Blogged And Tagged

This Sunday marks the finale of another season of my beloved Amazing Race. Even now as I blog from a taxi speeding across a deserted Manhattan in the predawn hours on my way to JFK, I can imagine that I am on the race. As it was, my night out on the town was in its own way a series of challenges, each task completed with the same level of happy satisfaction one would imagine I would employ on CBS primetime. The final challenge being a simple choice: Blogged or Tagged. In this Detour, contestants choose between blogging their adventure out on the town or taking a series of photos to be uploaded and tagged on Facebook. As expected, I chose blogging while Matty’s team went for tagging.

It all started innocently enough at Vlada with Original Jonathan. Initially we were going to have a drink and a snack at Vynl, but that hot slab of a bartender Aaron wasn’t working so we switched to old reliable Vlada around the corner. Jonathan is at something of a crossroads in his life and career in Manhattan and we were long overdue for some one-on-one time to discuss it. In the meantime, some guy named Mark recognized me from who can even say how many years ago. I am sure he knew me because he said, “I thought it was you but then wasn’t sure because you weren’t in shorts.” I was correctly identified but Jonathan was not so lucky, planting a cheek kiss on a guy named Chance, who as it turns out, was not his former co-worker Spencer.

Our drink and discussion at an end, we headed for the coat check, to retrieve our jackets and our next clue. It was there that I ran into Joe, who was just on his way in, but upon seeing me, realized it was already time to leave… with me! Jonathan went back to his apartment and Joe and I hopped into a cab to head down to the Village for a small party at Chris’ apartment, the scene of my notorious Halloween blog entry. Matty would be waiting there for us with his charming Austrian boyfriend Hanno. This time instead of hot shirtless men, the party was jammed with cleavage-heaving young women… and adorable Ryan Newman.

Ryan was there with his new boyfriend who, like me, is from Westchester. Although I own. They must be very happy together because the moment I arrived, Ryan flew into his arms like a long separated lover and was never more than a fingertip away the rest of the evening. Matty, ever the publicist, bragged on Ryan’s Britney Spears dance moves and prodded me to encourage an encore. However, the new boyfriend, in full Footloose-era John Lithgow fashion had banned the dancing. This only encouraged my worst instincts and I relentlessly goaded Ryan to dance, in or out of his underwear, at the soonest possible moment.

Despite my warm small talk about the cookies he had made, the new boyfriend was unbowed in his banned stance. However, before we made our hasty retreat to the Maritime Hotel for our next challenge, I am quite certain that I spied Ryan busting a move or two in the corner. Perhaps he was ginned up by the excessively controlled Vanity Fair cover photo posing that I deftly avoided by ducking under a plate of half eaten chocolate cupcakes, though Matty happily flung himself in despite his less-desirable placement on the third fold next to the perfume ad.

I had thought we would end up at Corey Craig’s CD release party further across town at the Chelsea Hotel, but instead we landed at the new hot gay party in the winterized cabanas off the upper patio of the lovely Maritime Hotel. A birthday party was being thrown for a woman named Zoe, who by all accounts is the woman of the moment in the gay community. The party was a weird mix of young gays in purposefully hetero gear (a self-ripped sleeveless t-shirt… really?), even younger gays in collar and tie and 90s leftovers who don’t realize they are in their 30s now and wearing ANF days after the company posted a steep double digit decline in sales on Black Friday (the final nail in their pop culture coffin) while still clinging to an ecstasy fueled Palladium fantasy that even for them is but a dim memory. For everyone else at the party, that look evokes an era near the end of the last century best described as “middle school.”

Also there seemed to be a lot of vests out tonight. I know I am not exactly the cutting edge of fashion. Earlier while comparing Polo shirts at Chris’ party, a co-worker of Matty’s gave my Ralph Lauren shirt a quizzical look and then smiled a smooth knowing smile. “Ah. Factory. No wonder I didn’t recognize it.” That being said, these boys in their vests just looked like out of work valets. I had to resist the urge to hand them my car keys. I guess it is all part of this ADD generation. Everything is so sped up, they don’t even have time for sleeves! Even the DJ got into the act and spun 28 seconds of all my favorite songs. It was like walking through a low rent carnival game row that didn’t want to pay music royalties. It made me long for the days of exhaustive ten to fifteen minute dance mixes that seemed all too short while dancing under the watchful spin of Junior. I am sure the thirty-something in the Abercrombie tee sipping on a cosmo thought the exact same thing.

Conor was there in a gently worn hoodie that undoubtedly had been tirelessly and expensively distressed to appear so casually at ends on a chilly winter night. He and Matty spotted each other and sparred at a distance though it didn’t have any of the venom I expected. Whatever intense animus there once was between them has apparently since been replaced by the kind of playful sniping that usually ended with Krystal and Alexis plunging into a fountain during sweeps. The ever winning smile of Brian Babst was on hand as well, ready the second he spotted me with lines from last night’s 30 Rock, all perfectly memorized. “I watch each episode twice,” he confided. “Once the night of when I am drunk and again in the morning when I am sober.” It was a tactic that clearly was paying off.

The evening ended as suddenly as it began. Joe was fondling his coat check ticket while lamenting all the photos Matty was taking, and when I returned from the bathroom, he was gone. In a flash, Zoe, the birthday lady in red, was gone from her own party too and it was like the air was let out of the balloon. In the end, some friend of Matty tried to coax us to join them at 3am at Brandon Voss' apartment, but we just stood in stunned horror as they (Conor included) swirled out of the nightclub into the street like the dancers from Fame, screeching and mobbing taxis in a mad clamour to reach the next destination. Matty, Hanno and I slipped away quietly uptown toward Chelsea, where I left them happily on the corner on their way home. For them the adventure was coming to an end, but for me it was just beginning. An hour later, bag in hand, I was in that cab on my way to the airport. For me, the race continues.