"Gold parties": like a pawn shop, with wine

WASHINGTON — It's gold parties now, here in the de-gilded age. The women who used to invite all their girlfriends over to their fantastic homes for good wine and catered nosh on the pretense of selling merchandise to one another (Pampered Chef! Fancy wrapping paper for school charity!) are now inviting one another over to their fantastic homes for parties where everyone turns their gold into cash (ca$h!!) and winds up convulsing with giddy laughter over such treasures as wedding bands from bad marriages or those door-knocker earrings left behind by dearly departed Nana.

"See this? This is the shah of Iran," says Kathy Atkins, a guest at a recent gold party in a suburban town house. She holds up a coin ring engraved with, sure enough, a profile of the shah of Iran. "I got this when we lived in Tehran."

She also brought jewelry belonging to another friend who couldn't make the party, because she's vacationing in Italy — "Lake Como, but a week after George Clooney left. ... She called me and had me go into her house to look around for her gold."

Another woman has lots of gold chains she bought "back when I was teaching at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok." A man brought a ghastly watch given to him by an African dictator on a lobbying trip.

Not all the tales have that air of Washington worldliness; there are also those half-heart pendants on necklaces, given by ex-boyfriends who were never so great. There are the dentures of deceased relatives, framed in gold, unwrapped discreetly for an estimate.

At a gold party, you walk away with a check ($453, $898, $297, $503) and an almost serene renewal of faith in one kind of economy — the ancient kind. You would never have this sort of fun at a pawnshop, and a pawnshop wouldn't serve ahi spring rolls and martinis.

"This is it; it's not very high-tech," says January Thomas, preparing to conduct a gold party for 30 or so guests. (And so can you! Simply go to Thomas' Web site, MyGoldParty.com, and purchase your own measuring kit and guidebook for $700, schedule a party and just wait for the fun to begin.)

Thomas has a jeweler's magnifying loupe, a battery-powered meter that is wired to a conductor and a little gel pen wired to the meter, which can test any item and immediately assay its authenticity as real gold. She has a scale that will weigh up to 50 grams. She has Ziploc baggies. She has index cards and a calculator.

"It looks like a dorky science fair project, doesn't it?" says Thomas, 29.

She flew in from Michigan, just for this. Her husband's family, the Ahees, have owned a fancy jewelry store in Grosse Pointe Woods that goes back decades. It all started when Thomas asked where she could sell some of her old gold — the charm pendant from junior high, some ropy chains that were no longer in style. In a family like that, you just melt the stuff down and sell it to banks. She couldn't believe how easy it was.

Eight years ago, gold was selling for less than $300 an ounce; lately it flirts with the thousand-dollar mark. On this particular Wednesday evening, the price of gold has closed at $881.90 an ounce, while on Capitol Hill, lawmakers look for a way to explain to themselves and to taxpayers a largely theoretical economic disaster of imaginary numbers, as a way of cobbling together a nearly trillion-dollar rescue of ... of what, exactly? What are they talking about that we could actually hold in our hands, recognize?

Entirely coincidentally — but wildly metaphorically — the doorbell rings and the gold party begins.

There's lots of leopard print, cute tops, great shoes. And some men, too — everyone has a little gold they don't know what to do with.

The party's host is Paige Rhodes, 40 and brimming with shiny cheer. She does the Susan G. Komen for the Cure hike for breast cancer research and awareness every year, in memory of four friends who've died, plus her mother, who passed away two years ago. Nine friends are cancer survivors.

Rhodes is the best customer ever at one of Thomas' gold parties, walking away with a check for $5,100 earlier this year. It was the biggest check Thomas has written. (The average is around $300, she says.)

"It was just all this stuff I knew I would never wear again, or ever," Rhodes says. "My mother was a QVC addict. "

The women at a gold party are usually just the right age to have sparkled in another epoch, the shimmery 1980s, when gold tennis bracelets were a measure of true love and gold waistlets said, if nothing else, that Slim Fast works.

This time of year is when Rhodes has to think of a clever way to entice her friends to donate to the cancer walk. "I'm tired of trying to sell people things for charity," she says. "As soon as I'd been to the gold party, everyone I know said they wanted to go to a gold party, too. And so I called [Thomas] and said: 'Hey, would you come down? Could we donate part of it to the walk?' "

One man who didn't want to be named waits patiently while Thomas weighs his old wedding rings (plural) and a pocket watch given to him by an ex-wife that had been handed down in her family. "It doesn't mean anything to me, really, so why not?" he says. He gets a check for $1,218 — mostly for the watch.

"Is this the worst thing you've ever seen?" says Brian Childs, showing an atrocious, crusted-nuggety gold watch. It was a gift, in 1991, from the late dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. The room screams with laughter.

"Can I scrape it?" Thomas asks, picking up a small file.

Childs rolls his eyes. Of course you can scrape it.

The screen on the meter never lies: NOT GOLD.

"Oooooh! Noooh!" moans the entire room, in raucous faux-letdown.

It takes Thomas three full hours to assay everyone's gold. Tonight she's written 21 checks for a grand total of $10,352 — about 75 percent of what it is valued on the day's gold market close. Of the remaining 25 percent, 15 percent goes to Rhodes' cancer walk. The rest goes home with Thomas. She's back on a plane to Michigan the next morning, and the two Ziploc freezer bags full of gold, more than a kilo, head to her via FedEx, overnight, insured.

Thomas will separate the gold from cheap gems, teeth, plated-steel chains and the innards of watches. She will feed every piece into a bubbling urn. When there's enough, and when it cools, Thomas gets the gold bars to a bank, pronto, to keep up with the price she paid per ounce. Gold could go way down or gold could go up and up. That is how things have always worked, in the most elemental economy around.