Becks got the call from Sin sometime Sunday morning; I don't know exactly when, because I was hiding in sleep from my headache until well past noon. I suspected Sin would have more than a few questions about the last couple of hours of Saturday night, but she managed to keep it to the two most pertinent ones — the one about how she got home (Jenn and Iva took her), and the one about what the hell happened to her camera (it ended up in my jacket pocket).
I go out so much that going out really isn't going out anymore; it's just what happens three or four nights a week after the sun goes down. The same bars, the same bands, the same faces. Not that it's an excruciating bore or anything. It's just that for long stretches of time, there's nothing particularly special or event-oriented about a night on the town. It can get to be something of a rut.
Well, nothing will pull you out of your nightlife rut quite like tagging along with a pack of young wives and mothers whose jobs and familial routines and budgets have kept them from blowing it out together for far too long.
They've been spending their evenings getting children ready for bed. They don't get to see one another nearly as often as they'd like. They haven't been able to set aside a night (and a day for recovery) to get out of the house and go at it like they used to, so when they finally do, they're going to make damn sure it's a special event.
Throw in a couple of recent birthdays and the fact that a few of the ladies in question learned all they know about partying — and it's quite a lot — together to begin with, and you can rest assured you won't just be spending another Saturday night with the ass of your dirty jeans glued to a rusty barstool. They're going to get dressed to the nines, pull out the killer shoes that rarely get worn even to work, and take a guilt-inducing amount of money out of the ATM. And they're not going to waste that shit on a bunch of draft beers and a game or two of darts down at the Pelican Pub. They're going to head out to a gay nightclub and dance and laugh and ogle hot men who like other hot men and generally get as fabulous as they can in the time allotted.
I should've known I was in over my head when, before we'd finished dinner at Ratchada, Iva's husband John's whole-fish entrée became the centerpiece for what appeared to be a photo essay about decadent living. Or by the way the husbands, no strangers to the Girls' Night Out phenomenon, quietly dropped out of the pack one at a time and headed home to relieve babysitters or make sure there was Alka-Seltzer in the house or whatever. Or back at Becks' place for what can only be termed Martini Intermission, where the drinks started to get spilled and the pictures started to get decidedly goofy. Or in the car on the way to Georgie's Alibi, when the music suddenly skewed heavily toward the electronic and repetitive.
My general disdain for dance music notwithstanding, I've always really liked Georgie's Alibi, a St. Pete institution with a killer bar staff and no discernible inclination to perpetuate hardcore gay-bar stereotypes. My experiences there, however, were limited to happy hours, weeknight drink specials and Sunday-night drag shows. I was in no way prepared for the crush of humanity as I trailed behind the four women dancing toward the nearest bar. Saturday night at Georgie's was fucking happening, a sweaty, joyful mess of rhythmic throb and moving, mostly male bodies. There was room to breathe, a little, but there was barely room to stand, and most of that would disappear as the hour grew later. It was a little like trying to hang out in a particularly colorful Jell-O dessert, thick and moist and prismatic and disorienting.
Somebody put a Ketel One and cranberry in my hand. One of the ladies squealed as she recognized someone. Sin gleefully stumbled off at my behest, looking for attractive men to photograph for an upcoming Planet issue. (No, seriously, that was what the pictures were for.) Somehow, I ended up at another bar by the dance floor, marveling at the number of cowboy hats in attendance — Brokeback Mountain has certainly been influential. I hadn't seen that many shit-kicker chapeaus at a nightclub since Madonna's Music album came out five years ago.
Then Madonna herself came on over the PA (in some sort of wildly re-mixed form, anyway; I wouldn't have known it was a Madonna song if Becks hadn't pointed out her name on one of the video monitors), and suddenly I was holding, like, a million coats as the ladies filed past, already moving to the beat as they disappeared into the morass of chests and raised hands undulating on the dance floor.
That was it, those were the seven minutes we'd come for: the girls out there in it, liquored up and laughing and unencumbered by kids and work and mortgages and broken appliances and a car that's making that goddamned sound again. It would get a little crazier before Jenn and Iva left, propping Sin up between them; the dirty dancing against the bar with the blonde, obviously wired young man was particularly entertaining. But the whole night was really about that one scene: Four friends dancing to Madonna, timeless and free and generally getting as fabulous as they could — in the time allotted.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2006.