It was well after three pm on the Sunday of One Mighty Weekend at the Buena Vista Palace (aka Party Central) and still the boyz were lollygagging in their rooms: recovering, primping, pimping and bumping. As for the ones who’d made it downstairs (without mishap), it was all they could do to slip into the pool, cocktail in hand. After-hours rehab. The sun beat down on the beat down faces—eyes shaded by LVMH. Phil B. was on the decks—banging out the beats—but these girls couldn’t move more than a pinkie. Not yet, anyway. It would take Debby Holiday to get them on their feet and onto the dance floor as she werked her way through a mini-concert of her chart-toppers, including “Dive” and the Tony Moran-produced “Surrender Me.”

One thing about the Reunion Pool Parties—they’re a fashion show of what the straight boyz will be wearing in ten years. That is, if those straight boyz spend as much time at the gym as this tribe. Calling Janice Dickinson: these boyz are ready for their close-up! And speaking of La Dickinson, JP Calderon was in the house, as was Gil Dominach, and so was Matthew Rush—and really, to be honest, by six pm, who wasn’t there? Even Joe Caro had made his much-anticipated late entrance…

To be honest, the only way to get through this juggernaut called One Mighty Weekend is to think of it as a seventy-two-hour marathon—and by Sunday evening, you have to realize you’re at Heartbreak Hill, ready for the slide into the home stretch. So best to hydrate, replenish, refuel—and set the Magellan for Universal Studios.

This year, the Sunday night party had been moved from Hard Rock—to Universal Studios—and maybe there were people who imagined we’d be inside—but no, and why should we have been indoors given the balmy night and an entire studio lot made up like a romanticized Manhattan, the New York of your dream state, where everything’s stylized and clean, and where the Metro Tribune building is next to Fifth Avenue brownstones and Finnegan’s Bar becomes The Absolut Lounge for the night. It was like walking through a diorama of the swank and sleek Manhattan you imagined as a kid. You slipped into one door—where there were nubile boyz dancing on a bar—and then out another door, and onto a fountained courtyard with acrobats swirling above the street—and meanwhile, over at VIP at the Monsters Café, there were cocktail waiters serving trays of Red Bull-and-vodka—and Skittles! “Skittles? Where’d you get those?” You’d swear, we were thirteen again.

And our jungle gym for this over-steroided playground? A lighting rig that looked like a gargantuan Rubik’s Cube torn apart by the Hulk on a Ritalin revenge. Rays of light pierced the night like scores of arrows from Cupid’s quiver. And the man in charge of the music and our good time? Our man Abel, a One Mighty Weekend stalwart who still manages to surprise and soothe as he drives us expertly through the night. This was Abel on a New York back lot street, by way of Hollywood’s art direction, in Orlando—or in other words, Abel Universo. The man who takes a party and reminds us of the ones we’ve loved before, even as he makes this one sui generis. And to dance near the lip of the stage, more or less at Abel’s feet, was to be surrounded by Abel aficionados, the ones who know his catalog forward and backward—and are still amazed at Abel’s prowess with his beat mixes.

In essence, in general, the Universe party was the perfect party for anyone suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder. You could leave the dance floor and ride the Mummy roller-coaster (where one car got more than they bargained for when the coaster stalled in the Boiler Room—and riders got slow-roasted…) It was visual extremism and aural overload and a visceral smorgasbord—and everywhere you turned, at any time, at any moment, you witnessed the most overwhelming sense of freedom: a playground without restraint.

There are few times when you get to see the little boy in your grown-up friends—the boy who might have been your sandbox buddy—and this night was one of them. For as one friend observed, it was the sort of party that you wanted somehow to share with those you love from the outside world—so that they, too, could see the joy and wonder of it all. Which was maybe how Abel felt as well, when he plated Soul Logic’s “Let Get Together”—and right then, it all came together—all over the playground, all over Universal Studios, at One Mighty Weekend 2008.

And then from the playground to the carnival… The night still young, the circus caravan headed south to Kissimmee where the boyz poured into Arabian Nights with its tilt-a-whirl lighting rig. Everyone was there. There were girls with geisha fans, and there was Holly as Nurse Silver Pasty, mirror balls on her nips, and there was someone who said, “Last night I was too fast for the music,” and someone else saying, “Look at me—I’m fucked up.” And at the helm, in full orchestral mode, there was Tony Moran, the brilliant impresario who seems always to plumb the romance of every party. And later, there was Manny who took the baton from Tony and ran onward with it, taking the packed stadium into the late morning. Everyone dancing on a floor in a stadium built for the sport of kings—a floor which rose and fell whenever the crowd caught the beat in tandem and shook the floorboards—at a party which brought an end to this year’s edition of One Mighty Weekend.

This year’s One Mighty Weekend beneficiaries were the Elton John AIDS Foundation and Orlando’s Hope and Help Center of Central Florida, Inc., two deserving institutions that provide needed services to the greater LGBT community.

Because as this year’s One Mighty Weekend proved, however you get there—and back—be it flying in a twelve-seater Gulfstream or flying down the freeway in a red Mustang convertible, top down, hair blowing, music trailing in your wake—the trip to Orlando for One Mighty Weekend is a trip you gotta make. It’s good for the soul.