Party Favors: At Rasputin's Equestrian Manor, the Debauchery Continues Well Past Closing Time

So what if the party was on private property, say, a retiree having a wine tasting with a handful of friends at his home and charging them $5 per glass of Cabernet?

"The board only regulates the sale and service of alcohol at businesses," Hill says. "If you were having a party at home and selling it at your house, we wouldn't do anything about that."

Big red bears rock out at Rasputin's on Halloween.

People can dance and drink all night Rasputin's, even mostly naked if they want to be.

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Not even if, say, there are a couple hundred people partying at a house every weekend, paying cover charges, dancing on stripper poles, and making donations for liquor? "We don't regulate private residences," Hill says.

And as long as house parties don't spiral out of control, local police don't seem to care, either. "Having a house party is perfectly okay, if you're doing it responsibly," says Sergeant Joe Favazzo, a spokesman for the Chandler Police Department. "Our concerns would be things like noise complaints from neighbors, illegal parking and drugs, underage drinking.

"The key is keeping it under control," Favazzo says. "As long as the neighbors aren't being disturbed and there are no beer bottles in the streets or nobody's standing on the lawn urinating, we don't care. You should have a party. We want you to have a party. If people are having fun, they're not fighting. We want you to have a good time."

But how big is too big for a house party? "There's no such thing as too big," says Phoenix Police Detective James Holmes. "There's no law that says how many people you can have in your home. You can stack them head-to-toe, if you'd like."

While not quite stacked "head-to-toe," the revelers at Rasputin's on a Saturday night in early November number around 50 by midnight.

On the patio, a group of people gathers around a hookah to smoke and chat. A short guy with close-cropped dark hair stumbles out of the glass doors and collapses into a chair.

He doesn't move until Tap and several other people walk by, carrying cases of beer and bags of booze from the local Fry's grocery store.

And everybody applauds.