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o I went to this party at the Delano Hotel, the one where Madonna's a part owner. "Oh, you didn't tell me this was an Ingrid party," said the friend I'd invited to come with me, meaning Ingrid Casares, Madonna's friend.
To get into this party, you had to go up to the velvet rope and give your name to the guy with the clipboard. Or you gave the name of the person you were pretending to be (in my case the magazine editor who had given me her invitation). Then you walked across the veranda and through white curtains into the lobby. This lobby with its dark wood floor stretches back, back, back, and all the chairs are, like, design statements. They're, like, way more important than you are, especially the one that's fourteen feet high.
The party was to celebrate a new chef, so out back behind the swimming pool there was all this food to stand in line for, seared tuna, black bean and corn salad. I remember a lot of long, straight blond hair tossing around, tight dresses and white lipstick. Some people huddled to the side in their own little curtained off cabanas. Nine hundred people at this party and I was the only one wearing glasses.
After eating at stand-up tables, people were wandering down to the beach, where there were abstract ice sculptures with scooped out hollows filled with homemade sorbet. There were white lounge chairs out on the sand, pulled up in a circle, the men and women sprawled in them were trying to look languid. Then suddenly everybody was standing up and pulling tighter and tighter into a circle. I went up and looked over all the shoulders, and there was a man in the middle, holding a stick up over the head of a gaping alligator.
Later, my friend and I were waiting on the veranda for the valet parking guys to bring up my car, and there she was, Olympia lounging on Freud's velvet couch, looking exactly like everyone else at the party, only twice as much so, working those red shoes.