This year, The Dinah Shore Weekend is going back to its roots with the original monster party: Club Skirts The Dinah - created and produced by Mariah Hanson, which is now the largest all-girl party and music festival in the world. An international must-do rite of passage for lesbians, it is also Palm Springs’ hottest ticket!
With two separate promoters of The Dinah Shore Weekend having been in direct competition for the past six years, there has been a certain amount of confusion. In the early days, the event was a joint venture between Mariah Hanson, who pioneered the first Dinah Shore Weekend before joining forces with the duo Sandy Sachs and Dr. Robin Gans (promoters of Girl Bar). But in 2005, the partnership dissolved and the power promoters parted ways, each continuing the Dinah legacy with two separate visions of what the event should grow to become.
Since the split, the spirit of competition has stepped up the famed weekend to a spectacular world-class plateau. But for Hanson the rivalry translated into one thing: the fact that “competition inspires perfection.”
Girl Bar Dinah, run by Sandy Sachs and Dr. Robin Gans, is now leaving Palm Springs to produce a Dinah-like version in Las Vegas called Girl Bar Dinah Shore Week Las Vegas.
"I think starting over again in another city is a good move for Girl Bar and I wish them well, “ said Hanson, “I just hope they picked the right city since Lisa Pittman and the Miami Aqua Girls, Jesi and Alison, host an annual event in September called Shedonism and it does well. Time will tell.”
“There have been two separately produced events for the past six years in Palm Springs - but now the producers of Girl Bar Dinah Shore Weekend in association with The Truck Stop Girlz from NYC are moving their events out of Palm Springs and to Las Vegas on a different weekend,” Gans and Sachs said in a statement about the move. The host hotels for the Vegas weekend are the Flamingo and Planet Hollywood.
Meanwhile, Hanson, under her Club Skirts marquee, is busy making the 2012 installment of the notorious weekend stronger, bigger and sexier than ever in the Sunny Oasis of Palm Springs.
Hanson’s 2012 lineup features performances from Grammy-Award Winning Music Legend Chaka Khan, Nina Sky, Wynter Gordon, Pussycat Doll Jessica Sutta, cast members of The Real L Word, and a Q&A with Meredith Baxter moderated by Suzanne Westenhoefer, just to name a few.
Girl Bar's move to Las Vegas has a lot of people wondering why since for the past 22 years, it has been a Palm Springs tradition. According to Palm Springs Hilton General Manager, Aftab Dada in a KMIR interview, "The Dinah ranks as one of the five premier events in Coachella Valley." He goes on to explain his theory behind the Girl Bar exodus, “For the past four years, Club Skirts has been taking a lot of market share from Girl Bar.”
But Girl Bar’s Sachs and Gans have their own reasons for the move to Sin City.
“Vegas is the hot spot with a plethora of entertainment and culinary options, which is exactly what our guests have been asking us for,” Gans and Sachs said in a statement. They added that what will be different with the Vegas move is that there will be “No more parties in massive corporate ballrooms, no more waiting in line for drink tickets, and most importantly no last call!” Gans and Sachs promise they will, “offer an intimate experience to our clientele and yet allow them to experience everything that Vegas has to offer.” They also said that “unlike Palm Springs pool parties, when a patron’s top comes off in Las Vegas, that’s considered “au naturale” and OK in Vegas!”
The Dinah started two decades ago, catering to a relatively small gathering of women who trekked to Palm Springs to socialize and maybe even take in some of the concurrent Dinah Shore Championship Golf Tournament. This was the beginning of The Dinah becoming intrinsically linked to Palm Springs. Hanson stated that, “The Dinah is to Palm Springs what Sundance is to Park City.”
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