TIME EUROPE
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Of Stock Values and Superpowers
By THOMAS SANCTON Davos
At a private dinner in a Davos restaurant, some of Silicon Valley's most influential (and wealthy) movers and shakers huddled with journalists from TIME and Fortune over smoked salmon and veal ragout to talk about money, technology, the new economy--and themselves. Towards the end of the increasingly boisterous evening, U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who had been dining in another room, stopped by to say hello. The Valley boys greeted him with cheers of "Lar-RY! Lar-RY!." Summers, wearing his perpetual deadpan, asked them, "How would you guys have received the U.S. Treasury Secretary after a year when the NASDAQ went DOWN?" To which one wit replied: "You've got it backwards, Larry: after a year when the NASDAQ went down, what would happen to the Treasury Secretary?" One tech-exec went further and told Summers, "Hey, you guys need some new portraits on those bills. How about one of me?" To which the head of a rival company shot back: "They don't make 25-inch dollar bills!"
At the same dinner, the fiancee of a rising dot.com superstar waxed passionate on the brave new world of high tech. "The Internet is the most important thing in my life," she enthused. "I mean, I love Bob [not his real name], but the Internet comes first." Well, said the journalist sitting next to her, the Internet is great but perhaps it's nothing to get personally worked up about. "You don't understand," she said. "I'm 32 years old. How many times in your life can you experience a change of paradigm?" She added: "Of course, some day I'll have children and they'll be important, too." "I hate to break the news to you," said her interlocutor, "but that's one thing you can't do on the Internet."
The Saturday night gala at the Davos Congress Center was a black-tie affair that brought one thousand of the world's richest and most powerful men and women together to celebrate their success over champagne, wine, margaritas and international cuisine. In the steamy swimming pool area, guests tucked into tortillas and tamales to the music of a Mexican mariachi band. In another salon, it was chicken and pineapple brochettes accompanied by Caribbean jazz. Other offerings included canapes in the piano bar and chip-n-dip to the tune of a Dixieland band. But the hottest place in town was the Chicago Club in the rear dining room, where three blues groups laid down a gut-thumping beat while guests gorged themselves on barbecued ribs and beer.
It seemed like a recipe for cataclysmic culture shock when Chicago blues singer Katherine Davis, buxom and burly in her tight dress, started grinding her prodigious hips and singing risque blues lyrics to a stiff crowd of rich white folks in penguin suits and evening gowns. "Rock me, BAY-bee," moaned Davis, her eyes closed and beads of sweat glistening on her temples, "like my back ain't got no bones ..." The lyrics got raunchier as the singer, accompanied by rocking, two-fisted pianist Erwin Helfer, launched into a Bessie Smith's "I need a hot dog between my roll/ Daddy, drop some sugar in my sugar bowl ..."
But the blues has a way of making people let their hair down. The crowd soon got to grinning and bouncing and rocking on the balls of their feet. Finally, Davis yanked "three pretty ladies" up on the stage in their long evening dresses and elegant decolletees and made them dance along to the tune of "I got my mojo workin' but it just don't work on you." Stiff and self-conscious at first, the ladies got into it and were soon shaking their money-makers with euphoric abandon. It remains to be seen whether Davos contributed to closing the world's wealth gap, but on Saturday night, at least, the soul gap started to narrow a bit.
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