Unlike comparable sports championships, the Derby comes early in the season, rather than at the end of a grueling series of games and playoffs. Before the first Saturday in May, they have been racing in Florida, California, New York, Arkansas, Louisiana and over at Keeneland in Lexington, many of them studiously avoiding each other before the big race. And the noise and color of Derby Day creates an unprecedented psychological situation for horse, jockey, trainer and owner alike. Derby time is Louisville s moment of special grace. The racing is, to some extent, just the pretext, or the occasion, for one of the world s most spectacular pageants raucous and refined, gross and gorgeous, ludicrous and heart wrenching.
Many people come for the party, never see a horse and leave happy.
There is a long tradition of wild and strange parties around Derby time, going back at least as far as the days when high rollers from the East would come down in their private railroad cars. Among the hundreds of parties that follow in that tradition, two stand out. The party, which benefits a Lexington charity called the Bluegrass Boys Ranch, always has a fanciful theme. Louisville s brightest bash is the Diamond Derby Celebrity Gala, a fund-raiser for the American Diabetes Association, thrown in a big old house overlooking Cherokee Park in Louisville. In 1996 the theme was A Nite on the Nile and featured pyramids, live camels and a lounging woman impersonating Cleopatra.