By the time I made it to Venus Velazquez’s party, the first drop had happened, and things looked dour. Her forces had amassed at Jasmine, a sushi bar that had recently taken over the site once inhabited by a charming Red Robin, and things were looking bleak. Venus was there sipping from a pint glass of delicious-looking ice water. Venus wasn’t talking to reporters—a member of her staff assailed me and said “Venus isn’t talking to anyone,” settling the matter before I could even bring it up—and so that left me to find the bathroom.

As I approached the stairs leading to the bathroom, a woman nearly fell into my arms. She was very drunk, and she was staggering down the stairs. “Easy,” I said to her, not very helpfully. “Tee-hee!” she said, and then, she added, also not very helpfully, “Whoa.”
In the bathroom again, I consulted Jay-Z. “Say hello to the bad guy/They say I’m a bad guy/I come from the bottom/But I’m mad fly/They say I’m a menace/That’s the picture they paint/They say a lot about me/Let me tell you what I ain’t,” Jay-Z said.
I went back out into the bar and chatted with a very nice employee of Friends of the Library who was about to leave the bar and attend Bruce Harrell’s party, which was no doubt a little more lively. Velazquez gave a not-concession speech that sounded very suspiciously like a concession speech.

“It’s been good,” she said. She added that the political process “has been remarkable to my soul.” The Friends of the Library lady left in the middle of the speech. An employee of the bar tapped me on the shoulder.
“Is it true,” she asked me, “That this is the one who got the DUI?”
I nodded.

She broke down in giggles. “That’s great!”

Venus, too, acknowledged the DUI at the end of her speech when she said, “So, eat, drink and be merry, and there are cabs for everybody who needs one!”

That seemed like as good a time to leave as any.