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We are at the Playboy Mansion. I feel dreadfully overdressed. The more sedate playmates are wearing traditional bunny outfits, but most of them are wearing only G-strings and a dab of paint. Then there is an adventurous band of girls roaming the party nude except for heels. Their total lack of body hair makes them appear even more exposed.
Phil and I meander over to the dessert table, ostensibly to get some brownies, but really we want to get a better look. I am astonished that these girls can wander around the party, apparently unconcerned by their lack of clothing. They see me and start to squeal with excitement. Apparently I am their favorite actress. They want a picture. Phil protests, but I go ahead and pose anyway. I feel sorry for them because they are naked. I think I would hate it if I met my idol, and I didn’t happen to have anything on. But in retrospect maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. “How would you like if that picture ended up on the internet?” chides Phil as we walk away.
We are here for a WSOP kickoff party sponsored by Milwaukee Light. A smattering of poker stars are in attendance: Jamie Gold, Annie Duke, Robert Williamson, and Phil Gordon, as well as Jeffrey Pollack and all the WSOP executives.
There is the requisite charity tournament, designed to be over in less than two hours. We basically have enough chips to play one hand, and I am out almost immediately when I come over the top of Phil when he raises my blind. “I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry!” he apologizes as he reveals pocket kings. He felts me and a girl wearing bunny ears in the same hand.
Even though he knocked her out of the tournament, the Playmate has taken a liking to Phil. She confides to him that her dream is to be a television journalist. I try to imagine her in Iraq, dodging shrapnel, wearing a serious expression and a camouflage bunny suit complete with ears.
Later on I run into a party girl I used to hang out with in the early nineties. At Trinity and the Roxbury she would always breeze past the doorman without paying. She dated the hottest guys and she never paid for a drink. She would flit around tablehopping, and when she left, you would realize her drinks were on your bill.
I still remember her Playboy cover because it was so cute. She is wearing nothing but panties and a man’s shirt and tie. A sudden wind has sprung up and is blowing the clothes off her body. She is looking at the camera and her mouth is making a surprised little o. Like “Oh dear, where did that wind come from? I can’t seem to keep my clothes on!”
Now she is a little weathered and wearing plenty of clothes, a jacket, a high-necked shirt, and jeans. She is trailing a pudgy balding millionaire, the kind of guy she never would have given the time of day to fifteen years ago. “I just turned 41,” she confides with a grimace.
“She’s kind of like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable,” I tell Phil. “All summer long she partied and played, and now winter is coming and her only hope for survival is to find a sturdy ant who will share his stuff with her.”
Phil’s triple-up has propelled him to the final table. The blinds and antes are so high now there is only one move: push and pray. It’s an all-in fest, what Joe Hachem refers to as “carnival poker.” When Shannon Elizabeth hits an ace on the river to dominate Phil’s pocket queens, he is bummed. Phil hates to lose. It doesn’t matter what the stakes are; at the end of the day he likes to be the boy with the most chips.
Only a short time after that Joe Reitman takes down Bob Daly to win the whole thing. As he raises his arms in triumph, we collect our things to leave. It is relatively early; the dance floor is jammed. There is still plenty of booze and food and naked Playmates left, but we are poker players, and for poker players the party is over when you bust out of the tournament.
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