This weekend, how to explain? I can't figure out how I'm going to express it without sounding like some rube who just rolled in off the turnip truck. So I guess I'll just risk it:
I know just one insanely rich person, and not that well, but several of my friends are close friends so I got invited along to a three-day birthday bash in Aspen.
Man. I felt like a weekend stowaway in the life of Malcom Forbes:
An "Eco Challenge" in the afternoon, shuttled back to change into tuxes, champaign and Godiva choclates on the gondola ride up to the top of Aspen mountain, drinks and hors d' oeuvre over sunset, with a dreamy white lace tent that looked like heaven to retreat to when it got chilly, back down the gondolas for a fabulous galla dinner in a stunning tent at the base of the mountain with five-figure ice sculptures and 250 eight-inch-high individual birthday cakes where everything on the dish and including the dish and utensils were edible, then another quick change to dancing clothes for a wild dance party one tent over, with a lighted dancefloor running video footage from the past 24 hours of celebration under your feet. More room parties until dawn. That was one day. It ran from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon.
I don't hang out with rich people, I don't go to oppulent parties, have never considered owning a tux and nearly refused the invitation because I could barely affored to rent one. But I rationalized that it was about all I would have to pay for for the weekend, and who knows what it might be in store.
I had no idea. It really is fun to be rich.
I'm not ready to sell my soul to get there, but man, it's a blast to play in their playground a few days.
Especially when it was a rich gay playground. About 95 percent of the attendees were gay men. Many of them stunningly beautiful, most of them highly successful. I had a couple long talks with former abassador James Hormell, and several shorter ones with Chip Arndt. (Yes, of Chip & Reichen. I sucessfully buried my lead for many regular readers. More about Chip in another post.)
Our host reserved the entire five-star hotel at the base of Aspen mountain, so the whole place was one big private party the entire weekend, and a bit like landing on fire island in the heart of Aspen. And to my utter amazement, the cliquishness you would normally find among a gathering of hot, successful gayboys was shifted way down to low gear. It was the friendliest, warmest atmosphere I've ever encountered in an event like that.
That was the nicest part. Often the bigger, the hotter, the gayer the event, the more I feel like an outsider. This really left me feeling good about myself, and about other gayboys. Nice to see we can be good to each other from time to time.
And the Eco Challenge was wonderfully designed, because nearly every event provided outs for different skill levels: you could slallom downhill on skateboards in the grass, requiring real skateboarding skill, or choose something silly like wheelbarrow races where a person seated in the barrow frantically directed a blindfolded pusher through an obstacle course. I chose the latter and had a lot of fun.
I also weanied out initially on our first event, the rock-climbing wall, choosing the ultra-easy wall, since I had never done it and was terribly hungover from Friday's all-night dance. But then I saw how easy it was, traded spots and did the moderate wall, terrified I would fall halfway up, humiliate myself and let the team down. But then I looked up, saw I was just a few handgrips away, and it had actually been pretty easy. It had been twenty years since I repelled, so it was scary as shit letting go at the top to float down, but incredibly cool once I was suspended.
I had so much adrenaline racing through my body, wiped out my hangover and had me fantasizing about taking the hard wall. And then the refs explained that since two teammates had fallen from the hard wall, (secured in harnesses, of course), we could still keep our perfect score if two more successfully scaled that wall in addition to the medium or easy. So I harnessed up again and got behind three more confident teammates. The first two fell, the third, our little spiderman who has been climbing for years, raced up it like an escalator, and then I gave it my shot.
I nearly slipped on the first hold, but recovered, zipped up quite a ways and then got stuck with two holds to go. I couldn't come close to reaching the next hold. I moved my hands around, my legs around, but it was hopeless. I must have done it wrong, ended up in the wrong spot, but there was no going back, because my hands and legs were starting to shake, I was losing my confidence and my grip--a few seconds more and I would be off the wall completely.
The only chance I could see was shoving off hard letting go with both hands and one foot at the same time and lunging for this distant handhold way up there with my left hand, and then grabbing a slightly-higher one with my right. No chance of succeeding, but better to fly off grasping, so I leapt for it, braced for the rope to catch me and instead I caught the handhold an managed to hold on. The right hold was easy from there, and I leapt again to slap the qualifying carpet-strip, hurled back and this time spread my arms and enjoyed the smooth sail down.
The team was cheering wildly as litterally descended down amongst them, and I don't recall ever feeling like an athletic hero like that in my entire life. It was just one little event, and four other teammates made it to the hard-top first, and all ten people successully climbed the easy and medium walls, and it's not like we ended with a great time, but still: for that brief little moment, I was actually the hero of a sporting event.
It felt pretty good.
That was the nice thing about the whole afternoon, though. When you did well, that was great, when you screwed up, no big deal. At least on my team. We just had fun, and nobody seemed to feel like a fuckup. For a big group of gayboys, that's a really big deal.
The best thing about the whole trip was that I it was such a transportive experience. It was so beautiful there--the Aspens are still changing (past peak, but still beautiful), our room looked right on to the mountains, everything was happy and uplifting, and most importantly different.
Escape is definitely the word. I've always been into the experiential vactions, not the pampering kind, but this was the best of both. I was walking down the hill Saturday talking to the host--because by luck of the draw, he was on my Eco team--and mentioned that I had completely forgotten about all my problems back home. That's when I first realized that I had. I was so happy to notice.
And I got back here and they were not so big after all.
I just really, really needed that. Could not have been better timed.
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
