Moulin Rouge

How does one spend a Sunday evening? Taika decided that we should all be at this party themed as "Moulin Rouge".

As the invite hadn't reach me in time, I had absolutely no clue what this was meant to be. Were we to be transported Moulin Rouge (French for "red mill"), the traditional cabaret, built in 1889 by Joseph Oller and enter into a world of debauchery? I doubted that.

The Taika stairwell was converted into black tunnel that was to take us into the coccoon of excesses and luxury.

Andrey Bely wrote in his 1906 letter to Alexander Blok about the Tavern of Hell at Moulin Rouge, where lackeys were dressed as devils:

Sometimes I would venture from my sepulchre to the jazz of night Paris, where having gathered the colours, I would think them over in front of the fire. I could be seen walking through a funeral corridor of my house and descending down a black spiral of steep stairs; rushing underground to Montmartre, all impatience to see the fiery rubies of the Moulin Rouge cross. I wondered thereabouts, then bought a ticket to watch frenzied delirium of feathers, vulgar painted lips and eyelashes of black and blue.

Naked feet, and thighs, and arms, and breasts were being flung on me from bloody-red foam of translucent clothes. The tuxedoed goatees and crooked noses in white vests and toppers would line the hall, with their hands posed on canes. Then I found myself in a pub, where the liqueurs were served on a coffin (not a table) by the nickering devil: "Drink it, you wretched!" Having drunk, I returned under the black sky split by the flaming vanes, which the radiant needles of my eyelashes cross-hatched. In front of my nose a stream of bowler hats and black veils was still pulsing, foamy with bluish green and warm orange of feathers worn by the night beauties: to me they were all one, as I had to narrow my eyes for insupportable radiance of electric lamps, whose hectic fires would be dancing beneath my nervous eyelids for many a night to come.

It would have been impossible for anyone to recreate that for a one-night only themed party. The interior was draped in deep red and black fabric and there were some girls in arabic (?) costumes hanging about. They are the green fairies perhaps? There were two dance items based on the music from Baz Luhrman's film of 2001.

Music played and drinks flowed. Friends hanging out and having a good time. What more could one ask for on a Sunday evening...