Hank Stuever: It’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.”
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