Monday, January 14, 1 a.m.
Appropriately held at The Bank on Week 2 of its new Sunday industry night, the semi-annual Gold Digger party is a scene that couldn’t have been dreamt up even by the most ambitious of Hollywood filmmakers. I enter through the Cristal room and tip my hat to the 500 bottles of Cristal sitting there in repose; at that, one assumes the walls will be lined with gold, and $100 bills will be substituted for cocktail napkins. Not so, but not far off, either.
I arrive at the mezzanine level of The Bank’s four inverted tiers to find that $100 bills are indeed showering down on my head. Marketing coordinator Kalika Moquin rescues one from the floor for me while all around girls beg, steal and borrow to wrestle the colorful little mock-Benjamins (Ben’s face switched out for a platinum-blond hottie); the girl with the most fake cash wins $5,000 worth of the real thing. The men are largely the bearers of the moolah, $20,000 per bottle purchased. They fan themselves to DJ David Christian’s beat with fat stacks of cash, but soon the ladies are offering up lap dances, entry to gentlemen’s clubs for an “afterparty” and more.
Kailey is a waitress from College Station, Texas, in town for her father’s wedding, but she’s slipped away long enough to amass, as she says, $150,000 in funny money. In a glittery bubble dress and with a personality to match, she trick-or-treats from VIP table to VIP table hawking huge all-American eyes and a drippy-sweet drawl. “Ahh was the first person here,” she says, showing me a wad of bills. “Ahh have so much credit-card debt, ahh need to win.” I contribute my one hundy to her cause and wish her well.
More bills flutter down as host Jeff Beacher of Beacher’s Madhouse beneficently releases them from above to the tune of Britney Spears’ “Gimme More.” Again, you can’t make this stuff up. I keep looking for a reality camera crew behind DJ Eddie McDonald or among the pack of DJs and promoters who perpetually congregate at the end of the far bar. The Bank’s bars now face one another, gloriously bookending the etched-glass-encased mezzanine and the miniaturized dance floor with the DJ balcony hanging over.
One Ketel on the rocks later ($15! I shoulda kept that money ...) and it’s snow that now falls from amid the three tilted, oddly-shaped chandeliers that dangle from the club’s LED-lit ceiling. Horns blare and the foam puffs stream down on blown-out hair and freshly dry-cleaned suits, but magically it dissolves before it can be the ruination of either.
In short pale-gold knit dresses, the cocktail servers now function more like hostesses, lavishing attention on their charges while other staff members do the fetching of bottles and mixers, the latter being tiny individual bottles stocked in the oh-so-cute storage table. The booth seats themselves are monogrammed with The Bank’s signature “Googy” design, a borrowed ’50s/’60s architectural element and a preppy touch that many of the foreign, jet-set, prep-school-educated clientele can identify with. Behind the booths, bikini’d beauties dance, aloof and flawless beneath black shades like they just stepped off the Hamptons Shuttle.
It’s hard to tell where the VIP sections end and the dance floor and rest of the club begin, but when Beacher calls for a round-up of the contestants, there is a mighty sucking sound as women dart, purses clutched to button-popping bosoms, to reach him on the balcony. I can now clearly see tables of Tryst, Blush and Jet employees, as well as a number of Pure cocktailers all making hay while the sun doesn’t shine.
About a dozen ladies are singled out for the size of their caches; two girls battle it out over whose Louis Vuitton satchel holds more, but a girl with a shopping bag has them both beat. The losers play surprisingly fair, donating their haul to the finalists in a magnanimous gesture of solidarity. The four take to go-go boxes to battle it out by popular vote, and Pure cocktail server Christina Vargas takes the $5,000 cash prize with a casual air. The smart-tart says she outsourced the gold-digging to three female co-workers—I wonder if they will try to claim some of her winnings. Faux money, faux problems.
Xania Woodman thinks globally and parties locally. And frequently. E-mail her at [email protected] and visit thecircuitlv.com to sign up for Xania’s free weekly newsletter.