Just as we were ready to enter Syatt's love nest, hordes of smiling, twentysomething freaks came rushing onto the scene with eerie smiles and pink hearts on their name tags. They were chattering about sales percentages and quotas.

"These people have been here all weekend," she whispered, with a look of scorn. "They're called NuSkin."

It was a company like no other, and after talking to a skinny guy in a blue suit with a crazed look in his eyes, we were almost converted.

"I became a distributor because of faith in the product. If you don't have the belief that these are the finest products in the world, then you won't succeed. The objective is to build your belief level," he said earnestly.

He and the 100 other tagwearers around us were training to become NuSkin distributors, an elite with the power to foist goods upon unsuspecting multitudes.

"It's shampoos, soaps--you know, skin careproducts. We've got something calledsonic-enhanced drying. You see--your body is aliving organism and every day you put soap allover your body."

He left us feeling stunned, unproductive andacutely chapped. But he soon came back, with thelook of someone who has just one more thing tosay.

"I hope to go to Utah soon. That'sheadquarters. Our company has a motto: All of thegood, none of the bad."

NOW THIS IS A PARTY

Contorted faces examined a buffet tableat the front of Syatt's party. A group of hungrymen squinted through the dark of the Hiltonnightclub in a vain attempt to identify thefoodstuffs.

We stood watching their routine. It wasorderly, systematic. Each man examined thedisplay, cut a sandwich in two, placed a half onhis plate and sauntered away, back to his startingposition with the other fellows. They appeared tobe stuck in this cycle forever. Not exactlyromance.

The dance floor in this place was not muchbigger than your average public bathroom. It was aplace where adults could start all over again.They were going to be young...to dance the nightaway.

But this was hardly the case, for the peoplewere not here to dance the night away--they werehere, as one man said, "to connect." The dance,this whole scene, was strictly a means to anend--finding someone. It was a particularlyawkward means of overcoming loneliness.

Indeed, the majority of adults did not evenconnect with the dance floor. Forming asemi-circle around the dance floor, they watchedand sipped their drinks.

The music was some kind of ugly late-seventiesnightmare. To witness these older framesstruggling with gravity on the miniature dancefloor was to see the unnatural forced upon thelonely.