Something about the Pool Party at the Surfcomber on the Saturday of Winter Party Festival brings to mind Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.  Our version of it, anyway. 

The car glides under the porte-cochere of the Surfcomber, and a doorman gets the door—and then you wander through the lobby, packed with boyz in various states of undress—and out along the landscaped loggia, this year dressed to the nines by RKM Boys in various shades of orange and yellow—and already you can hear it: the music and the buzz of hundreds of boyz in full Saturday afternoon “Boogie Nights” mode.  It’s an all-afternoon porn shoot—with boyz in the pool and boyz in cabanas and boyz on the dance floor.

Like that—except this year, the Pool Party was amped up exponentially.  There were flocks of New York snowbirds who’d barely managed to escape nine inches of snow—in search of another nine inches…  And while RKM Boys have always done a superb job with the décor, this year seemed even more over-the-top, with their orange-and-yellow spangled and polka-dotted décor stretching way beyond the pool and nearly to the ocean.  And while attendance has always been high, something about this year’s Pool Party attracted more people than ever.  As Alyson Calagna put it: “Beautiful Day.”

And it kept on getting better.  “It’s insane,” someone said to us, gazing around.  Because it was—it didn’t seem possible that so many people could be there, without there being any sense of overcrowding.  Instead, the energy just kept on building—and every time you thought the party had peaked, it was amped up another notch.

And that was Alyson.  “Now let me see you werk,” she said.  She read the crowd—and let them have it.  She tuned them perfectly, tweaked them repeatedly, and played them like Midori plays a Stradivarius.  As one of her voice-overs had it, “Who’s that playing that sexy house music?  That’s Alyson Calagna.”  She made you pay attention to what she was doing; she made you listen and move.  She kept the boyz happy and the dance floor overflowing down onto the sand. 

There was “Shackles,” for example—a song long associated with Winter Party and South Beach with its lyric “Praise you”—and also “Strings of Life” with its swelling strings and hopeful romance.  It was the perfect setting for a birthday party, for an adorable Superman—and his beautiful posse.   

And it was a perfect grace note to Matt Foreman’s stewardship of the Task Force.  With this his final Winter Party as Task Force head, Matt leaves the Winter Party Festival on a solid foundation—and it could only have been gratifying for him to look out over the insanely happy crowd of merrymakers, local shakers, and tastemakers. 

There were cocktails—and swag—by Bacardi—as well as underwear by Undergear.  In fact, there was an underwear scramble as word got out.  Out in the courtyard, it was a feeding frenzy as undie-deprived queens (and one Surfcomber maid still in uniform, on her knees with open garbage bag) pawed through boxes of Undergear, stuffing eight and ten pairs of the latest edition of Undergear in their gift bags, in their pockets, in their already-stuffed briefs.  “There’s only Small and Medium left” someone moaned—which said something about the crowd—or their own ideas of themselves.  (And need we mention which waistbands were most in evidence that night at Hilton Wolman’s party at Karu&Y?)

It was a beautiful party—and no one wanted to leave.  The sun had stayed out, but never too hot—and always there was the ocean and the palms, and the pool filled with beach balls, and Alyson’s sexy house music, and boyz at their peak, with everything anticipated, all the rest of Winter Party Festival still ahead, yet to come.  What’s not to love about that?

Best always,
Mark and Robert