I heart the Hamptons

Love it or hate it – you gotta go to the Hamptons, and when you do, stay in Sag Harbour. I stayed there because it was the only place in the Hamptons that I could find an Airb’n’b place but in hindsight – it was the best possible choice. The cranky New Yorkers were right about one thing though – you need a car if you want to see it all, or maybe a yacht?

My first night in the Hamptons, I was quickly whisked away from the house by my host S. to her art gallery on Shelter Island - a tiny piece of the Hamptons jammed between the North and South forks accessible only by boat.

En route we picked up beer for the gallery party and we stopped by Buddy and Cynthia’s place to pick up S’ boyfriend W. Buddy is one cool guy. S, W and Buddy are all mad sailors. Buddy has Sag Harbour’s unofficial yacht club in a huge shed at the back of his summer place where he lets everyone store their boats during the summer. Three times a week through summer Buddy organises fiercely competitive sailing comps in the harbour.

We had to go to Buddy’s to pick up W, who was at Buddy’s after sailing to drop the boat back. Buddy and Cynthia were about to sit down to dinner, and the next thing you know, there I was chowing down on salmon watching the sun set over Shelter Island on the back deck of Buddy and Cynthia’s place right on the water – magical! Pinch me.

Buddy and Cynthia live closer to New York City during the rest of the year but they have two places at Sag Harbour for the summer. The place I went to and another place down the road which is kind of a bunkhouse/party house for their kids, so they can bring their friends home for the college for the Summer. Cool huh? According to their daughter Maggie, she's always getting in trouble for not bringing people home for the weekend to help crew Buddy's boat.

We had to make a hasty exit from Buddy and Cynthia’s to grab the barge over to Shelter Island before S was late for her own opening party. Not before, Cynthia marked me on the wall in the kitchen and wrote my name and the date and Buddy made vague plans to involve me in Sunday’s sailing comp.

The gallery party was a hoot! Sometimes I feel like I’m not really doing the holidaying so much as watching other people on holidays and sniggering and stifling giggles at all that I see and hear. The gallery party was definitely one of those occasions.

The opening was actually hosted by Karen, a glamazon that owns the gallery next to S’ and hosts entertainment at her gallery every Friday night of 'the season'. Tonight’s special entertainment was a very modern mix of images projected on a wall inside the gallery, with interpretive dancers and a DJ spinning random sounds to accompany it. In a word, it was terrible. I’m sorry, but modern interpretive dance is the biggest wank on earth. I like art, I like modern art. But I draw the line at interpretive dance. This was interpretive dance to random groaning sounds and scratching and bird noises and other crap. It was hideous. But that’s not even the best bit.

Have you ever walked past Ralph Lauren and seen a summer collection of sorbet coloured menswear? Models wearing lemon coloured jeans with mauve sweaters teamed with peppermint shirts. I often wondered who bought that stuff? I’m sure they sell a stack of gelato coloured polo shirts but I always wondered who bought the rest of the gear that always seemed to end up at the Harbour Town outlet store – surely this kind of stuff was really one item at a time wear? No? Now I know. It’s all sold to wealthy 65 year-olds in the Hamptons that actually wear it as complete ensembles. So picture this for live entertainment - I’m watching this complete garbage of a performance surrounded by wealthy old men in lavender sweaters teamed with peppermint jeans and white trousers with lemons sweaters. As I said earlier, between the performance and the outfits, and don’t get me started on what the women were wearing, there were a few times when I had to suddenly look away as a derisive smirk formed from the corners of my mouth. It was fantastic.

After the garbage performance – which I of course lied through my teeth and said I enjoyed, even hamming it up to talk about the energy of the dance and the flow between structured movement and free-flowing forms (while vomiting on the inside), we milled around outside and drank S’ beer. I chatted mostly to her friends - not a lavender jumper among them. There was the artist who is showing in her gallery at the moment and her husband who were really fun, S’ intern for the summer, Chip – a local real estate agent and Frank, a local interior decorator who specializes in mid-century pieces – hmm an interior decorator in the Hamptons oh how I want Frank’s job. Frank and I had a brief chat about the price of mid-century furniture in the US compared with Australia (which piqued Frank’s interest, again, I’m thinking about shipping containers!).

At about 11, we decided to pile into Chip’s Landrover and head for the uber cool bar Sunset at Sunset Beach. Now there’s a few cool ideas I could steal to rival the coolest bars I’ve ever been to on the Gold Coast, Noosa or Sydney. Friday is the quiet night so we just chilled out on the lounges by the fire pit – very cool indeed. And that was pretty much, the first 10 hours in the Hamptons taken care of.