Getting dressed to chill in the Vod Box

So let’s say you love the outcome of Tuesday’s election and you’re looking for a place to party.

I can help.

Or maybe you came up a big loser in the election -- or your editor got fired before you got to the fourth paragraph of your column -- and you’d like to drown your sorrow.

I know just the place.

Believe me, if my deadline didn’t come before last night’s results were in, I’d be doing brilliant election analysis today. Instead, I’m going to tell you about an invitation I got last week from my neighbor, Larry Nicola of Nic’s Restaurant & Martini Lounge. They’d heard about the new me and thought I might finally be ready for Beverly Hills.

In case you missed it, I got a makeover last week from Gov. Schwarzenegger’s hairstylist on Canon Drive. Seemed to me that if a guy could commit as many sins as Arnold and still be a lock to get reelected, style truly is at least as important as substance.

So with my newly coiffed hair the color of middle-age desperation and a few lonely sprigs standing straight up, thanks to the product applied by maestro Giuseppe Franco, I decided I was up for a visit to the Vod Box.

Vod Box?

Yeah. Larry’s latest innovation, and I’ll take you there in a minute.

Our first stop Saturday night in Beverly Hills had to be Giuseppe Franco’s salon. My wife wanted to see the scene of the crime. The shop was closed, but guess who was holding court at nearby Caffe Roma?

Schwarzenegger.

I thought about asking what he thought of my do, but then I’d have to explain the whole style-over-substance thing. That’s the only way I can explain the free pass he’s gotten from voters after a string of flip-flops and contradictions, unless of course you consider the fact that his challenger did not have a detectable pulse.

Schwarzenegger granted me just one measly interview in three years, because running from tough questions is part of his game. Now that we’re using the same salon, I might be able to get to him now and then while we’re having our hair layered and colored. But please don’t think of us as Girlie Men.

“Let’s get going,” I told my wife. We had to meet our buddy Mark Morocco, who was dying to see what this Vod Box was all about.

Morocco took one look at me -- fresh patches of pepper mixed in with the salt -- and wondered whether I was wearing leopard panties on my head.

What would an emergency room doctor know about style?

He said he was grateful, at least, that I didn’t look like the governor, who’s been giving him ulcers. He said Mr. Get the Special Interests out of Sacramento has been in the pocket of health insurance companies from Day One, and some of them sell junk policies that don’t cover ER costs. That leaves hospitals, doctors and patients holding the bag.

“It’s not that there isn’t money in healthcare, it’s just going to the wrong people,” Morocco said. “If the governor can force the healthcare dollars from ER docs and patients back into insurance company executive bonuses, then I’m gonna apply for a job cutting hair at Giuseppe’s -- I’ll bet he already makes more an hour than I do, and he’s not open at 4 a.m.”

Clearly, it was time to get Dr. Morocco into the Vod Box.

Here’s how it works: You drink vodka in a freezer nestled in the back of the restaurant. But first you put on one of the coats Larry Nicola had specially made -- he calls it a Don King pimp coat. It comes with a matching fur hat that looks like King’s hair. Your date wears a leopard-pattern coat and hat.

I don’t know about you, but after this wretched season of political fliers, unsolicited phone calls and vapid TV ads, I was all for the idea of sticking my head in a freezer.

Larry’s son, Luke, a natural schmoozer like his dad, escorted us over to the coat closet, and in no time at all, we looked like the cast of Dr. Zhivago. Dr. Morocco and my wife wore leopard, perhaps in solidarity with the pattern on my head. I wore the Don King pimp jacket.

Stepping inside the 30-degree vodka room, it occurred to me that in much of the Eastern United States, people are dreading the icy advance of winter.

In sunny Los Angeles, where it’s been in the 80s and 90s, there was a line to get into the freezer. Bitter cold is a diversion here. An amusement. We do not know suffering, nor do we care to get acquainted.

A Brazilian guy named Leopold was the Vod Box master, pouring shots and sharing the history of vodka. Did you know it’s not just made from potatoes in Russia? It’s made in France, Italy and Korea. It’s made from polished rice and barley and from chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, none of which you will remember if you drink enough.

Look, I’ll drink whatever is put in front of me, but I was more interested in the story of the table the bottles were stacked on.

“This is from my father’s store,” Nicola said.

What store?

The Nicola Twins Market on Sunset in Silver Lake, he said, where his father and uncle ran a butcher shop and deli beginning in 1946. Larry started working in the store as a kid of 7 or 8, then did some catering when he got older.

Nicola took the table after the market closed and used it in his first restaurant, L.A. Nicola, which opened in 1979 across from his dad’s former shop. He later opened another restaurant downtown, followed by Nic’s in 1997. For sentimental reasons, the table always followed.

On a trip to Mandalay Bay in Vegas last year, Nicola’s eyes lit up when he saw a vodka freezer in which you had to buy a whole bottle. But it was a solemn, private affair, like a Kremlin meeting.

Nicola thought it would be more fun to have a big picture window looking out on his restaurant and to take people in for shots between appetizer and entree.

Luke came up with the name Vod Box, and they found that the perfect furnishing for the room was the old table.

I asked Nicola what his old-school father, the son of Lebanese immigrants, would say about his meat-grinding table being used in a Vod Box where a Brazilian host occasionally breaks into song. He didn’t hesitate:

“He’d smile and have a drink.”

So you won on Tuesday?

Vod Box.

You don’t have to have your hair styled first, because the hat will cover it anyway.

So you lost and are thinking of leaving the country?

Vod Box.

While I was in the middle of writing this column, the paper’s editor, Dean Baquet, one of the best bosses I’ve worked for in 30 years, did indeed get fired after standing up against staff reductions.

If he were a drinking man, I know where I’d take him.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez