"As I arrived inside the darkened confines of the VIP room—a cramped roped-off area in the back—and my eyes wandered around the assembled Arab potentates, twenty-two-year-old dot-com CEOs, NBA athletes, voluptuous R&B songbirds, and several princes of extinct foreign states but no Stephan in the bunch, who did I bump into but my missing-in-action au pair, Fedora-wearing gossip columnist to her right, cigarchomping investment tycoon to her left!"