Mark over at Pawn Gallery has alerted me to breaking news on the $30,000 millionaire beat: The Beautiful Room isn't claiming to be beautiful any longer. In a surprising display of self-awareness, the social club is now calling itself "The Room." Actually, the Web address is "the--room.com," so you can feel free to fill that blank in with whatever you like. I'd start by looking up synonyms for "vapid" and "soulless." Why the name change? I like Mark's theory: "It could be the fact that their members are beautiful, but can only spell using hooked-on-phonics."
If you're just joining us in the ongoing saga of The Room Formerly Known As Beautiful, a summary: You apply online by sending in photos of yourself, then, if you're deemed attractive enough (or, if you're male, if you look like you can pay the monthly membership fee), you do a phone interview with the club's owner. If you make the cut, you get access to exclusive parties where they hire professional photographers to come take pictures of everyone while they get beautifully hammered.
Mark and I both have special ties to The Room: I infiltrated their ranks for a cover story in June 2006, and Mark unwittingly allowed the group to rent out his gallery space for one of their parties -- an event that would have been unremarkable if group members hadn't started dry humping each other while Mark surretipitously filmed it.
Amazingly, I'm somehow still on The Room's mailing list. I got an email from the group this morning announcing their plans to expand to Austin and Chicago. It's like douchebag manifest destiny. They've also got new pics up on their MySpace page. Their next exclusive event is this Friday, October 19. The e-mail didn't say where -- that's super-secret beautiful info, of course -- but I think Pawn Gallery Mark can attest: if you've rented out your gallery/warehouse/yard to The Room, you might want to start covering everything in a thick layer of Scotchgard. --Andrea Grimes
