Though we are not rich, sometimes we get to pretend. Like when someone with a fabulous royalty-sounding name -- Ashleigh Dempster -- beckons us to Beverly Hills (actual zip code, 90201 bitches!) to take part in a private dinner party dubbed "The Society" at a modern house we will never ever be able to afford ourselves. As someone who is actually mortifyingly shy around people I don't know, partially due to the fact that I'm extremely hard of hearing and wear a hearing aide, and partially because I was picked on mercilessly until I graduated from high school, I loathe events where everyone is fabulous and semi-famous-seeming (in the case of one guest, ex-Lost star Maggie Grace, actually famous), and try to avoid them whenever possible. Unless I can find a good wingman.

My chosen wingman was Charles Runnette, who in normal life was briefly my boss at HollywoodLife.com and who is now one of my buddies; but who in the Alternate Universe is reality TV's newest, love-to-hate-him rising star. He's the host and creator of the newly debuted Travel Channel's "Confessions of a Travel Writer," and people really haaaaaaate him, and have written veritable essays about his wry, sarcastic sense of humor, which they have mistaken for whining or simple nastiness. People, of course, are stupid.

Those looking for a snippet of that cutting humor weren't disappointed. While we were told that dinner would start at 8:30, we weren't seated until 9:15 which is like 2am for Los Angelenos, who party early and pussy out hard. "Oh, they're Argentineans," groaned Charles loudly in his booming voice for everyone -- including the Argentineans -- to hear, "we're not gonna eat til' midnight." As I buried my head in my hands and started laughing and sighing. "What!" he shrugged and gulped down some of the specialty cocktail, the Hemingway Daquiri, made with the sponsor for the evening, Zacapa Rum. " It's a nervous tic," he explained.

The dinner did take place at a South American pace; there's nothing wrong with that except for the fact that it was outside and we were all freezing by the second hour. Host Ashleigh's warnings to dress appropriately might have included instructions for a pea coat or a down jacket for us thin-blooded pansies, as even those with regular jackets and long sleeves were cold.

The discomfort was helped by two factors: Ashleigh had airline blankets, and, more importantly, we were on a fabulous patio overlooking the hills and had a view of Downtown L.A. The house, it was explained to me by the owner, Tim Braseth of Willow Glen Partners, is called the Pasinetti House, and it's landmarked -- a status he and his business partners gained for the house to save it from certain demolition. They restored and remodeled the home, which was commissioned in 1958 by Italian writer Pier Maria Pasinetti; it was designed to be a home for entertaining. The open bi-level space and the patio's devastating views ensured just that. Ashleigh had come to be the host of this particular party somewhat fortuitously: a friend who works with the city's tourism bureau was attending a Toronto Society event (where the company is based), when she told Ashleigh about the house; just then, Ashleigh got a photo of the very same house on her phone, at the same time. I know, spooky.

The idea for The Society is a good one: curate a dinner party (and other cultural events) with people who are involved in the arts and culture scenes of a city (including celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak, DJ Alex Merrell, and artist Gemma Ponsa Salvador), serve them dinner cooked by an upcoming chef (in this case we had the services of Diego Felix), and provide booze, and conversation. Lest this sound supremely pretentious, the two ladies Ashleigh and Amanda Blakely who started this are quite self-aware; the name is a dig at true society events, even while it aims to recreate them for a different set of people.

Try as we may to mingle, naturalemente, the journalists all found each other. Charles and I sat next to Lonny Pugh, LA editor of the misnamed Urban Daddy.com newsletter, and Los Angeles Magazine editor Sara Wilson, as well painter Whitney Bedford, who taunted us with her ability to get us into the Magic Castle. (Now, that's a secret society.)

We heard a few songs by Charlie Wadhams and got a mini-lesson from bartender Jamieson Rhyme, who works at famed Bottega Louie, about why the sponsored rum was actually special and not just because they were paying for the whole evening (short answer: it's made in Guatemala, it's not mass-produced, and is aged in four different barrels). Then we stood up to go with a fistful of business cards in our hands, rum in our tummy, and drove home down those winding hills back to our reality, where we do not live in that beautiful house, we do not live with our beautiful wife, and are not stars on the Travel Channel (but we are friends with one).

Email tips to {encode="tromano@bbook.com" title="tromano@bbook.com"}.