Spoleto Party Blog

Leave the pedicab-clogged, Wet Willies-centered bedlam of lower East Bay Street for the silent enclave of South of Broad.

Walk down Tradd, the click of heels echoing off the old stucco, and go through a red gate with red streamers, into a humming party, 200-plus folks in the cozy street. Servers passed martini glasses filled with light-blue bamboozles (coconut milk, mount gay and crème de banana –not a daiquiri served at Wet Willies). A Dixieland jazz band played in the middle of the block, the trumpeter occasionally taking a break to sing/shout out some lyrics sans-mic, a la Jimmy Durante.

Inspired by Kurt Weill’s, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the party had a campy, casino theme, with ice sculptures of dice, poker chips, play money and roulette wheels on the buffet tables, and a lot of monkeys, including a few inflatable ones.

“We thought the idea of a ‘monkey bar’ was funny,” Spoleto producer Nunnally Kersh told me. (I didn’t get it at first, but Nunnally has a four-year-old for whom ‘monkey bars’ is a single entendre.)

Bumped into regular guy/Spoleto Board Chairman Eric Friberg and had to ask where he parks. Turns out he has to scramble just like the rest of us.

“I’m a member of the Carolina Yacht Club,” he said. “So I tonight I parked there There are no perks with this job. It’s a volunteer gig – except they ask you for money.”

Alex and Kim Quattlebaum were suffering from that typical Spoleto Party affliction: Skipped-the-show guilt.

“You can make up whatever you want about us, but the truth is we didn’t go to the show. We were at Anson’s, eating double-fried porkchops,” Kim said.

Of course Post and Courier critic Josh Rosenblum had been to Mahoganny, which didn’t get with the standard standing O. “It’s just what the writers would have wanted,” he said. I’ve been told Gossip Writers are supposed to mention footwear. Josh had on white New Balances, which I thought was a very New York/Journalist kind of insouciant look.

The cast of The Gate Theatre’s The Constant Wife hung by the band, digging “When the Saints Came Marching In.” I hated to tell them it was New Orleans jazz and not Charleston. Talking with drop-dead gorgeous Judith Roddy, who plays Martha Culver, and stage manager Miriam Duffy, I tried to get them to decry the horrible conditions at the Dock Street Theatre, but they said they loved it. Sorry, Nigel, I’m sure we can still raise the money for renovations anyway.

On the way in we were asked for our “keys.” Thinking it was some designated driver-deal like the graduation party in Say Anything, I pulled out the keys to the Volvo. Actually they were looking for a cardboard key which served as a ticket. We talked our way in, as did another gate-crasher we’ll just call M.R., who was shocked at my Festival duties.

“You have to go to nine parties?” she said, and I don’t think it was sarcasm. A wedding photographer, she understands my plight.

A Society Page writer’s dream, the Hagerty Sisters were with friend Patrick Nolan and his dog Otis, trying to get a Waiter in a Red Derby and Casino-Dealer’s Armbands to give them extra key lime ice-cream bars out of a metal sidewalk cart before the police pushed everyone towards the Tradd Street exit. You just don’t expect the bum’s rush at a Spoleto party, but it went with the faux-sleazy Weill conceit.

“Oh my God,” Gervais Hagerty said. “It is totally like New Orleans!”

Highlight: Sublime’s Key Lime Pie Ice Cream Bars – coated in chocolate with pie crust!

Cheeses eaten: 0. More of a heavy-hors d’oeuvre spread.

Philip Glass mentions: Big fat goose egg – WHAT IS THE DEAL!