The Billion Dollar Game by Allen St. John

Author:Allen St. John [JOHN, ALLEN ST.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-52927-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

After the walk-through, the Playboy Party Team huddles up, and there’s an undercurrent of urgency. While there’s some discussion about the overall theme—Rawhide will be transformed into Playboy’s Desert Oasis—at this point the discussion centers on more practical issues. A party this big needs its own infrastructure.

Which is why they spend half an hour talking about toilets. The problem? Acquiring private facilities for the VIP area. It’s no problem to find attractive executive-style portable bathrooms. But they’re only good for about 1,000 flushes. The high-capacity units suited to the kind of traffic that a party requires look more like Porta-Johns, not exactly the kind of thing that’s likely to work for Usher or Alyssa Milano.

The macro issue is flow of a different kind. Donna Tavoso is concerned about the proximity of the sunken dance floor to the DJ booth. The elevated cabanas for VIPs represent another balancing act—they’re debating between a narrow passageway, which could create bottlenecks, and a wider passage, which might encourage revelers to congregate on the platform, creating another traffic problem. In Detroit in 2006, the VIP lounge was a huge hit. In Miami, they replicated it, but it remained all but empty. It’s prominent on the plans this time, but the Playboy team is looking at it with a slightly jaundiced eye.

They know that they’re facing a delicate balancing act, and any stumble on the night before the Super Bowl couldn’t be more public. They want to replicate the success of Detroit, but they also know that each venue is different, and shoehorning the ideas that worked in one space into another is a recipe for disappointment.

“In Miami, everyone had a good time,” says Lisa Natale, senior vice president of corporate marketing. “In Detroit, it was electric. It was a snowy, cold, terrible night—“

“It was a blizzard, and everybody had the best time,” adds Lauren Melone.

“People had a good time in Miami,” says Natale. “It just wasn’t that wow!”

Dana Rosenthal is sitting at the table, calmly looking around. She makes eye contact with Donna Tavoso. They’ve done the heavy lifting so far, having looked at dozens of properties a day in Arizona’s searing summer desert heat. Rosenthal has done this so often, she only needs to squint a little in order to see the building not as it is but as it will be on party night. She’s calm because she just knows Rawhide is going to work. “I can walk into a place and in five minutes I know ‘It’ll never work here’ or ‘This is the perfect place for our party.’” She is quick to point out that this skill doesn’t transfer into other aspects of her life. “In my own apartment I can’t hang anything on the walls because I never know if it should stay there,” she laughs. “I’ve been living there for three years and I still move my furniture around constantly.”

Lisa Natale’s phone rings and a hip-hop tune emanates from her cell. Her teenage son has pranked her ring tone, and she laughs it off with the cool-mom vibe that serves her well on her job.

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