Win an invitation to the most bittersweet Playboy Mansion party ever thrown

By Sean O'Neal | November 10, 2010 | 5:23pm

Aux Features Books

If you’ve ever dreamed of attending a party at the legendary Playboy Mansion but lack the star power of a Pauly Shore, you may finally get your chance this Friday: Included inside the pages of the approximately 200,000 issues of the magazine will be 10 “Golden Tickets” to the annual Midsummer Night’s Dream Party, a Willy Wonka-inspired promotion that substitutes licking snozzberries for the chance to avoid hepatitis-B. As the amusingly named editorial director Jimmy Jellinek notes, it’s the first time the doors of the fabled mansion have been “swung open” to the public, allowing the average man to mingle with “Hollywood stars and Playboy models often wearing little but body paint,” resulting in “stories [the average reader] can't tell their wives and girlfriends but will last forever.” Like the time you stood in the Bacardi line for half an hour while Bill Maher talked to some waitress 20 feet away and you saw her blue nipples.

Anyway, winners will get a flight to Los Angeles, board at the “posh Petit Ermitage hotel,” and dinner at the swanky Simon L.A. in addition to access to the Playboy Mansion—and more importantly, according to some Wall Street analysts, this may be your last chance to see it: As Playboy continues to lose money to this whole Internet fad, and the specter of a $115 million debt grows ever closer, Hugh Hefner has been advised to not only begin selling off his art collection, but consider allowing Playboy to sell its fabled mansion as well (all of which is reminiscent of the slow bleed that killed Bob Guccione). So yeah, if you want to attend one of the most bittersweet Playboy parties in the company’s history—“Our girls wear nothing but a brave face!”—then make sure you hit the newsstand on Friday. Please is the subtext of that statement.