Washington Post - The 24-Karat Party
Posted: 07.12.2009
By: Hank Stuever
Washington Post WriterIt's gold parties now, here in the de-gilded age. The women who used to invite all their girlfriends over to their fantastic homes for good wine and catered nosh on the pretense of selling merchandise to one another (Pampered Chef! Rolls of fancy wrapping paper for school charity!) are now inviting one another over to their fantastic homes for parties where everyone turns their gold into cash (ca$h!!) and winds up convulsing with giddy laughter over such treasures as wedding bands from bad marriages or those door-knocker earrings left behind by dearly departed Nana.
"See this? This is the shah of Iran," says Kathy Atkins, a guest at a gold party the other night in a townhouse in Alexandria. She holds up a coin ring engraved with, sure enough, a profile of the shah of Iran. "I got this when we lived in Tehran." She also brought a zipper pouch containing some old jewelry belonging to another friend who couldn't make the party, because she's vacationing in Italy -- "Lake Como, but a week after George Clooney left. . . . She called me and had me go into her house to look around for her gold."
Another woman has lots of gold chains she bought "back when I was teaching at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok." A man who came to the party with his wife brought a ghastly, nuggety watch given to him by an African dictator, back in the early '90s, on a lobbying trip.
Not all the tales at a gold party have that air of Washington worldliness; there are also those half-heart pendants on necklaces that were given by ex-boyfriends who were never so great. Charms, brooches, class rings -- some of it so neglected there is no longer a good narrative to go along. There are the dentures of deceased relatives, framed in gold, unwrapped discreetly for an estimate.
There is gold that doesn't even seem like gold, except it is. "I got this on a college trip to Hawaii," says Julie Lobdell, holding up a gold pendant with a tiny pearl in it. "You know those places where they make a really big show of getting the pearl out of the oyster and have you pick out the setting? . . . Oh, and these were my very first earrings, from when I got my ears pierced. Eighth grade! The only way my mother would let me was if I got them done in a doctor's office."
Suzy Senkus brought a bracelet given to her once upon a time by a handsome doctor, who then cheated on her with a nurse, which sounds very "General Hospital," and so is the bracelet, chunky '80s gold, trapped in that same gauzy era. "Get rid of it" is what Senkus tells herself, every time she looks at it, and tonight she will. "God, I should go home and get more of it," she says. "I have more."
* * *
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. You would never have this sort of fun at a pawnshop, and a pawnshop wouldn't serve ahi spring rolls and martinis.
"I mean, this is it, it's not very high-tech," says January Thomas, showing how it's done, sitting pretty in a corner of the living room next to a bright table lamp. She is getting ready to conduct a gold party for 30 or so guests. (And so can you! Simply go to Thomas's Web site, http://MyGoldParty.com, and purchase your own measuring kit and guidebook for $700, schedule a party and just wait for the fun to begin.)
Thomas has a jeweler's magnifying loupe, a small battery-powered meter that is wired to a conductor and a little gel pen wired to the meter, which can test any item and immediately assay its authenticity as real gold -- and if it is gold, determine what the karat is. She has a scale that will weigh up to 50 grams. She has Ziploc baggies in both sandwich and freezer size. She has index cards and a calculator.
"It looks like a dorky science fair project, doesn't it?" she says.
She has one of those great big binders of pale green blank checks. She unfolds a beige pad on which party guests will get a turn, one by one, to spread out the gold they've collected over the years and no longer wear or want.
She flew in from Michigan, just for this. She's 29, and in this soft living room light, her long blond hair and fair skin and creamy beige sweater make her look weirdly golden, and calm. She used to work in sales. Her husband's family, the Ahees, have owned a fancy jewelry store in Grosse Pointe Woods that goes back decades. It all started when Thomas asked where she could sell some of her old gold -- the charm pendant from gymnastics in junior high, some ropey chains that were no longer in style. In a family like that, you just melt the stuff down and sell it to banks. She couldn't believe how easy it was.
Eight years ago, gold was selling for less than $300 an ounce; lately it flirts with the thousand-dollar mark. On this particular Wednesday evening in Troubled America, the price of gold has closed at $881.90 an ounce, while on Capitol Hill, lawmakers look for a way to explain to themselves and to taxpayers a largely theoretical economic disaster of imaginary numbers, as a way of cobbling together a nearly trillion-dollar rescue of . . . of what exactly? What are they talking about that we could actually hold in our hands, recognize? Everything we own? Everything we don't?
Entirely coincidentally -- but wildly metaphorically -- the doorbell rings and the gold party begins.
Women squeal their customary greetings to one another. There's lots of leopard print, cute tops, great shoes.
This time the husbands come, too. Everybody has a little gold they don't know what to do with.
* * *
The party's host is Paige Rhodes. The townhouse is nestled in one of those high-end enclaves off Duke Street, east of the freeway. Rhodes's husband, Don, is a general practitioner in family medicine. They have a calico cat.
Rhodes, who is 40 and brimming with shiny cheer, does the Susan G. Komen for the Cure three-day hike for breast cancer research and awareness every year, all 60 miles. She's seriously into it, it has changed her life and all that. She walks in memory of four friends who've died, plus her mother, who passed away two years ago. Nine friends are cancer survivors. Rhodes has a pink ribbon on the back of her white BMW 330i (license plate: 3DAYS, in reference to the annual walk).
It also happens that Paige Rhodes is the best customer who ever showed up to one of January Thomas's gold parties. That was earlier this year, when Thomas came to town and set up her little kit and checkbook at another house. Rhodes brought a Tupperware tub, in which layers of her gold jewelry had been carefully separated by paper towels. She walked away with a check for $5,100. It was the biggest check Thomas has written, so far. (The average is around $300, she says.)
"It was just all this stuff I knew I would never wear again, or ever," Rhodes says. "My mother was a QVC addict. I'd go visit my parents in Florida and see her wearing some piece of jewelry, and say something nice about it, and pretty soon, one just like it would show up in the mail." The jewelry her mother left behind included a set of stickpins with little dolphins on them. ("Why," Rhodes says -- not a question, just baffled endearment.) Rhodes kept only what mattered.
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.)
This time of year is when Rhodes has to think of a clever way to entice her friends to donate to the cancer walk. "I'm tired of trying to sell people things for charity," she says. "As soon as I'd been to the gold party, everyone I know said they wanted to go to a gold party, too. And so I called [January] and said: 'Hey, would you come down? Could we donate part of it to the walk?' I mean, everybody wins. When do you go to a party and walk away with money?"
So it's a cancer story and a gold story and a money story and an economy story and most of all, it's a party story. Rhodes is running around, greeting her guests, who are all carrying little zipper bags or old shopping bags filled with tiny boxes. There is absolutely no shame here, among well-off friends. You don't want it anymore? Sell it. It's not real gold? Have another glass of champagne.
One man (he didn't want to be named) waits patiently while Thomas weighs his old wedding rings (plural) and an old pocket watch given to him by one of his ex-wives, a watch that had been handed down in her family. "It doesn't mean anything to me, really, so why not?" he says. His longtime girlfriend is watching all this, with screaming delight. He gets a check for $1,218.29 -- mostly for the watch. Then he seems a little bit sad.
"I told you," he says to the girlfriend. "She never gave cheap things."
* * *
How much of our history is built around the often tragic quest for gold? Eventually we got some, and not all of it was treasure. At a gold party it might seem like we got too much of it, or too much of the wrong kind -- little pieces of it, or things that are gold plated, or less-than-charming charms.
That the price of gold is where it is right now should be telling us something. Some people are hoarding it, waiting for economic apocalypse. You have to say this for gold: It can sit at the bottom of the sea for centuries and come up looking great. It just doesn't go with fashion right now.
"Is this the worst thing you've ever seen?" says Brian K. Childs, who came to the party with his wife, Loree, and is slapping an atrocious, crusted-nuggety gold watch on his wrist. It was a gift, in 1991, from the late dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. Childs worked for a lobbying group. All the junior staffers on that trip got a watch from Mobutu, in a tacky-looking maroon case. The room screams with laughter. Childs takes a long sip of his martini. "I found it going through some boxes. I can't believe I still have it."
"Can I scrape it?" Thomas asks, picking up a small file.
Childs rolls his eyes. Of course you can scrape it.
The screen on the meter never lies: NOT GOLD.
"Oooooh! Noooh!" moans the entire room, in raucous faux-letdown.
* * *
It takes January Thomas three full hours to assay everyone's gold. She never gets up for a potty break, and she never finishes her first glass of wine until everyone has gone home. Tonight she's written 21 checks for a grand total of $10,352.89 -- about 75 percent of what it is valued on the day's gold market close. Of the remaining 25 percent, 15 percent goes to Paige Rhodes's cancer walk. The rest goes home with Thomas. She's back on a plane to Michigan the next morning, and the two Ziploc freezer bags full of gold, more than a kilo, head to her via FedEx, overnight, insured.
Back home, Thomas will separate the gold from cheap gems, teeth, plated-steel chains and the innards of watches. She will feed each and every piece of it into a bubbling urn. When there's enough of it, and when it cools, Thomas gets the gold bars to a bank, pronto, to keep up with the price she paid per ounce. Gold could go way down or gold could go up and up. That is how things have always worked, in the most elemental economy around.
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