Swelter

Another week gliding by -- a film industry fundraiser for Lawton Chiles at the Biltmore, Nestor Torres making a bid for the easy-listening big time at Vizcaya -- and then it's Friday night, time for the district tour. A mass arrest of warring youths at the Cameo, proudly sporting "No Fear" T-shirts, metal teeth, and plastic handcuffs, a trouble-making vixen laughing in the chaos. On to Warsaw for the sixth anniversary celebrations, Louis Canales hosting another "Fellini" theme party, complete with costumed nuns sporting dildos, Satyricon go-go boys, and paintings of skeletons begging for sex. A sinister drag version of Anita Ekberg cooing like a whore and licking his lips. Not pretty, although we've had worse offers. All of us mourning the old days of baroque Warsawian decadence -- midgets feeding grapes to fat ladies, strippers lighting torches in their vaginas -- amid the gluttony of self-aggrandizement, the reverie of the lost. And suddenly it's exactly like Fellini's Casanova, a waltz of marionettes, frozen in time and space. A land where there's always too much of everything, a wallow transcending taste and appetite, dark children, twisted beyond redemption and still yearning for the whisper of miracles, the elusive radiance of the divine.