The Ruiners held their infamous Winter Ball this past
weekend at the Buggles
Ballroom at the Sherry-Netherlander
hotel. The secretive social club is renowned for its
seasonal
parties, with the Winter Ball perhaps the most infamous of
soiree
of all. One year The Ruiners had a small Swiss glacier
shipped across the Atlantic and installed
at the Metropoliatan
Club; another year, each of the hundred members arrived at
the
opera with an walrus on his arm, the happy beasts clad
in tailored tuxedos and each
supplied with its own bucket of
fish from the Fulton Fish Market. It was announced this year
that
surliest, snarkiest and most reprobate of all The Ruiners, as voted
by
his fellow members, would be required to crawl on his belly the
length of Broadway from Columbus
Circle to Madison Square Park,
surviving on nothing more than a flask of Lagavulin and a small
quantity of Nat Sherman cigars. Louche ne'er-do-well Marmaduke
Wales
easily swept the voting. He waxed philosophical as he dragged
himelf through Times Square. "Crawling
home after a night out," he
reflected, turning over a playing card in the gutter and
finding it to be
a four of diamonds, "is nothing new to me."
