Velvet rope burns

As y’all know, someone guessed the password reset hint to Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account and posted her possible social networking profile (via Defamer). In the friends list is a woman by the name of Rohini. Could it be Rohini Reiss?
 
Los Angeles magazine did a gabby cover story in 2001 about Reiss, a twentysomething velvet-rope butterfly whose father is Indian:

Rohini grew up in Northridge, where she lived with her dad–who is Indian and worked for Boeing–and her mom, who is British, until the couple’s marriage difficulties overwhelmed them and Rohini followed her mother at 16 to a small apartment in Sherman Oaks…

… They were amazed at this gift who wore no makeup, who could smoke massive amounts of pot and still beat them on Super Mario or Zelda…

… in L.A. a woman so inclined can arrive out of nowhere… and insinuate herself into the highest echelons… They are fresh arrivals like Christie Prody, who left Minnesota to stand outside O.J. Simpson’s gate until he came down off the Exercycle to take her number… Rohini and Jessica were over the rope, smiling past the paparazzi who shouted, “Who are you? Let us take your picture!” and into the club…

The anthropology of dating inside the L.A. Scene, on the other hand, is as complicated as a structuralist’s interpretation of a Balinese cockfight. As Rohini explained it once over lunch, there are four major motifs: (1) Men (and some women) are always attempting to have sex with as many partners as possible; (2) No one wants anyone else to know who they are sleeping with; which leads to (3) Couples passing as single people in clubs to avoid detection; and finally (4) The Slut/Angel/Slut typology…

“… Guys are trying to sleep with as many girls as they can… so no one tells anyone who they’re sleeping with… You could see two people sitting and talking to each other and have no idea they are going home together. They will purposefully leave at different times and then meet later on somewhere else.”

… “It’s weird,” said Rohini. “There are girls that don’t sleep around but flirt a lot without giving out their phone numbers, and they’re called sluts in the scene.”…

… “My ego is always being crushed every day,” she said once to me. “It goes up, then down. Ben Affleck will ask for your number one night and say you’re so beautiful, then the next day some random guy you think is hot will say `I don’t want to see you.'”…

She heard from other women that masturbating in front of a girl you had just picked up at Sky Bar had become as trendy among young actors as heroin was for a while…

The more I learned from Rohini about the L.A. Scene–that they were stuck meeting in the same few rooms every week, that they all dated the same people, that they had reenacted a caste system as cruel as anything found on the quad–the more I thought of it as a group of twentysomethings who had figured out a way to extend senior year through the first half of their third decades…

15 thoughts on “Velvet rope burns

  1. Some very interesting truths about the club scene in LA and also NYC. I have friends who acutally live like this and you wonder what they do when they hit 30.

  2. To the truest amazement of all people on this EARTH. One must really contemplate only ONE THING:

    What does Paris Hilton say if she’s drinking a really cold glass of water.

  3. I…have…absolutely no words after reading this…reading this was like driving past an accident…not sure if I feel sorry for her or hate her for having a worthless life…either way, she belongs on http://www.bluntinstrument.net

    …”For days she wood sit, bored, scanning the new view for others like her

    wood?…wood?…do you mean, “would?”…this was just one of the many mistakes in the article…this guy is hired to TEACH high school students in LA…

    …Helps explain how the learning machine churns out girls like Rohini, I s’pose… 🙂

  4. I noticed the horrible spelling and grammar in the story too. But, to give the author the benefit of the doubt, a lot of the articles that you find online that were taken from print publications are transcribed by some lowly intern somewhere, or copied by some piece of flawed software. I’d have to see these errors in the actual story before pointing the finger at the author.

  5. Don’t fall into the trap that positions light skinned people as inherently better.

    If you do, go watch spike lee’s school daze

  6. An email I received from a friend: “Made for an event called Garba With Attitude o_O found it at http://www.sepiamutiny.com (excellent group blog by a bunch of not-so-ignorant NRIs) original source: http://www.pariandharvin.com

    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2003/06/09/107366.html http://www.syncpicture.com/Blinkmovie (movie based on above link)

    also check out at sepiamutiny the latest posts by beep and squadeek – I stole their identities! It’s so easy to post comments under someone else’s alias!”

    Please disregard the last two out-of-character posts made by squadeek and beep as they were made by my mischevious friend.