Our special Learning Annex correspondent Eric Deamer spent an endless evening with fashion/rap/vodka/watch/magazine mini-mogul Damon Dash last night.

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While in Regis Philbin's Learning Annex class back in May, only the students looked at the class as an opportunity for self-promotion. In Damon Dash's class last night, teacher and student alike viewed the evening as a chance to flog their products and, um, talents. The orgy of self-promotion began before you even entered the second-floor ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel to take the "class," with Roc-a-fella interns forcing endless swag promoting Dashs's many concerns into your hands: CDs, Rocawear towels and dog tags, flyers promoting various Roc-a-fella Records artists and his Armandale Vodka, and copies of his new magazine, the modestly titled America (which appeared to have a nude Lenny Kravitz on the cover for some reason).

While there were plenty of Damon Dash money-making opportunities on display, for a long time there was no Damon Dash. In fact, it wasn't even until 10 minutes after the class was supposed to start that a woman who works for the Learning Annex got up in front of the class to say that Damon was going to be late. Never fear. There was an easy solution: a seemingly endless video promoting Damon Dash's many exciting business ventures. While this droned on in the background (I could barely hear it from where I was setting. The sound was terrible in that room) it occurred to me that we had all paid - paid! — to watch a commercial for: Rocafella Recrods/Rocawear clothing/Armandale Vodka/Dash Films/Team Roca sportwear/America magazine etc. etc. It really did seem like the video was never going to stop, like the interminable talking heads and their encomiums to Damon Dash's work ethic, business savvy, and all-around greatness would just keep coming like water flowing from a tap. Finally, improbably, it ended. And, people actually clapped.

By now, it was thirty-Five minutes after the class was supposed to start and still no Damon Dash. But, we were informed that he was "being mic'ed" (apparently some arduous process), and that he would appear any minute.

And finally, forty minutes late, he did appear. He was wearing a suit. I don't think I'd ever seen him wearing a suit before. It was the first issue he addressed. He said he was only wearing a suit because every once in awhile he had a company-wide "executive day" where everyone has to dress up. Unfortunately, this was one of precious few interesting tidbits he had to offer. The next thing he did was ask the Learning Annex representative what he was supposed to do, because, in his own words, he'd "never taught a class before," and it showed. I longed for Regis's "I have no control OVER THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE!" style as I sat through Dash's monotone recitation of the story of his rise to the top. Though in Mr. Dash's defense, his success story seemed to involve a lot of actual work, and not an improbable series of lucky breaks, like Regis's. His oral autobiography also involved, ironically enough, a lot of complaints about being made to wait for a long time when he had meetings with record industry big-shots early in his career (once for 45 minutes!), which he found "disrespectful." Not being much of a raconteur, he was only able to stretch the "tell me your life story" portion of the evening out to about ten minutes. However, he was still able to work in a plug for Armandale vodka and for his new line of watches: "You may have noticed there's a bucket of ice water on my wrist."

Then it was time for the real point of the evening, the Q&A. While in Regis Philbin's class, the audience questions were divided evenly between over-the-top expressions of star-worship ("You have such a beautifully modulated voice. Do you take voice lessons?") and bizarre attempts to use the class to somehow get into show business, for Damon Dash almost all of the questions were from those who were trying to parlay this class into their big break.

First "question": "I have just published my first novel. If you like it and see my talent I hope you will produce my first film and allow me to write and direct in it."

Another question: "I'm multi-faceted and there's no company I'd rather work for than Roc-a-fella. What do I do?"

Damon Dash: "Get an internship." (Brilliant!)

One guy had a sort of non-typical question, asking "When you're expanding into all of these different businesses. How do you keep it cohesive?"

Dash had a simple, typically self-effacing answer: "Well, I like drinking Armandale because it's the best vodka out there. I like reading America because it's the best magazine out there. I like wearing my watches because they're the best and the iciest out there."

Another question: "If someone wanted to present you with a 'letter-of-inquiry' where would they send it?"

Damon Dash: "To Roc-a-fella or Rocawear." (Again, brilliant! And well worth the $50 or whatever for the class!)

A woman who said that she'd gone to the same high school as Mr. Dash asked him if he'd had an inkling that he wanted to be an entrepreneur way back when.

Damon Dash: "It might sound like it comes from a superficial place, but I always knew I wanted to have nice things."

A pretty girl with a West Indian accent started talking about how she was a singer and an actress, but she noticed that Roca doesn't really have any female artists. Her quite reasonable question, "What a sister gotta do?"

Then Damon started going into some non-sequitur about how he gives 150%, maybe 200% to his artists, and how he hadn't slept for two days, (which really showed in his delivery), so that question never got answered.

Somewhere around this point there was a near-complete breakdown in order, owing almost entirely to the Learning Annex's poor planning. The microphone was being handled by a meek, small girl and she was taking questions, which virtually everyone had, in no discernible order. Finally, one guy started yelling, "Can we just put a microphone in the middle and we line up because I don't even know how she's picking?"

The crowd went crazy. There was total chaos for a few minutes and somehow out of it all this really big guy, who said he was a rapper named Solomon, got the microphone, telling the guy who had just freaked out, "She ain't dissin' you homey. If you'd listened to what the man said. You would've just taken it for yourself," to a general sarcastic rumble from the house.

His "question": "I just want to let you know that there's one person here who understands you."

After him, a guy just stood up without the microphone and blurted out a "question" which essentially consisted of the statement "Some people perceive you as an asshole."

Finally, at this point everyone started forming an impromptu line behind the microphone to ask such questions as "I have my resume," and "I have a script that is extremely marketable right now." However, it was well past the point at which the class was originally supposed to end by now and people started walking out, taking cell phone calls, milling around aimlessly etc. Yet, Damon Dash was still dutifully taking questions.

I couldn't hear anything above the general din by this point, so I got up to leave. As I left, I did hear a girl starting her question by saying, "I just wanna say to the people at the Learning Annex that the reason this happened is because we're all hungry."