It's a Party

We sat on lounge chairs and watched the rest of candidates perform from the sidelines: the stand-up comedian, the rap duo, and the black-power capoeira act. The tipsy audience was a potpourri of Beirut's artists, film-makers, actors, designers, writers, and hipsters. They clustered on the grass around the stage, the elevated rocky terrain adjacent to the bar and just in front of the pool.

It was well past midnight—palm trees illuminated by footlights framed the horizon. Allegedly, La Voile Bleue is a beach club, but the beach seemed to be more of a forgotten circumstance than a place.

When the capoeira act finally ended, Hatem and Samar, the organizers of Sahra Khat Ahmar (Party OFF-LIMITS), rallied the party-goers to vote. Ballots in hand, the polity slowly headed to the polls to elect a candidate. The winner was to receive $5 of each $30 entry ticket.

It was an election. With performances by the candidates. At a beach club. In Southern Lebanon. A month before the hotly contested presidential elections.

Moreover, because the event was a party, it eschewed the gaze of the censor, which had just recently banned a contentious performance because it supposedly raised sectarian tensions.

I was in my bathing suit enjoying a pathetic daiquiri at the pool bar when the winner was announced: Salamander, the trio of comic book artists who pledged to use the funds to launch their publication. They performed right before we took the stage, and—by the by—they were the only candidate to speak in Arabic.

"You missed your audience, just missed 'em," the burly guy at the bar told me. "You should have played for your audience--I mean, you were good and funny, performance and acting and all, but no one got it."

The water was a murky aqua. When I climbed out and dried off, a young woman on her way to the bathroom stopped and asked me, "Now, really, what were you on?"