I yearn to dress with the authority of a kleptocratic cannibal

Charlie's myriad interests intersect so rarely that she just had to direct your attention to one such cosmic instance: confidante and culture maven Cintra Wilson's most recent NYT Critical Shopper column. Where else will you find booze, shoes, and Uzis?

At the top of the third-floor escalator, an excruciatingly handsome Alain Delon type offered me a flute of Veuve, or a Grey Goose cocktail. That’s it, I thought. This is my promised land. Hold my animal, I’m staging a putsch.

Drooling over racks of totalitarian resort finery, I succumbed to delusions of megalomania. I selected noms de guerre and despotic monikers for each outfit: Madame Subcommandantrix. La Cobra Blanca. She Who Leaves a Flaming Trail of Plastic Animal-Print Combat Garments en Route to the Glorious People’s Jacuzzi.

Or simply ... Cher.

An example of superlative service: You have selected over $30,000 of garments — and there are three of them, total. They are carried into the “special” dressing room (the one with — no lie — what I believed to be actual cheetah fur covering the doors). You remark: “I’ll be in here for a while. I am going to do a pile of blow and clean my gun.”

The sterling professional, instead of dialing security, quips that you’ll be “needing another drink.”

This is how it feels to hold a nation in fear!

[snip]

“Shall I call the fitter?” the sterling professional asked. That suit ($3,850) wasn’t to come off until M.P.’s pried my corpse out of it. Oh, for a tyranny of one’s own. I vowed to return with euros after selling black helicopters to Libya, and my mother, too.

(And, apropos of Charlie's earlier post, see Cintra's fine obit of HST here. We promise to return to our regularly scheduled programming in the morning.)