F E A T U R E S

Come Home with Me
By Don George, Editor
Bahamians go all out for tourism

Riding High
By Cintra Wilson
Our resident enfant terrible does the Kentucky Derby

D E P A R T M E N T S

The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Dinner for Dali:
A palette to delight your palate

Passages:
"My Night of Candomblé"
Bewitched in Brazil
By Christopher Hall
- Books on Brazil
- Getting there

Postmark: Moscow
Every Man a Czar
By Arline Klatte
In Moscow, even schmucks from Detroit can savor Cuban cigars and bed Slavic beauties
- Getting there

Readers' Tips and Tales
Do grocery stores reveal all there is to know about a culture?

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Your virtual travel agency

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L A S T+ W E E K

Tuesday April 29

Uzbek low tech
By Doug Fine
If you're big on telephones and such, the nations of Central Asia aren't for you. But if you have an iron stomach, a steel will and a bottle of Cipro, you'll be rewarded with priceless spectacles of ancient history.

A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

R i D i N G
++++++++H I g H

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I L L U S T R A T I O N   B Y   K A T H E R I N E   S T R E E T E R

BY CINTRA WILSON | a scarce few fillies, three to be precise, have ever won the Kentucky Derby in its 123 years. Two of them were named Genuine Risk and Regret. I spent the weekend with them.

Darla and Eileen were friends of friends. I had never met them before. Darla, who has had a shadowy past, is now living the good life as the former-other-woman-now-main-love of a rich good ol' boy who is embroiled in a feverish and obsessively hateful divorce. She is recently back from having "everything done" in Brazil (eyes, face lift, lipo, tits, lips and nose, seamlessly constructed by a doctor of evident cost and fame). She is a blisteringly fetching bottle blonde in a tight little suit, ablaze with a large turbo personality. She wears sunglasses with large gold medallions of the Chanel logo. Earrings of large gold Fendi medallions. Jacket buttons made of large gold YSL medallions. Pants with large gold Versace medallions sewn all over them like conchas. Hermes scarf. Vuitton luggage. In short, more endorsements than most race cars. "I had mah boyfriend Hal go pick up an 8-ball for me for the weekend -- I said, 'Honey, could you go pick up a little handbag for me at my cuzzin's house?' The coke was in the inside pocket. If he knew he was drivin' around with all those drugs, he'd be so pissed!" Her turquoise eyes go all round with mischief, her cupid's-bow mouth, which has other parts of her body injected inside of it, puckers into a naughty grin around her cocktail straw. Darla and Hal were my Kentucky Hosts for the 123rd Kentucky Derby.

Friday at legendary Churchill Downs was consumed by the Kentucky Oaks, the preliminary all-filly race. The place was already saturated with pre-hats, hats spectacular yet not too spectacular, worn by women who were saving their real head regalia for Saturday. There were repeated announcements enticing the Oaks viewers to meet LeRoy Neiman, the "Official Artist of the Kentucky Derby." Most of Louisville (say: Looahville) was there for the Oaks: There were a record-breaking 92,000 people in attendance. The Oaks is a Derby weekend party prerequisite, but the event seemed to be far less about horses and gambling than about the Scene of thousands of monied Southerners milling in and out of the stand boxes in a floral blizzard of loud spring suits, kissing and trashing each other with equal relish. "Hi Guuuuurl! Hayah ARR yew? Yew luk grite! ... (Sotto voce): She OUGHTA luk grate, she's been fuckin' that big Negro behand her husband's back for two months."

Mendacity seems to be the goal and intent of Southern Orthodontry. All Southern girls have the same block set of huge white teeth, erected to form a flat and carnivorous edifice across the front of their faces, surrounded by Liner and Gloss, the Danger camouflaged like a Venus Flytrap. Rabid trophy alligator stewardess smiles. The majority of these women are roiling with violent personal unfulfillment, due to their construction pattern. First they go to elite all-girl Catholic elementary and high schools. Somewhere in that time they attend cotillion and social dancing. Then they go to a prestigious university, and since most of them have pretty sharp academic skills, they actually get prestigious degrees, but these are used as purely ceremonial husband-bait. Then they get married and relentlessly remodel their husband's homes, room to room and back again, until they get pregnant. Once they have children, they send them to boarding schools and get miserably loaded on pills and bourbon and hate their husbands for having destroyed their lives. Their husbands cheat on them, then they re-activate whatever drive got them their degrees and devote all of their suppressed sexual and creative energies toward legally (and not-so-legally) destroying the lives of their soon-to-be-ex-spouse. This is all anybody talks about at the Oaks when the horses come in, save for the odd mention of a business deal among the gentlemen.

Darla and Eileen were not these women, but the Bad Women with whom the husbands cheated. Much to their own bewilderment, they had both found themselves on the fast track to matrimony. However, their talent for drinking and narco-sucking was equaled only by their aptitude for self-sabotage, which constantly kept their fiancée status in a precarious position.