The real economic meltdown, with a twist

Leave it to the Washington Post to ring in the “de-gilded age” of economic calamity with a lighthearted romp through Washington’s of-the-moment party pleaser (and by Washington’s, I’m clearly referring to those richer-than-holy-hell types in northwest Northwest and NoVa).

Pampered Chef parties are out; melting gold into cash, on the other hand, is totally in. “At a gold party, you walk away with a check ($453, $898, $297, $503) and an almost serene renewal of faith in one kind of economy—the ancient kind,” writes the Post’s Hank Stuever. “You would never have this sort of fun at a pawnshop, and a pawnshop wouldn’t serve ahi spring rolls and martinis.”

January Thomas, 29, is the gold guru behind My Gold Party, a company that sells $700 party kits, including a measuring device to assess the authenticity of your golden gem and guidebook, to aspiring gold party planners. With gold hovering around $900 an ounce, the formula has been wildly successful—boosted by the convenient fact that gold jewelry just isn’t particularly in vogue these days.

Here’s what I’d call, well, the money line of the article:

The women at a gold party are usually just the right age to have sparkled in another epoch, the shimmery 1980s, when Cybill Shepherd was a TV detective, and Belinda Carlisle was dropping weight, and women had baby-oil tans and wore rope necklaces and big hoop earrings in bright yellow gold. It was a time when gold tennis bracelets were a measure of true love, gold anklets said something about sexy adventure and gold waistlets said, if nothing else, that Slim Fast works. Men wore gold chains as a matter of prowess, the minute they turned 13. The less said about pinky rings, the better. (“New Jersey is a great place for gold parties,” Thomas says.)

In true Washington form, many of the article’s partygoers scrap gifts from foreign diplomats or expired tokens of amour from past spouses. Nothing is off-limits: not wedding bands, not family heirlooms.

But after all, who needs nostalgia when you can have cold, hard cash?

Photo via Flickr