What the WEF?! Week 4: Great Challenges Indeed

A regiment of kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing Scotsmen enter the ring. Dozens-strong, unexpected, they give every neck whiplash as all eyes turn to them, a triumphant parade of pomp.

A small troupe of mariachi musicians is trampled underfoot at their entrance, disco music playing from a tinny speaker is drowned out by their pipes, a woman, resplendent in pink sequins and energetically lip-syncing Britney, dissolves into invisible mist in the face of their attention-grabbing march.

It’s the Great Charity Challenge, that Saturday Night when young and old, professional and amateur, gather together under the lights in a show of competitive pageantry, to raise money for local Palm Beach County charities. Fifteen years running with over 20 million dollars already donated and distributed, tonight we add another 2.3 million to that number.

And we do it in style! This year’s theme is Global Music and we have everything from our overwhelming Scotsmen to flamenco to heavy metal to the Spice Girls. An absolute carnival of creativity and enthusiasm—no detail spared. If you don’t believe me, check out the Dollys—there’s no mistaking those buxom blondes!

In the ring, a labyrinth of three courses is set at three different heights. Each team is made up of two amateurs and one professional. The first to go jumps at the lowest height, which increases with each team member, a relay-style race that allows the very young, with facility for the lower heights, to participate equally.

And boy do they! There are children everywhere, I am tripping over them. I open my mouth to speak and a torrent—a veritable vomiting-forth—of profanity gushes out. This is usual for me, the mouth of a sailor with the attendant volume of a megaphone.

“Erica,” chides one child slowly and softly. Her wise and patient eyes are filled with recrimination, but a kindly sort, as if a gentle reminder is all it will take to amend decades of verbal debauchery.

“My dad always talks like that!” shouts the son of an Irishman standing beside us. The Irishman begins to protest, but his guilt is made obvious by his defensiveness.

Back at the table, we hear of another person newly svelte and thriving on semaglutide or its ilk.

“Have you seen —— ? She’s lost 20 pounds in one month!”

“But she wasn’t even fat,” someone (me) rejoins.

“Whatever. But now she says she has no medical problems, everything’s solved, she has no problems at all. Of any kind.”

“Well, I’m doing the same,” announces someone (me). “And then I’m going to marry a very rich man, because I am determined that only the greatest wealth will induce me into matrimony.”

“You cannot say,” sagely intones the Irishman sitting next to me, “that you will lose weight and then you’ll be happy, because it doesn’t work like that.”

“I am not saying that,” protests someone (me). “I am saying that I’ll be happy when the rich man is in bed next to me.”

Then someone (me) tries to throw a spanner in the works by suggesting that poor men are much better in bed than rich men. A quick survey of the table is conducted, with a particularly passionate vote for the proposition given by a young Ecuadorian rider of humble origins, and it is found that, indeed, poor men are much better in bed than rich ones, the flaw in the survey being that none of us have slept with any rich men.

“I’m going to get food,” says the aspiring videographer in our midst, standing abruptly.

When she comes back, her plate is piled high with meat—three slices of steak, a wedge of fish, a breast of chicken with attached wing, and six jumbo shrimp. We search for a bit of green, a head of roasted cauliflower. Nothing.

“I’m feeling like a carnivore,” she replies lustily to our stares. We all move our chairs a tiny bit further away from her.

Meanwhile, in the ring, a continuous blitz of painted horses and bedazzled riders. Team Spice Girls, representing British 90’s Dance Pop, grabbed the win on the course and Team Flamenco triumphed in the costume category with their sexy corsets and rose-bedecked helmets.

Pack your sequins and tulle away until next year! The Great Charity Challenge is in the books!

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