The 24-Karat Party

She flew in from Michigan, just for this. She's 29, and in this soft living room light, her long blond hair and fair skin and creamy beige sweater make her look weirdly golden, and calm. She used to work in sales. 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 gymnastics in junior high, some ropey 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 in Troubled America, 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? Everything we own? Everything we don't?

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

Women squeal their customary greetings to one another. There's lots of leopard print, cute tops, great shoes.

This time the husbands come, too. Everybody has a little gold they don't know what to do with.

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The party's host is Paige Rhodes. The townhouse is nestled in one of those high-end enclaves off Duke Street, east of the freeway. Rhodes's husband, Don, is a general practitioner in family medicine. They have a calico cat.

Rhodes, who is 40 and brimming with shiny cheer, does the Susan G. Komen for the Cure three-day hike for breast cancer research and awareness every year, all 60 miles. She's seriously into it, it has changed her life and all that. She walks in memory of four friends who've died, plus her mother, who passed away two years ago. Nine friends are cancer survivors. Rhodes has a pink ribbon on the back of her white BMW 330i (license plate: 3DAYS, in reference to the annual walk).

It also happens that Paige Rhodes is the best customer who ever showed up to one of January Thomas's gold parties. That was earlier this year, when Thomas came to town and set up her little kit and checkbook at another house. Rhodes brought a Tupperware tub, in which layers of her gold jewelry had been carefully separated by paper towels. She walked away with a check for $5,100. It was the biggest check Thomas has written, so far. (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. I'd go visit my parents in Florida and see her wearing some piece of jewelry, and say something nice about it, and pretty soon, one just like it would show up in the mail." The jewelry her mother left behind included a set of stickpins with little dolphins on them. ("Why," Rhodes says -- not a question, just baffled endearment.) Rhodes kept only what mattered.

The women at a gold party are usually just the right age to have sparkled in another epoch, the shimmery 1980s, when Cybill Shepherd was a TV detective, and Belinda Carlisle was dropping weight, and women had baby-oil tans and wore rope necklaces and big hoop earrings in bright yellow gold. It was a time when gold tennis bracelets were a measure of true love, gold anklets said something about sexy adventure and gold waistlets said, if nothing else, that Slim Fast works. Men wore gold chains as a matter of prowess, the minute they turned 13. The less said about pinky rings, the better. ("New Jersey is a great place for gold parties," Thomas says.)

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 [January] and said: 'Hey, would you come down? Could we donate part of it to the walk?' I mean, everybody wins. When do you go to a party and walk away with money?"