Good Ol' Thomas Barker stopped by on a stroll from his nearby apartment and found me reading Gwen Cooper's "Diary of a South Beach Party Girl"; he had given me the book earlier this year with an eye roll. "You will love this!" And, so I did. Both of us discussed the characters of this "novel", some of which were thinly cloaked to protect the guilty and others just in-your-face named. It seemed we knew them all and both of us wondered just how you survive in a town like this. As Cooper wrote on her website, "There used to be a joke about the typical table setting at a South Beach dinner party: fork for the tongue, spoon for the nose, knife for the back."

Both of us have the security blanket of a relationship without which we'd be bouncing around like olives in a martini. We also have a network of friends all keeping an eye on each other. So, why does that book scare me? None of us are into the club scene anymore, and we certainly don't do drugs, but both of us easily see ourselves moving deftly through all those well known names in Cooper's book, winking at a doorman, and over-tipping bartenders. While we were sipping some Kettle One, I picked up the book and read a passage of some shallow club talk. We looked at each other and both rolled our eyes.