Short Cuts: Episode I 
Hi, Society!
No one in Houston throws a party like Becca Cason Thrash, the flirty socialite whose dazzling sense of style and irrepressible personality are the talk of the town.
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I stood in the foyer and stared at the arrivals. Here came Robert Mosbacher, the Secretary of Commerce when Bush the elder was president, with his new young, blond wife, Mica, at his side. Here came the international modeling sensation Lauren Bush, the niece of Bush the younger, with her date, Lucas Somoza, a high school classmate who, it was whispered, was related in some way or another to the infamous Nicaraguan dictator. Here came Lynn Wyatt, who, despite being rather, shall we say, reserved in the interview she gave W for its article about Becca ("She's a nice girl. She's married to a nice guy. She's . . . well . . . fun"), knows a good party when she sees one. And here came the new generation of the city's social divas, stunning creatures in their thirties and forties who confidently walked five steps ahead of their husbands, posed with fixed smiles for the photographers, and made cute comments to the society writers gathered in the foyer. Cathy Echols, the blond wife of a banker, sidled up to Andrea Minnis, the blond wife of a real estate developer, and cracked jokes about her "jewelry elbow"—apparently, a form of tennis elbow brought on by wearing too many bracelets.
Among the guests were a few men who have no real social standing but were invited because they make Becca laugh. One of them was Al Nolen, a balding, fiftyish high school counselor, real estate agent, and society columnist for The Examiner, a Beaumont newspaper (his column is called Out and About). He went to the bar and ordered a cranberry juice and vodka. "It's the perfect drink," he explained, "a positive with a negative." Nolen was so excited to be at Becca's that he couldn't stop moving and was shaking the hand of everyone within ten feet. "In my columns I like to call this house a 'poshienda.' Isn't that delightful? A poshienda!"
A murmur wafted through the crowd: The celebrity fashion designers were arriving. Mark Badgley and James Mischka smiled graciously as women approached to tell them how good they looked whenever they wore their dresses ("I mean, really good," one woman said). The curly-haired Diane von Furstenberg was accompanied by her young femaleassistant, who carried a small camera. Von Furstenberg took one look at the house and exclaimed, "This is a temple, a temple." Turning to her assistant, she said, "My camera!" Then she proceeded to photograph the tables, the walls, and even the peculiarly stitched tuxedo jacket worn by George Lancaster, an executive with the Hines Corporation.
Fashionably late, Vogue editor Anna Wintour arrived with her boyfriend, financier Shelby Bryan, who was born and raised in Houston. Everyone pretended to listen while he spoke collegially with old friends about his attempts to raise $35 million for something or other, but their eyes kept darting over to Wintour, who was wearing a silvery Chanel cocktail suit. One of the fashion world's most powerful figures, she is renowned for her reserved, somewhat aloof English personality and the dark glasses she wears constantly. Perhaps to show respect, Wintour was sans sunglasses this evening, but it seemed as if she desperately wanted them. Her eyelids blinked rapidly at the orgy of chatter that swirled around her. She hardly knew what to say when Cerón, the voluble Mexican-born hairdresser to many of Houston's glitterati, whispered in his sultry accent, "You look fab-oo-lous." When a woman in a very low-cut Ralph Lauren gown that displayed what partygoers said were very new breasts introduced herself, even Wintour did a doubletake at the cleavage.
At one point, I watched Wintour watching Becca. Although Wintour said nothing, she seemed awestruck. On this evening Becca was a social cyclone, complimenting everyone she saw, laughing at everything they said, and spouting off a series of one-liners. When someone asked about her 2,000-square-foot kitchen, she said, "I don't know that much about it. John and I go out to eat almost every night." When someone else asked if she ever swam in the indoor pool, she said, "Oh, God, no, it's too cold. I've never put my big toe in there." To another person, she said, "Take a tour of the house. Our house is your house, except for the rooms that are locked." When a guest asked to see her closet, she sent her upstairs. "We're going to expand and add 1,100 feet to it," she said. "I've got to find a place to put all my clothes."
Meanwhile, John Thrash seemed to have undergone an amazing transformation since those days in 1995 when he first met Becca and was known, she says, as "a kind of Tibetan monk whose socialization had not begun to evolve." Thrash was kissing women on the cheek, showing people to their tables, and taking no offense whatsoever when he came upon a couple of half-stewed men who were trying to puzzle out some of the sayings that were engraved in his marble tables. "'This truth within thy mind rehearse, that in a boundless universe is boundless better, boundless worse,'" one of the men recited, quoting a table. "What the hell?"
Around the indoor pool were tables draped in red fabric, and on each one a large silver vase held 275 red roses—some 8,000 in all. A stage had been suspended over the middle of the pool, where the Houston actress Sally Edmundson provided the evening's main entertainment: a scene from Full Gallop, the one-woman show about the life of Becca's heroine, Diana Vreeland. As Vreeland, Edmundson exhorted the audience to act larger than life: "You have to have style. It's what gets you up in the morning." After the performance and the seated dinner (chicken paillard, salad with goat cheese, and papaya mousse), which ended around eleven o'clock, Becca's guests rose from their chairs like hyped-up salesmen after a motivational speech, grabbed their drinks, and began mingling again as if the party were just beginning. A few people, including Wintour, slipped away early. But Diane von Furstenberg wasn't going anywhere. She was having such a grand time that she asked Becca to sprawl across the bed in the master bedroom with her so her assistant could take their photograph.
Everyone imbibed great quantities of champagne. One giggling woman became disoriented as she tried to walk across the second-story glass floor and fell, injuring her leg. Members of the catering staff carried her out of the house in a throne-size chair. "Good-bye and good luck," cried the still-walking guests, holding up their glasses of champagne in a kind of group toast. Lucas Somoza was so entranced by his surroundings that he did not watch where he was going and stepped straight into the shallow end of the swimming pool. A short time later, a newly married young woman who was staring adoringly at her husband a few feet away—one of the few women who actually took time that evening to look at her husband—also stepped straight into the pool.
Then, while Becca was upstairs changing into her second outfit of the evening, Al Nolen, the Beaumont paper's effervescent gossip columnist, decided that he wanted to shake hands with the lead singer of a pop band playing at the far side of the house. Trying to take a shortcut, he walked the wrong way around a table and became the third guest of the night to fall into the pool—but he fell into the deep end. His Prada dress shoes with the trendy thick heels and wide toes, which he had recently purchased at Neiman Marcus' Last Call sale, quickly filled with water, and he began to sink to the bottom. The last words he was heard to say before his balding head was completely submerged were "Oh, holy shit."
"Save that man!" shouted several people nearby who had no desire to ruin their own clothes. Nolen, meanwhile, was still sinking, staring plaintively upward. Some witnesses said his eyes seemed to focus on the glass of cranberry juice and vodka he had set down on one of the tables. Then Charles, the Thrashes' houseman, leaped into the water and grabbed one of Nolen's outstretched arms. Just as he was pulled to the side of the pool, gasping for air and telling people that he really had seen his life flash before his eyes, Becca descended the staircase by the other side of the pool in a stunning black Jean Paul Gaultier gown.
"I'm back!" she trilled as the partygoers turned and applauded. Meanwhile, Nolen had slipped out a back door. Was he just too embarrassed to be seen again? Of course not. Ever resourceful, he always keeps a second tuxedo in his car when he goes to parties, in case of emergency. He was soon back in the poshienda, shaking hands again.
"Sweetie, you've changed too!" Becca cried when she saw him, still oblivious of his near-death experience. "Just following in your footsteps," Nolen replied, a cranberry juice and vodka already in hand.
At two o'clock Becca went off to make her last change, returning in red silk La Perla pajamas—a signal to her guests that the party was over. Everyone formed a line to say good-bye to Becca and John, thanking them so profusely you would have thought they were U.N. workers who had just provided a truckload of food for starving refugees.
The great front doors finally shut behind the last guest. The party was over. The house was silent. Then Becca turned to her husband. "Baby," she said, "wasn't it flawless? Absolutely flawless? When can we do it again?"
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