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It’s the most beautiful club on the Beach—and possibly the most
beloved. Built as a theatre in 1936, this Art Deco gem was a punk
rock mecca in the late Nineties, before becoming Crobar in the new
millennium, where it was host to Anthem Sundays and Back Door Bamby
on Mondays—as well as those notorious Winter Party/White Party
Sunday-night-Victor-Calderone
marathons. Boyz got hot in this club—fell in love and got married.
Face it, this club is on our gene code—and at Noche Blanca on Sunday
night of this year’s
White Party week, the newly-botoxed
and steroided
Cameo has never looked better.
It wasn’t only the boyz—a sea of jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring beauty:
bodies and faces fashioned by a 21st-century
Michelangelo. So intoxicating was the pulchritudinous combination
of perfect pecs and bodacious bootys that one Kentucky boy in the
lav line was overheard to exclaim, “GODDAM. They just don’t make
any cuter. Wait ‘til I get home and tell them they have got to WAKE
UP.”
Well-said, of course—for the comely crowd just kept on coming,
oozing their way onto the floor as Tony Moran werked them over with
“This Is My Moment” and “You Got What I Need,” and “You Can Play
Me.” By one am, the floor was a shirtless mass of excess: too much
skin, too much joy, too much, too much, too much—and yet (and here’s
where Cameo’s beauty comes in) there was no sense of being trapped
in an overly-crowded theatre and that’s because one of
Cameo’s primary attributes is its
flow.
Everything flows: from your entrance into the still-gorgeous lobby
and up the Art Deco staircase to the balcony club (called Vice on
other weekends) and then out onto the mezzanine—where there it all
is: a photographer’s wet dream! The lasers, the video screens, the
light walls, the platforms, the mirror balls—and that stupefyingly
gorgeous crowd. There’s no bad angle in this club; every nook,
every landing, frames perfectly.
From the booth (perfectly positioned just shoulder-height above the
crowd),
Tony Moran werked his magic—“So
glad that I could see ya... Just like Alegria…”—while
all around him, behind him, boyz on boxes and on staircases, werked
it out. High above the floor, on the upper mezz, boyz lined the
railing, caught in the grip of the music. Napkins flew skyward from
the bar like a flock of doves as a bartender sprayed the crowd with
a tank like a jeroboam of champagne. Everyone was happy. Water
bottles waved in the air and the boyz on the boxes cheered. There
were boyz from the gym and boyz from the airport. Boyz you
remembered from
Black and Blue and boyz from
Winter Party last year. And boyz
you’d never seen before and might not see again, so you followed
them like a burglar returning to the scene of the crime. Looking
for that adorable superman, the one with the tat on his tailbone—and
there he was… Found, again.
Like the phone in the cab, the one our friend had lost in a SoBe cab
on Friday night—and how he’d called his cell from his hotel when he
got in the next morning—only to have the cabbie answer and say,
“This your cell? I’m right outside your hotel.” That’s the kind of
night it was: where everything comes around again. Karma’s a
boomerang—and
Cameo’s got the flow—and guess what
else: “The deejay made me do it. Turn up the bass. Play me all
night long. Turn up the bass, dancing to your song.”
That’s how it went as
Tony werked a haunting magical
soundtrack, flying us out into the galaxy—before landing us softly
on the upper mezz and then down onto the banquettes where we found
that other boy, his body his temple—except now he’s feeling “a
little pukey from the pills”—which was where MedEvent came in.
Always there in times of need. And you couldn’t ask for a better
bunch of boyz: no judgments rendered, just medical assistance should
the need arise.
And then
Tony fired his “Freedom” song—that
righteous ode to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which was
exactly what everyone was feeling right then and all night long.
“Oh, you. Oh, you.” Oh, everybody in the house. “Free My Love.”
That’s how
Tony can be—as if he knows the
contents of your heart and soul—and opens it and bares it—for all to
see and hold. And “you don’t know where to hide”—and you don’t want
to, because you’re right where you want to be, in the hold of your
family, in the center of
Cameo, the most beautiful club in
South Beach, and maybe even the world—hyperbole be damned.
That kind of night. The kind of South Beach night where at night’s
end you can do nothing else but be grateful, so very grateful—to
White Party and
CareResource and everyone else who
has shared it all with you.
Best always,
Mark and Robert
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