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Another has silver platform shoes and a silver vest w/ no shirt underneath. The XPlor boys are in Klein sweatshirts and urban-camouflage fatigues, and there’s a large contingent with them that may or may not include the
South Park
brain trust. A guy on the arm of Ms. Morgan Fairlane has an immense and razorous violet mohawk à la British punks of the late 1970s.
    Inside the hotel, a kind of impromptu cocktail party forms in the broad marble hall outside Caesars Palace’s largest and reportedly classiest ballroom, which is called Caesars Forum. Burly casino staffers stand taking tickets and being very discouraging about anybody trying to bum-rush the show. The crush of bodies out here entails a degree of physical contact that CES mooks never even dreamed of. There are pockets of klieg-glare as cable TV reporters interview various performers about (
sic:
) the air of keen excitement in the air. Mysterious bundles of co-ax emerge from under the Forum doors and go all the way up the length of the hallway and disappear around the corner. A suspicion that we’d had all week but decided was unverifiable is now instantly verified when one of yr. corresps. gets accidentally shoved against a starlet and is jabbed in the side by her breasts and it
hurts
. A lot of people are holding drinks in plastic glasses and it’s unknown where they got them. The starlets take turns getting interviewed re atmospheric excitement while the woodmen all avoid the cameras like mafiosi. The TV lights are not doing anyone’s skin tone any good at all. In their all-black tuxes, several of the male Insiders—including e.g. John Leslie and Tony Tedeschi—are so pallid and sallow as to appear diseased. Mr. Nick East devotes a full 5.5 minutes of rapt concentration to the cuticle of his left thumb. A slight surprise is that a lot of the industry’s elite woodmen are short—5'6", 5'7" 36 —and most of their companions tower over them. Dick Filth confirms that the contemporary industry’s 5'6" standard helps a prodigious male organ look even more prodigious on videotape, a medium that apparently does all kinds of strange things to perspective.
    Tickets for Saturday’s main event are $195 per, in advance. It’s unclear whether any Insiders’ tickets are comped, but journalists pay full retail. Our tickets designate our table as #189. Twenty-five hundred tickets have been sold, and since it’s highly doubtful that anybody got past the flinty-eyed casino guys outside without a ticket, tonight’s attendance can confidently be fixed at 2,500.
    The Caesars Forum ballroom itself is a huge L-shape with the stage at the—as it were—joint; thus half of the 15th Annual AVN Awards’ audience is geometrically invisible to the other half. This problem is addressed via six sail-sized video screens that hang from the ceiling at strategic points throughout the auditorium. During the nearly two hours 37 between when the doors open and the Awards show actually starts, the screens alternate quick clips from porn classics 38 (recall that the theme of the 15th AAVNAs is “The History of Adult”) with live shots of various people making their entrances and mugging for the remote cameras
AVN
has got circling the room.
    Both Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth have come equipped with binoculars (H.H.’s in a very official-looking Audubon Society case), which seems mysterious until we all arrive at Table 189, which is at the very, very back of the ballroom’s L’s northern leg, hundreds of yards from even the nearest video screen. “They always put the print guys out in mookland,” Hecuba explains. This fact is unpleasant surprise #1. Unpleasant surprise #2 is the supper the $195 includes, which turns out to be buffet-steam-table-style and might best be described by inviting you to imagine a very cosmopolitan and multiethnic hospital cafeteria. 39 Several of the male Insiders, we now notice, have brought in their own picnic hampers.
    Now moving w/ laden plate to a