Summer in LA can only mean one thing. Pool parties. Not the kind that you and I are familiar with – playing marco polo in the backyard while your Dad stands in his stubbies that barely cover his arse crack, beer can in one hand, beer gut in the other, burning the snags to a crisp golden black while your Mum yells at you to come put yet another layer of zinc cream across your face in that traditional Aussie war-paint. No, last weekend I scored an invite to an LA pool party. And not just your average party, but a Quicksilver one.
So here’s the deal; one thing you can do in LA at a lot of hotels is to be able to go and drink by the pool. You don’t have to be a guest at the hotel, in fact they are happy for you to come and sit at their poolside bar and drink the night away. So far I have had the pleasure of downing a couple of Suffering Bastards (that’s a drink, you perverts) at Trader Vics poolside bar at the Beverly Hilton Hotel during a model shoot, and I’ve also sunk a few Coronas at the Standard Hotel on the Sunset Strip. But the best pool bar of all is at the Standard Hotel downtown – a roof top pool and bar overlooking the city where the beautiful come to play. And let’s face it if you are going to hold a pool party, then this is the place to go.
Now, it seems that there is an abnormal amount of people drinking at these poolside bars and then deciding that a swim is on the cards, obviously forgetting that when one goes swimming, bathers are generally the go. I suppose that’s fair enough – I mean, who plans these things? I wasn’t planning on swimming at the Beverly Hilton and yet after a few Suffering Bastards, bugger me if I didn’t think a dip in the pool was an awesome idea. Of course the problem was my lack of appropriate swimmers. I suppose I could have gone all Clark Griswold and stripped down to the bare essentials – but I have neither the body of Chevy Chase nor was there was someone as tempting as Christie Brinkley in the pool asking me if I was ‘gonna go for it?’. And this is where Quicksilver have entered the fray. They’ve made it impossible, for once and for all, to have any excuse not to drunkenly and spontaneously strip down to the swimming trunks and yell ‘Cannonball’ before soaking everyone within a 5 mile radius with an earth shattering bomb. You see, they have installed vending machines at all Standard Hotels so when the mood takes you, it’s as easy as slipping the cash in the machine and lo and behold out pops a brand new pair of boardies (if you’re male) or bikini (if you’re female) or bikini top with board-short bottoms (if you live in West Hollywood).
Hence the pool party. The launch of said vending machines. And if you are going to have a pool party you just have to have twister, water guns, and make your own Quicksilver t-shirts. And lots of attractive people in bikinis. Let me tell you, if you recall my earlier statement about my desire to achieve a Chevy Chase body then you’ll immediately recognize the desire to keep my shirt on amongst the buffed boys and girls of the LA Social Scene. Sadly for me, alcohol was not being consumed quick enough by the masses for me to feel that their beer goggles would make me appear to be a Greek God and not Con the Fruiterer.
Which brings me to the second event of my social calendar. See, my parents arrived in LA this week and it has been my delight in showing them my little secret hot spots. Even if my Father did pat me on the stomach within 10minutes of arriving and ask “what’s that?” Um, that would be 9 months on an American diet. Must they put cinnamon on everything? It makes it all so hard to resist. When you order a simple turkey sandwich and find yourself having to take half of it home for later, then you realise that they don’t do things in small portions. It’s not me man, it’s the damn system.
And so I figured a trip to the Griffith Observatory was in order. The Griffith Observatory is an iconic landmark on the LA landscape where the Los Angeles basin stretches out in front of you for miles, of which only about a quarter of it you can actually make out through the smog. The reason I like the Observatory is very simple. It’s where I can stand on a set of scales and it tells me I weigh 35 pounds. Of course this scale would be correct if I was standing on Pluto, but I take what I can get. Scales don’t lie. It just a matter of what planet you are standing on. I refrained however from checking out my side profile, even though I did read that you can fit 65 Earths in Uranus. I’m not sure if that was just on average or whether they had someone particular in mind, but I wasn’t going to try. I’ve had sand in my crack – that was bad enough. Hey if you think that was childish, then a) you obviously have never read my column before and b) the amount of fingerprints over the planets told me that there are plenty of people getting photos of themselves poking a finger in Uranus or making other such anal gags. A quick search of Flickr will prove my point.
So two these two events this week lead me to a fantastic revelation.
I’m not fat. I’m just on the wrong planet.
