Despite a scarily slow start, yesterday’s Derby party surpassed any of our expectations, pulling more than eighty revelers, a fair number of whom stayed until we finally kicked them out at five in the morning. The mix was exceedingly eclectic, from Ivy Leaguers to Knicks dancers, with musicians, actors, investment bankers, med school students, an MTV VJ and a slew of filmmakers in between.

Still, we woke this morning to find our apartment covered in a thick layer of Boones, juleps and Old Milwaukee, and spent much of the day scrubbing the remnants away. As a result, our apartment is now the cleanest we’ve seen it – better even than its relatively pristine state when we moved in mid-November, and certainly better than it stood on Friday, considering we’d not actually cleaned the place in the intervening six months since the move (as evidenced particularly by the state of our bathroom, christened by at least one previously overnighting female as “absolutely, disgustingly unusable”). In the whirlwind clean-a-thon, we even went so far as to remove the windows from their frames for a thorough inside and out Windexing – with them transparent rather than the previous opaque, we’ve now discovered we overlook a busy street in front and a small park in back.

Stunned by the beauty of our apartment in its newly washed down state, we’ve vowed to clean the place regularly, a sentiment that should last until slightly before whenever we next had intended to clean. Consequently, we’re preemptively planning another party for later this summer as a sort of backup plan. The next post-party cleanup should bring us back to pristine, no matter how bad the inevitable downhill slide in the months between.

About a month back, my roommates and I decided it was time to throw a housewarming party. Or, rather, it was well past time for a housewarming party, considering we moved into the apartment back in November. Which, essentially, was the problem – we couldn’t really call it a housewarming party without sounding like morons, especially considering that several large rooms in our apartment are still largely unfurnished. Compounding that problem was the issue of high expectations – the last time the three of us regularly held parties, they were good enough to eventually become the basis of a movie on Comedy Central.

After some thought, we settled upon the idea of a Derby party. One of us, Colin, being from Kentucky, we figured had some legitimate claim on the event. So, in typical style, we talked about the idea for several weeks without actually doing anything. Then, about a week back, with the panic of true procrastination, we sat down and banged out an Evite:

Dearest Friends and Lovers:

Next Saturday, May 3rd, 10 p.m. Mark the date on your calendar with a large, red pen.

We, the proprietors of the Gotham Sugar Shack, invite you’ns (and yer sister) to join us in celebrating the Kentucky Derby. Yes, this is a theme party (sans the spooky masks, organ music, and sacrificial orgies).

Here’s how it works: our lovely Sugar Shack will be divided into an “infield” and a “grandstand” (a la Churchill Downs). In non-Kentucky speak, that means you should dress either as “southern gentry” or “white trash.” (i.e. Scarlett O’Hara vs. Daisy Duke). We’re serious about this; we’ll have a big motherfucker at the door checkin’ for overalls or white seersucker.

By the miracle of Tivo, we’ll have a midnight broadcast of the ACTUAL KENTUCKY DERBY. That means real horses running in a circle for 60 seconds. Then the race is over (but the party will continue going round and round). Let us know below which horse you think will win – placing bettors will receive genuine horse products. That’s what they do in Kentucky, and that’s what we’ll be doing in Hell’s Kitchen.

We’ll provide cheap beer & wine coolers (infield), Mint Juleps & champagne (grandstand), and fried chicken. But please bring a bit of your own beer, bourbon, or chicken to help the Ol’ Kentucky Cause.

And remember: Everybody Pig It!!!

Yours and we are,
Joshua, James, & Colin

Amazingly, over sixty of our friends have RSVP’ed. And, more than likely, thirty or forty more will be showing up unannounced.

But we’ll be ready for them. As promised, we’ve stocked up on champagne, marinated mint for the juleps, bought out every flavor of Boones, and filled giant Styrofoam coolers with Schaefer, Schlitz, Schlitz Ice, Schmidt’s, Old Milwaukee and Pabst Blue Ribbon. We’ve decorated the Infield with a holographic Jesus, an American flag made of Christmas lights, empty buckets of fried chicken, and NASCAR paraphernalia, while the grandstand has pictures of Secretariat and My Old Kentucky Home.

And, best of all, we’re suited up and ready to go. Colin and James are holding up the white trash end of the spectrum (with James doing the modern variant, and Colin a retro Hatfield/McCoy), while I’ve picked up a seersucker suit/bowtie/suede shoe ensemble.

In short, we’re set. If you’re going to throw a party, we say, throw a fucking party.

To paraphrase: Home at last, home at last, God almighty, I’m home at last.

Back in Manhattan, with no trips anywhere on the immediate horizon. I cannot express how happy that makes me.

Apparently, even if I am only gone for a matter of days, my roommates wreak organizational havoc, remarkably efficiently, in my absence. Dishes pile in the sink, garbage cans fill to overflowing, important incoming mail becomes buried under several-month old issues of The Onion, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Certainly, even the second law of thermodynamics predicts such change – over time, the universe inevitably progresses towards chaos. And yet, sitting this close to the seemingly inexhaustible energy supply of the sun, our little planet is mathematically destined to head in the opposite direction, towards an increasingly ordered state (see Morowitz, 1968). Perhaps, then, it is my recent time in sunny LA that inspired me to clean our apartment this evening in my roommates’ absence. For a few brief moments, at least, there is a semblance of civilization, everything is in its right place.