls only.

Woah! Low blow!

Will he actually delete me from whatever jumbled promotional spamming method he uses?

At this point, I could only be so lucky.

Yesterday I found myself the only girl in a room full of caveman-like boys, who intently watched the All Star game with beer in hand. Most were still in corporate attire, but ties had been loosened and shirts un-cuffed. I sort of felt like I was inside one of those National Geographic specials. I was the explorer in a cute tan outfit with a camouflage hardhat and a necklace of binoculars observing a watering hole of man beasts alone in their natural habitat. I thought I might get a sneak peak into the inner workings of the male mind and come out of the situation with the inside skinny on what guys talk about when they’re alone (How much they trash talk their girlfriends? What they’re really think about during your heart to heart talks? How to decipher the male grunt?).

Sadly, this didn’t happen. I had to prop my head up with pillows just to keep myself from passing out in boredom. All they talked about was their jobs, the economy, the stock market, the baseball game, the players’ stats and personal histories and this website called Where the Hell is Matt.

Zzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzz.

So I started asking questions about game to keep myself awake like, “Why is that player so much larger than that player?” and “Why are they all wearing jerseys from different teams?” and screaming, “This is so confusing!” At which point the host locked me in his bedroom with his Guitar Hero so they could watch in peace. Anyway…this entire boy experience reminded me of an apartment party I attended a few weeks ago, a party pad I’ve titled, “Where Good Boys Go When They Die.”

Observe below, the ultimate, New York men’s entertainment loft. If this isn’t boy heaven, I don’t know what is:

Pool, foosball, plasma. (Yes, there’s darts in the corner as well)

Funky, old-style arcade games. Some as primitive as packman, others where you have to blow stuff up wearing a cool mask.

Three more plasma screens (watching all sporting events, in every time zone in the world, all at once, is a must). A pinball machine (The Sopranos, you even get to shoot the ball between Dr. Melfi’s legs) and another arcade game in which you hunt grizzly bears.

Beer on tap.

Beer with its own fridge.

Grub! Grub! Grub! Lot’s of grub! (And a plasma screen.)

When I go to a nightclub, especially a Hamptons nightclub, I’m not expecting refinement. I’m not anticipating costumer service or comfort or access to the bathroom. I’m pretty much prepared to be trapped in a body lock between those two crazy Swedish girls prostituting themselves, inhaling the stench of cigarettes, fresh vomit and weed. Often, consequently, I’m not even expecting to have a good time.

Even with these impressively low expectations, I found myself shocked by this.

This is the ripped and holey banquet couch at Dune which patrons pay upwards of 2K to sit at, stand on, or apparently, violate. This photo captures what I find paradoxical and intriguing about the Hamptons.

How can a theoretically elite and successful club, complete with celebrity sightings, promotional events and outrageous prices, get away with decorum like this?

If this couch, subpar to a McDonald’s booth, was presented to a bottle service group in the city, they’d immediately go elsewhere. In the Hamptons, the bottle service group literally and figuratively jumps on it, accepting the grimy booth as just another part of the preposterous Hamptons financial defilement package we submit ourselves to weekend after weekend, without really knowing why.

I’ve written before about how Hamptons wackiness often inspires a Zen-like attitude, an acceptance of ‘loss of control.’ And I think this passive acceptance crosses over into every element of summering on Long Island.

A thirteen dollar bagel? Well, the next bagel shop is ten miles away and perhaps more expensive, especially if we include the gas money to get there.

A thirty dollar cab ride home (per head!)? Well, I’m drunk, unable to drive, and in the wilderness.

A germ-laden couch with holes in it for 2K? Well, we just valet-ed the car and escorting a rowdy drunken group to an alternate location would require the patience of a kindergarten teacher or a Taser.

The entire Hamptons setup traps tourists seeking prestige and relief from city humidity into accepting prices and quality they’d otherwise scoff at. It traps them into paying off a doorman, when in New York they’d cab it over to the club around the corner. Into partying on a banquet they normally wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Into accepting customer service they’d normally be phoning the better business bureau about. And consequently partying like orangutans with all city manners, conventions, and standards tossed out the window. Hence what keeps the Hamptons simultaneously dirty and fun.

Driving in a Hamptons-style overloaded car, we were cruising between Fourth of July parties when the entire backseat shrilly screamed “Breaaak!”

No, a deer or rodent hadn’t scurried under our tires.

No, a tree wasn’t tumbling onto our windshield.

Our GPS had navigated us though a South Hamptons back road that was lined with cars as far as the inebriated eye could see. Music blared at a level so high we could hear it within our own music-blaring car. Girls dressed to the nines hiked from their far parked vehicles to the mansion that was evidently hosting a raging event.

In a usually smooth bout of communication, we alerted our other three cars of friends that we’d be ‘breaking for this party.’ In a miraculous moment that only Fourth of July intoxication could provide, everyone somehow agreed and we all parked, staggering out of automobiles in the pursuit of party.

“Hey, is this Jamie’s party?” our ringleader asked a clearly bedraggled set of exiting participants. This is a name he pulled out of his ass, but it got us the desired response.

“No it’s Rob Cook’s,” they responded wearily (and helpfully.)

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!

We now possessed the host’s name. Our friends worried as we approached the noisy house: What would we find on the other side? How would we fit in?

“Maybe it’s a wedding. We can’t crash a wedding.”

“Maybe it’s a charity event. We’ll be like the only ones not in tuxes.”

Wrong and Wrong.

We entered with ease – no checkpoints, no hired security wielding lists. The glamorous manor was wisely locked up, yet the path to the backyard remained unguarded. We pushed through the hanging open wooden fence and admired what looked like the movie set for one of those teen comedies like “She’s All That.” Sprawling grass. Kegs. Naked kids in the pool. A loner puking in a bush. The token black guy wearing a baseball hat on the deck in a DJ booth. A self-serve bar stock piled with Mountain Dew.

For some reason, it took chillin on the lawn and a few more drinks for us to fully become aware about where we’d landed. As we further analyzed the music selection, lack of décor, and scattering of late-blooming teenagers, it finally dawned on us that we’d crashed a high school party.

A young man not far enough into puberty for shaving to be mandatory approached me suspiciously and asked, “Who are you here for?”

“James,” I sung quickly, my dyslexic mind easily switching up the names I’d heard out front.

“You mean George?” he corrected.

“Yeah-huh. George,” I nodded, attempting to recover as my heel fell into a sink hole in the grass.

He walked away unconvinced.

After trying to remember how to pump a keg and high-fiving a kid in Speedos that looked like Ron Jeremy, we decided to go before serious suspicious started to arise.

Standing at the opposite fence, good-naturedly waving to the incapacitated revelers staggering out, a wiry lad, presumably George, repeated Miss Manners-style; “Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming!”

We piled back into our cars and headed to our true destination: a more tranquil event hosted by forty-year-olds, but all of our party spirits had been profoundly touched by George. Ah, to be young and utilizing your parents’ empty South Hampton villa. High school immaturity, much like a contagious disease, fevered within us for the remainder of the night.

For me, time spent in the Hamptons remains a Zen-like exercise in coping with unpredictability. Unless you’re traveling with your own set of wheels, you rarely have any say in where you go, what you do, or when you do it. You start to feel like those chubby, clueless toddlers strapped in rear facing car seats, happily oblivious, along for the ride. People with cars have the control, but are burdened with responsibility. Everyone else is enviably carefree, but consequently at their mercy.

There’s two different ways to handle this scenario. One is the aforementioned ‘toddler approach,’ which we’ll discuss today. This involves utter passivity. You go wherever your share house is going because it’s easy, it’s non-confrontational, and there are people to take care of you once you’re obliterated on Patron. The other approach, which we’ll explore later this week, involves trying to take your Hamptons destiny into your own hands. Breaking off from the herds to accomplish some sort of side mission, whether it be meeting up with other friends, attending an alternate party, or frequenting a different club. If you have a car with a GPS system, this is easy. If you don’t, this ‘mission approach’ involves attempting to brainwash your ride to align with your plans, attempting to brainwash anyone with a car to align with your plans, or taking a very expensive taxi to your plans, which you share with six other people you don’t know.

With that intro, I let myself get ‘toddler style’ dragged this weekend to East Hampton’s Grey Goose Manor, where your liver comes to die. On the plus side, they serve a dinner with remarkably tasty steak so guests don’t suffer from alcohol poisoning immediately. On the down side, there’s still enough easy-to-chug vodka to get all of East Hampton hospitalized, jailed with a DUI or both.

Further proving that the Hamptons is essentially adult summer camp, the grub was served buffet style and eating took place in the ‘chic’ version of what for all practical purposes was a dining hall (granted, with complimentary Vitamin Water and martinis as opposed to a soda machine, yet still campy in feel).

Very pink beverages where passed around by circulating cocktail waitresses, which I couldn’t consume since to me, they tasted like cotton candy. This lead me to one of the three bars to ask, “I’d like a non-pink beverage. Preferably, non-sweet. Hell, just give me a vodka-water.” The Grey Goose bar representative was extremely accommodating.

The party filled up until the entire manor was instructed to leave for Lily Pond at the same time, which the valets just loved.

The festivities continued in the parking lot for forty minutes while we created a mega traffic jam on a one-way-only dirt road and men battled one another for the attention of the frenzied parking attendants.

The best part of the night by far was when a promoter loaded ten models into the back on an Enterprise van – no, not a van with seats. I mean like an empty mid-size van used to move furniture. The ladies were helped into the stainless steel cargo hold while I tried to snap pictures. The promoter in charge violently stopped me, going as far as to physically block my camera with his hands and scream obscenities at me. So I guess he doesn’t want people to know that he treats his female entourage like cattle. I’m sad I don’t have the visual, because if that transport scenario doesn’t epitomize the Hamptons, I don’t know what does.

Thursday. It came so fast I don’t think anyone was truly ready for it. Even the most professional organizers don’t have much experience dealing with 3-day weekend scenarios in which Friday’s the day off. So after countless emails and what felt like hundreds of debates via MSN, someone in my Hamptons crew made the executive decision that we’d all leave for Long Island post-clubbing at 2:30 AM to avoid traffic. Making this plan possible were two sober drivers and a car service. The most amusing part of our time spent at Kiss & Fly (which wasn’t promoting any 4^th of July party but was just its normal, crowded, cone-filled self) remained that every time the word “Hamptons” came up you’d hear a resounding chorus of, “Yep! We’re leaving right after this!”

So apparently our ingenious idea of partying in the city and driving to Long Island post-club in the middle of the night was something other East-bound fun-seekers had thought of as well. In fact, the more people I spoke to, the more it became apparent that all of Kiss & Fly was heading to the Hamptons as soon as the party winded down. Instead of cruising down a desolate LIE, I realized we could very well be entering some sort of packed, party highway.

So much for avoiding the crowds.

After Kiss & Fly, it took awhile to get everyone regrouped in our ringleader’s SoHo apartment. He tried to sober people up with homemade pressed Paninis, a sandwich that’s easily up for grabs for the title of “best Panini of my life” since it was crisp, meaty and oozing with Dijon. When finally car-bound, we wrestled over who got to utilize the one pillow available in the backseat. Someone upfront with a potent chip craving instructed the driver to stop at a gas station, where they proceeded to buy one of every kind of potato chip known to man. Cape Cod – Doritos Nacho Flavor – Lays BBQ – Doritos Cooler Ranch and Cheetos were consequently passed around until everyone fell asleep sitting up, inhaling crumbs. When I startled from slumber, I realized it was because our car wheels were crunching gravel instead of gliding over pavement i.e. we’d arrived at our house’s driveway in the shortest Long Island travel experience of my life. If only I could be unconscious and high on snack food’s artificial flavorings for all such journeys…

As our group stumbled inside and proceeded to claim couches / beds / lawn chairs / sections of the floor, the head of our house received a message from producer friends interested in pitching a reality TV program / documentary centered around the life of a friend of ours in the house who is launching a noteworthy business venture in coming months. Their idea had been to come to the Hamptons for the long weekend to get some trial footage. The text they sent resembled something like:

“We’ve decided to come. See you all tomorrow. I hope there are enough beds for us and the camera crew.”

To which our first reaction was, “camera crew!?!!?!?” and our second reaction was, “beds!?!!??”

We wrote back that we hoped the camera crew would be okay with sleeping outdoors on lawn chairs, since every Hamptons house on holiday long weekends is PACKED, PACKED still being an understatement.

So we drifted to sleep plotting how to best avoid the oncoming camera and fake an accident in which all the necessary electrical equipment might get destroyed in the pool. The adventures to come…

The good news: It’s a Holiday weekend coming up
The bad news: It’s forecast to rain every single day

The good news: It’s a Holiday weekend coming up
The bad news: Holidays make weird gray relationship even weirder (examples one and two)

The good news: You have extra time off
The bad news: You feel pressured to do something fabulous with it

The good news: You can leave the city for more than 48-hours
The bad news: So can everyone else and their cousin

The good news: Fourth of July fell on a Friday this year
The bad news: That means you need to be organized to leave Thursday, and Thursday’s, like, tomorrow

Panic ensues.

On a separate, slightly more serious note, an issue that’s been troubling my conscious has to do with charity as an excuse to party, and do these events actually raise any money?

This seemed the ultimate party question on everybody’s mind at Steve Nash’s charity event inside SoHo’s Replay store, which I attended exactly one week ago today. On the up side, snaps to Steve Nash for giving a hoot about charity. On the down side, it remained difficult to imagine the shindig would manage to break even since the event included:

2 stocked open bars

6 bartenders

15 attractive cocktail waitresses circling the crowd (my friend noted all the waitresses had legs and shins that looked like a female soccer player’s and asked if I thought they were selected for this exact purpose. I can picture the Craigslist open call ad now: ‘Seeking cocktail waitresses with soccer-esque shins for exclusive event.’)

Unlimited booze

Hamburgers

Mini hot dogs

Chips and guacamole

Vegetables

Quesadillas

Mini steaks

Vitamin water

Gourmet ice cream, and best of all,

Sushi in the shape of mini soccer balls.

Renting out SoHo’s Replay store and hiring a 20+ person wait staff must already have a hefty price tag, not to mention alcohol and food for two hundred people. Less than a dozen jerseys were auctioned off for around a $1,000.


Clearly, I’m missing something because in my mind the numbers don’t seem to add up. Yet I was always a dunce at math, so what do I know? If there is a way humanity can enjoy lux events inside SoHo designer stores while simultaneously helping kids in Africa, I’m all for it.

Unreal!

Remember Dirt Nasty’s comedic video, posted last week, which pokes fun at everything eighties? The vid took Youtube junkies by storm, but now seems to be influencing real life fashion decisions.

I, for one, didn’t know whether to scream in delight or horror when I saw this young gentleman at Hampton’s Dune Saturday night wearing the gold chain a.k.a. Donkey Rope that Dirt Nasty wears and continuously references in his rap lyrics. Who wants to holler, “’I’m radical, T-shirt say party animal,” first? [Note chain similarity!]

Did our Dune dude wear the chain to the club as a joke? As a Simon Rex homage? As a reference to the video? Or is that really just what he considers a classy look to pick up broads on Long Island?

Who knows!

Also under the category of crazy, I felt it appropriate to exhibit this delightful photo. I’m deeming it the ultimate share house lifestyle photo of the month, complete with ‘guy passed out on couch.’

It’s never pretty the day after.