“I’m going to teach you how to dance,” a short black man in baggy pants and braids snarled in a manner that he clearly thought I’d interpret as sexy.
In fact this was beyond normal niceness–it was special treatment. When my friends and I hijacked some people’s VIP lounge seats and chugged almost a whole bottle of champagne they’d bought, no one said anything to us. It seems that in any sort of civil company these days, being overly kind to the minority is prioritized. Only here the minority was a spoiled party girl who didn’t have to wait in line or pay and didn’t even care that R. Kelly never showed up.
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A few weeks ago Chuck Anderson, a rising-star illustrator whose work has been seen in a McGriddles commercial and ads for Absolut vodka, received an e-mail from Eric Johnson, an account exec with Trace, a magazine aimed at “today’s multiethnic youth.” Johnson wanted to know if he’d host a party at his place for Navan, a new vanilla-flavored cognac. Sorry, Anderson said, but I’m a 19-year-old Christian who lives in the suburbs with my parents. He put Johnson in touch with his friend Rob Robinson, a designer for a local ad agency who’s known to his friends as Robrob.
By the time I got there, at 11 PM, the place was packed. You can judge a house party’s funness by how fucked-up the bathroom is. If the toilet’s not busted by midnight, ain’t nothing good gonna happen. And sure enough, though the catering team was doing a decent job of keeping the place tidy–one black-clad man even asked Robrob for a paper towel to wipe up a spill–the top was off the toilet tank, exposing a severely messed-with ball cock.
The set was created for Olympia electro-rap duo Scream Club, two foulmouthed, pro-queer, anticapitalist women from the Peaches camp of gross-out sexiness. Cindy Wonderful and Sarah Adorable spent a lot of time onstage giving shout-outs: to someone named Elizabeth on her birthday; to filmmaker Rusty Nails, who shot them for a music video earlier in the day and was up there with them at that moment doing more of the same; to Sarah’s brother “Ben Adorable”; and to Jessica Hopper, their publicist. “I drank her pee,” Cindy announced, “and hallucinated.”
