They say what goes to Vegas ought to stay in Vegas.

Normally, I am in complete sympathy with that approach. After all, the innocent should be protected, and the wicked should be left where they can be scourged on their own account. But this was innocent enough, and besides, you don’t know Tom, a swell guy from one of our rival companies, who may (or may not) enjoy a tot or two as solace on the road.

This conventioning life can be an existential one, and he is one of the gentlemen of the road. Or maybe I should just say that something like this might have happened at some other conference in some other resort town. Yeah. That’s it. In fact, never mind. The two working ladies were proper enough, though the fact that they were drinking Diet Cokes should have been at least a partial tip-off, and the fact that the House Dick had to drag Joe off to pointedly ask if the ladies-in-question were his guests another. We had all got quite past that, though Joe and my associate were discussing the matter up the table at Quinn’s in SoBeach.

You can look it up: “Tucked beautifully into the hip Park Central, one South Beach’s most charming art deco hotels, the stylish eatery is a hub for fabulous people-watching amidst soothing live music, swaying palms, balmy breezes and the velvet darkness and salt tang of the beach. “

A black 1940 Ford coup with a mannequin in a slouch hat at the wheel was parked at the curb; actually, we were all at the curb, at a table for fourteen in the open air on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant proper.

We were at the edge of the SoBeach evening promenade, a walk of extraordinary diversity that resembles nothing I have seen in this merry wobbling world. The prettiest of ladies, the buffest of men, small dogs, ancient tourists, flat-brimmed gangsta ballcaps on rolling perp walk struts flowing past. It was all there jiggling, an undeniable current of raw and vital life just inches from our long table.

There were multiple trips in a variety of vans and cabs to bring the group to this place,   and I have no idea how Joe picked it.  A trip to the restroom suggested to me that the place might have been a bank back in the days before the big Miami beach real estate bust, the one that pre-dates our recent national melt-down, and is the antecedent of the next one.

I had been fairly well concerned about that when I was seated listening to General Hugh Shelton, the 14thChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the conference that morning. He is well preserved, as you might expect, and has a new book out about his impressive military career. The General specializes in motivational speeches these days, and he is quite good at it. As I listened, I scrolled through a disturbing e-mail from one of my correspondents.

I was trying to keep tabs on the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, and I was gratified to see that it appeared the Japanese engineers were going to prevail, with dauntless courage, over the melting refined uranium.

The other news was as bad, and there were no heroes in it. The long analytic peice was about the tsunami of debt that the Fed is valiantly pumping into the economy, to the tune of $4 billion a day. We have gotten quite used to these astonishing numbers, and the commentary goes like this: The Fed will cease this “Quantitative Easing” thing sometime in the summer because the smart guys are getting nervous. The market, which has artificially been pumped up with the funny money, will collapse. A new QE will quickly be re-imposed, but the genie of inflation will be out of the bottle again.

What was curious is that the smart guys cannot tell me if this is the deflation of Japan’s collapse of the 1990s, or that of Weimar Germany’s hyper-inflation in the 1930s.

The only thing to do as the conference ground on through the day was to go to dinner. It was our equivalent of doing what Mr. Bernanke is doing.

An extraordinary performance artist was working our table. Dark-eyed, lean, Latin and approachable, Ricardo juggled wine-bottles and menus with aplomb. He was supervised by award-winning executive chef and owner Gerry Quinn, who made a special trip from the kitchen to introduce himself to our Quantitative Easing party.

Gerry is committed to redefining “local flavor,” we were told. He fuses old-Florida style seafood concepts with progressive global trends. The result is a South Beach seafood institution that you really ought to take in, if you have a chance. I had the calamari salad and the sashimi tuna, and it was dynamite.

I would tell you more about what happened at Ocean Drive, but I think I have been indiscrete enough. Suffice it to say, if this all melts down this summer, it was still one hell of a good dinner, and it might define, in my mind, what is going to look like our Gilded Age when we look at it in the rear-view mirror.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com