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Six ways to Sunday: with one week under the world's spotlight, Houston showed off its lust for flesh, booze, sports, and business--and took Super Bowl revelry to dizzying new heights.

Article Excerpt
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE YOU GET the chance to see Houston reveal itself with a bracing, eager purity. Its anxious to please, we-belong-in-the-big-leagues nature was fleetingly evident during the premiere of Urban Cowboy, in 1980, when almost every socialite in town threw herself at John Travota, and again during the global economic summit of 1980, when honchos recruited five thousand civilian volunteers to clean the streets, and yet again, during the 1992 Republican Convention, when the planting of red, white, and blue flowers reached daffy proportions. But for my money, Houston-the complete Houston-has never been so apparent as it was during the week of Super Bowl XXXVIII. The event played to Houston's natural strengths-its zeal for girls, booze, and sports--while simultaneously enabling its upwardly mobile persona: Its expansiveness and its self-consciousness, as well as its ambition, its devout capitalism, and its deep but unexamined worship of undeserving demi-celebrities. During the week before the game Houston seemed so overwhelmed by itself that it teetered on the brink of madness and almost took me down with it.

MONDAY, JANUARY 26: feel a little like an impostor; the last time I sat through a football game was during high school, when the Vietnam War was raging, and I still know more about demilitarized zones than end zones. Still, it's seductive inside the George R. Brown Convention Center, currently ground zero for the Super Bowl elite. I pass through several layers of security, and someone hands me press credentials and an embroidered badge with eBay potential, inducing an instant case of smugness. I'm in! Then I realize that everyone around me has more badges than I do. The semiotics are easy to grasp: The more badges, the more important you are. Then there are people too important for badges, like Astros owner Drayton McLane and Texans owner Bob McNair, who stride imperially through the building, trailed by beefy, reverential sportswriters.

The status virus is in its early bar virulent stage. For many weeks before, telephone lines and e-mails have been clogged with gossip about who is going to whose parties given by which corporate sponsors. I've heard several times that Denzel Washington and Halle Berry will be in town for soirees, the locations of which are as secret as the sites of Saddam's WMDs. Not everyone is buying the celebrity rumors, however. "Some parties say they've got invited guests. We've got confirmed guests," a representative for the Mercury Room, a hip Houston downtown club, assures me. I experience a twinge of high school like desperation:...

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