It’s the most beautiful club on the Beach—and possibly the most beloved.  Built as a theatre in 1936, this Art Deco gem was a punk rock mecca in the late Nineties, before becoming Crobar in the new millennium, where it was host to Anthem Sundays and Back Door Bamby on Mondays—as well as those notorious Winter Party/White Party Sunday-night-Victor-Calderone marathons.  Boyz got hot in this club—fell in love and got married.  Face it, this club is on our gene code—and at Noche Blanca on Sunday night of this year’s White Party week, the newly-botoxed and steroided Cameo has never looked better. 

It wasn’t only the boyz—a sea of jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring beauty: bodies and faces fashioned by a 21st-century Michelangelo.  So intoxicating was the pulchritudinous combination of perfect pecs and bodacious bootys that one Kentucky boy in the lav line was overheard to exclaim, “GODDAM.  They just don’t make any cuter.  Wait ‘til I get home and tell them they have got to WAKE UP.” 

Well-said, of course—for the comely crowd just kept on coming, oozing their way onto the floor as Tony Moran werked them over with “This Is My Moment” and “You Got What I Need,” and “You Can Play Me.”  By one am, the floor was a shirtless mass of excess: too much skin, too much joy, too much, too much, too much—and yet (and here’s where Cameo’s beauty comes in) there was no sense of being trapped in an overly-crowded theatre and that’s because one of Cameo’s primary attributes is its flow. 

Everything flows: from your entrance into the still-gorgeous lobby and up the Art Deco staircase to the balcony club (called Vice on other weekends) and then out onto the mezzanine—where there it all is: a photographer’s wet dream!  The lasers, the video screens, the light walls, the platforms, the mirror balls—and that stupefyingly gorgeous crowd.  There’s no bad angle in this club; every nook, every landing, frames perfectly. 

From the booth (perfectly positioned just shoulder-height above the crowd), Tony Moran werked his magic—“So glad that I could see ya... Just like Alegria…”—while all around him, behind him, boyz on boxes and on staircases, werked it out.  High above the floor, on the upper mezz, boyz lined the railing, caught in the grip of the music.  Napkins flew skyward from the bar like a flock of doves as a bartender sprayed the crowd with a tank like a jeroboam of champagne.  Everyone was happy.  Water bottles waved in the air and the boyz on the boxes cheered.  There were boyz from the gym and boyz from the airport.  Boyz you remembered from Black and Blue and boyz from Winter Party last year.  And boyz you’d never seen before and might not see again, so you followed them like a burglar returning to the scene of the crime.  Looking for that adorable superman, the one with the tat on his tailbone—and there he was…  Found, again. 

Like the phone in the cab, the one our friend had lost in a SoBe cab on Friday night—and how he’d called his cell from his hotel when he got in the next morning—only to have the cabbie answer and say, “This your cell?  I’m right outside your hotel.”  That’s the kind of night it was: where everything comes around again. Karma’s a boomerang—and Cameo’s got the flow—and guess what else: “The deejay made me do it.  Turn up the bass.  Play me all night long.  Turn up the bass, dancing to your song.” 

That’s how it went as Tony werked a haunting magical soundtrack, flying us out into the galaxy—before landing us softly on the upper mezz and then down onto the banquettes where we found that other boy, his body his temple—except now he’s feeling “a little pukey from the pills”—which was where MedEvent came in.  Always there in times of need.  And you couldn’t ask for a better bunch of boyz: no judgments rendered, just medical assistance should the need arise. 

And then Tony fired his “Freedom” song—that righteous ode to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which was exactly what everyone was feeling right then and all night long.  “Oh, you.  Oh, you.”  Oh, everybody in the house.  “Free My Love.”  That’s how Tony can be—as if he knows the contents of your heart and soul—and opens it and bares it—for all to see and hold.  And “you don’t know where to hide”—and you don’t want to, because you’re right where you want to be, in the hold of your family, in the center of Cameo, the most beautiful club in South Beach, and maybe even the world—hyperbole be damned.

That kind of night.  The kind of South Beach night where at night’s end you can do nothing else but be grateful, so very grateful—to White Party and CareResource and everyone else who has shared it all with you.