Some people like to get inspired for the day watching televangelists at 6am, while they get ready for work. Me, I’d like to have a channel of all shows like Mary Queen of Shops on BBC America.

Mary Queen of Shops comes from the same team which produces Gordon Ramsay’s F Word and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, both shows about how to improve commercial kitchen work. My problem with the Gordon Ramsay shows is that I can’t watch most food television without getting insanely hungry and desperately craving whatever is being prepared. Basically, I have way too low a threshold for food porn. Mary Queen of Shops has a similar format with none of the insatiable craving for sauteed scallops in some special parsley butter sauce following viewing.

Mary Portas is a branding and retail consultant for fashion enterprises. Each episode of this show, she takes a small floundering independent boutique and helps it improve the way it does business. She is a strong advocate of fabulous service and careful market segment focus. It doesn’t even matter if one always agrees with everything she says because part of the show’s appeal is that it puts one in a business frame of mind. It makes you think about what you would do in whatever situation is being presented. Mary Portas comes across as high energy and even playful, while simultaneously being aggressive and can-do. She seems like she would be both a lot of fun and a formidable adversary.

Fascinated by her powerhouse on-screen presence and my own wish for more shows with this sort of business theme, I started casually researching her background. The best bit I found was that she got a gig as Creative Director at Harvey Nichols, after being in charge of window dressing at both Harrods and Topshop previously. At Harvey Nichols, she not only brought in cool designers like Vivienne Westwood, but she arranged for extensive product placement and name shoutouts on the TV show Absolutely Fabulous. Having Jennifer Saunders’ Edina and Joanna Lumley’s Patsy regularly stumbling around, drunk on champagne, talking about Harvey Nicks as The place to get AbFab clothing is pure marketing genius.

Although I spent actual NYE contemplating my goals for 2009 and feeling pretty good for a change about how well I did on my 2008 resolutions, I did go to champagne brunch this morning. I haven’t quite determined all my primary goals for the New Year, but Blue Blood just turned Sweet 16, so we’re all pretty celebratory about that, so that should tie in with those resolutions somehow I think.

Although this is Blue Blood’s first and only Sweet 16, my friend Sabrina has a fabulous Sweet 16 birthday party every year. She is a brilliant event planner, so her events tend to be varied and fun. When I say she is a brilliant event planner, I don’t mean in the Cartman tea party fantasy way some people claim they are good at stuff, but in a she just got a hundred million dollar budget to plan events for 2009 kind of way.

Today’s festivities involved getting a whole bunch of us our own colonnade sectioned off from the beautiful Chateau Marmont patio. (I could tell what a colonnade was in context, but, if you were wondering about the precise definition, according to the dictionary, a colonnade is “a series of regularly spaced columns supporting an entablature and usually one side of a roof”.) Apparently Sabrina had to bump some other party of twenty for us. She explained the details of how this was accomplished, but, really, she just cannot be denied. We were all much better behaved for champagne brunch than we were at her birthday. Certainly, I was.

There were a few people at brunch who I totally had zero recollection of having met before. Hopefully they didn’t think I was being stuck up saying “nice to meet you” and asking for names. In my defense, we all drank so much champagne at Sabrina’s most recent Sweet 16 that we actually ran the dinner restaurant entirely out of champagne. Our party literally drank every bit of champagne in the restaurant and a couple of people had to make a supermarket run to replenish.

Afterward, we went to this surreal karaoke bar which fortunately (or possibly unfortunately for remembering everyone clearly) was still well-stocked with champagne. We did start out with Rotari and then move to Moet, which is kind of backward, but we did play a drinking game to see who could drink a split with no hands. (Apparently not me.)

The karaoke place seemed like something out of a gangster movie. It didn’t appear to have signage and was just on this particular floor of this Korean office building. There were these semi-private rooms with black stone floors and it just seemed very much like there should be a high level mobster meeting going on. (We had thought the rooms were entirely private, until the staff informed us that there were certain things we could not be doing in there, and it turned out the walls were one way glass.) I’ll try any weird food once, so I did eat some of a chicken thing which left a very peculiar taste in my mouth, but it was worth it for the adventure points.

I still have my place setting name tag. Sabrina made them out of these sort of Barbie style dolls and customized each one to the person they were a place setting for. As Chateau Marmont scolded us for taking pictures, allow me to share a crazed Barbie art gallery with you all, photographed by the talented Forrest Black. My seating tag doll had a mohawk and come on her mouth. Very elegant . . . in a Barbie with a mohawk and come on her mouth sort of way.