What's it like inside the hottest nightclubs?

By: Carrie, Foster City, California

Without the stars in them, the clubs are all kind of the same. Sure, they range from boxy to homey, plush to techno, but really, an ottoman is an ottoman is an ottoman, unless it has Lindsay Lohan's barf on it. Then it's an eBay treasure.

I know that brief description won't satisfy you bloodsuckers, so...some grudging details:

? All of the clubs are dark inside. There are no brightly lit clubs. That's just ridiculous.

? A few years ago, clubgoers cared more about who was working the door than what the door looked like. (The once hot Concorde, where Jessica Simpson held her 23rd birthday, was little more than a box with no sign out front.) But lately, club owners have begun to zazz up their furnishings, offering tables with a bit of scrollwork on them or miniature palm trees or colorful but nonthreatening pieces of art.

Over at Hyde in Los Angeles, some visual terrorist has paired gold lighting with faux-crocodile furniture. At the semiprivate Plumm in New York, everything is red and brown--boxy red light fixtures on the ceiling, obnoxious, bourbon-will-be-served-in-the-library wood paneling, etc. And last year, before people got sick of Teddy's in Hollywood--a club so exclusive even the manager would text message herself, begging to get on the list--they raved about its homey vibe.

"It used to smell like lavender candles," one veteran clubgoer sighs to this B!tch. "Big, plush couches--like you were in someone's living room."

? Most clubs have a side door--so that, say, Jessica Simpson can meet up with, say, Dane Cook and still enjoy some plausible deniability.

? Most clubs have velvet ropes outside, to intimidate people who are not Wilmer Valderrama. Those non-Valderramas tend to start lining up, on its hot night, at about 10 p.m. or so. Then some harpy with a bullhorn emerges and barks that there will be no cameras inside, or she will personally have you banned from every other club in Los Angeles until you die, or until she OD's on Oxycontin and forgets everything she just said.

Then five select nobodies are allowed past the ropes. Then the bullhorn lady comes back and announces that the club is "at capacity," and the "fire marshal has left us no choice" but to close the list. Then Vanessa Minnillo pulls up to the curb and walks in.

? The only other staple at nearly every celebrity-obsessed club in the nation: the tables at which no one is allowed to sit. I am speaking of the cozy, low-slung booths with the little tent signs that say "reserved." That sign means, unless one's last name is Hilton, or one is willing to part with $200 to $400 for a bottle of vodka paired with a tiny carafe of orange juice, you may absolutely not park yourself at those tables. Even if no one comes to claim them...all...night...long.

That still not enough for you? Here, then, your obligatory tale of cocaine:

"When three girls all pile into the same bathroom stall together," the clubgoer says, "they're not peeing."