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LUNCH WITH LYDIA

Bravo takes aim at SoBe's brash reality

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Ariel Stein, Sorah Daiha and Hardy Hill among the local scenesters ready to bare their souls on Bravo's <em>Miami Social</em>.
Ariel Stein, Sorah Daiha and Hardy Hill among the local scenesters ready to bare their souls on Bravo's Miami Social.
CHARLES TRAINOR JR. / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
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lmartin@MiamiHerald.com

You're a South Beach player. You're living the music video with your slick ride and your sick pad. You have made-for-TV looks, too. The girls want you. The boys want you. Well, maybe not all of them, not all the time. But you go through life operating as if they did. Even better, you have VIP-room carte blanche, proof you're all that.

So you're not quite this fabulous?

Even better. Bravo's latest reality show, Miami Social, which premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday, is banking on your wanting to live vicariously through a crew of bona fide South Beach party people, some more professionally involved in the scene than others, who have put in the nightlife hours and have a few hookups for their efforts.

As a cast member declares in a preview clip, ``We're, like, the most fabulous circle in Miami.''

Not.

But, no matter. These folks know a doorman or three, some party promoters, a bartender here and there. Which means the velvet ropes part, and the free cocktails flow. And, really, what else is there?

''Miami is forever on our radar,'' says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president of development and original programming. ``Miami offers a really aspirational lifestyle for people. There's nothing about it that doesn't seem fun and alive and energetic and hip and beautiful.''

MEET THE CAST

Bravo sought out a group of friends, people already interconnected, though some had closer ties than others when taping started.

They are Ariel Stein, a former model and fashion-show producer now working on a fashion line; George French, a mortgage banker with an investment firm; Hardy Hill, party promoter and nightclub marketer/manager; Katrina Campins, who runs a real-estate brokerage firm and was pretty big on the watchable first season of Donald Trump's The Apprentice; Sorah Daiha, a real-estate agent who works for one of the town's biggest developers and was once married to French; Michael Cohen, a former celebrity reporter who recently started a fashion website, thestylelabonline.com; and Maria Lankina, art director and photographer.

''We wanted a group that was fun and dynamic and fun to watch on TV. And we got it,'' Andy Cohen says.

Sure, the show spends a lot of time parading the shallowness of South Beach's scenesters. But they can also be so enchanting.

''Get the fat girl out of my table,'' we hear Stein say in a Miami Social preview.

''I don't judge anybody,'' he offers. 'She's in PR, and she didn't want me at her events, but she decides to sit at my table. And she's taking drinks. I didn't know her name, so I said `the fat girl' the same way that people who don't know me might say 'the gay guy.' But I'm not a fat hater. I was fat. I suffered from bulimia and anorexia at one point. But if anybody is being rude to me and my friends, I'm going to say something.''

You meet up with Stein and two other cast members in the lobby of the hip Gansevoort Hotel to chat about South Beach -- and why they jumped at the chance to expose the kind of personal stuff folks with a shred of decorum try to keep personal.

''I needed a little change in my life. I had nothing to lose,'' says Daiha, who, judging by the first couple of episodes, seems the most grown-up of the gang. She's into the party, sure, but she doesn't seem nearly so impressed with herself and as some of the other cast members. Daiha lives in the same Venetian Causeway high-rise as her ex-husband, who has a new Russian girlfriend. When French fights with her, which is often, he runs downstairs to tell Daiha. She has a new boyfriend and seems to have moved on but attempts to advise the man she says cheated on her.

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