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noizemagazine - Index

noizemagazine - noiZe Magazine Issue 60 May 2009 - Index

Photos by Moody Mustafa/Moodypics
a script for the entire night. It was
a more thought-out entertainment
experience.”
By 2002, the Sunday night crowds
had far outgrown Hard Rock’s 3,500
capacity, so Baker moved it to
Friday night and replaced it with
the Stars Party at Universal Studios
Islands of Adventure, with the ability
to accommodate 6,000 revelers.
Along with the daytime Groove
parties at Universal Studios, Gay
Days became Baker’s baby for several
years. He also branched out
to the hot (and hotly competitive)
Miami scene with White Dreams at
the Miami Seaquarium during White
Party and a Winter Party event at
the Ice Palace.
From Gay Days to World|Vibe
While at the top of his game, Baker
decided to sell his company and
the rights to his Gay Days parties
four years ago to Johnny Chisholm.
Eventually, he says, he realized,
“You can’t really top yourself. I had
done it for five years, and you kind
of run out of new ideas. There were
some pretty creative components
to what we’d done, but I thought
we had taken it as far as we could.
I thought it was a good time to
step away and go on to do other
things.”
He takes a grand and all-encompassing
approach to producing events in
order to live up to his personal motto,
“Beyond belief is where this party
begins.” “We know Gay Days weekend
is a very competitive market,” Baker
acknowledged during an interview back
in 2002. “If you don’t have the biggest,
best thing, probably the next year you
won’t be around. So we just make sure
that all our parties are the best.”
To accomplish this, he would assemble
a core team of more than a dozen people
to coordinate the weekend. “The
people we hire are really great special
events people,” he explained. “They’re
very technical people who have worked
for a lot of theme parks. They take the
week off and come work for us. We have
an individual project manager for each
of the parties, and a dedicated technical
person who handles all the technical
stuff. They’re not people that do other
jobs like Realtors or something else during
the week—they do special events all
the time, and that’s all they do.”
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Happy Am I! Healthy Am I! holy Am I!