Last Friday night Joan and John Jakobson had a dinner dance at the Harmonie Club for 155 of their friends. Friday night for me is the night not to go anywhere but J&J are good friends and I also went to this party a couple of years ago and, much to my surprise, it was very laid back and fun. The Harmonie is a lovely old private club on East 60th right across from the Metropolitan Club. The Jakobsons took over the reception rooms on the second floor where people often have wedding receptions, engagement parties, birthdays and bar mitzvahs. There was a big buffet of beef filets, chicken, veggies, salads, and all kinds of desserts. Joan said the dress was simply jacket and tie and very down home, or as down home as you can get in the atmosphere of a private club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

I asked Joan the purpose of this dinner. Her answer was quite simple: “I just wanted to have a dance. The only place you can dance in New York nowadays is a benefit or a wedding, and I wanted to have something where you didn’t have to pay or buy a gift.” She hired a DJ named Freddie Russo who played pop favorites all through the dinner – the kind where you think no one’s going to get up and dance.

Lots of familiar faces in the crowd: Joe and Nancy Missett, Joe Armstrong, Phyllis George, Dolores Barrett and Ed Klein, Susan Burden, Chris Cerf, Duane and Kate Hampton, Rick and Susan Braddock, Bob and Suzanne Cochrane, Sean Driscoll, Bill and Jane Donaldson, Didi and Oscar Schafer, Christy Ferrer, Betsy and Victor Gotbaum, Tovah Feldshuh and Andy Levy, Joan and Philip Kingsley, Virginia Mailman, Susan Calhoun and Charlie Moss, John and Nancy Novogrod, Suzanne OMalley, Suzanne Maas, Paige Peterson, Sarah Syms Rosenthal, Barbara Uzielli, Michael LaRocca, Robin Straus and Joe Kanon, Caitlin and John Tashjian, Esty and Dan Brodsky, Ken and Barbara Jackson, Nancy Newcomb, Lynn Sherr, Nancy Collins, Susan Patricof, Liz Robbins and Doug Johnson, Jane Hartley and Ralph Schlosstein, Jurate Kasickas and Roger Altman, Mary and Pat Durkin, Ron Daniel and Lise Scott.

I was seated next to Phyllis George and so we got into a long conversation about life ... and business. Phyllis, who as the world knows hails from Denton, Texas, won the Miss America title in 1971, and has never looked back. She was the first female sports broadcaster, a co-anchor of the CBS Morning News, anchored the Emmy Award winning NFL Today Show with Brent Musberger, founded her own company “Chicken By George,” was a host of her own primetime tv show, the First Lady of Kentucky (when she was married to John Y. Brown — mother of a son and a daughter with Governor Brown); has written four books, most recently Never Say Never in 2002; and even more recently has launched her own cosmetics business, “Phyllis George Skincare,” which she sells on the Home Shopping Network. Whew. But you knew all this already, right?

And we talked about Hillary, as in Senator Hillary. The two women have been friends ever since their husbands were governors of the neighboring states of Arkansas and Kentucky and they used to exchange visits to the governors’ mansions. And what did she say about Hillary? What you may have heard before – that she is very very smart, works very very hard, is amazingly thoughtful with her friends, and loves to be in the thick of it. She’s one of those women who likes a lot of responsibility. Like Phyllis.

After dinner, Joan’s singing group, The Glad Girls got up to do a number. The last time I saw them, they did a medley from the repertoire of the Ronettes and the Shirelles. This time they sang one song only (they didn’t want to ask too much of their captive audience, according to Joan), a kind of doo-wop acapella riff on Rodgers and Hart’s Blue Moon. As soon at the solo was over, Freddie Russo went into his dance playing the Beegees and the Stones and all kinds of disco stuff and before you knew it the dance floor was jammed with all of these balding and/or grey haired and/or blonde sort of/would be babe and bombshells frugging and twisty and shaking their booties.

I always feel like I’m watching my parents rock and rolling when I see my contemporaries (I can’t see myself of course) twisting the night away. And it’s kinda funny. How’s that for self-delusion? Forgetting of course that I, these people, this crowd, am/are the once-younger generation who literally grew up on rock and roll. And a lot of us can remember when it was forbidden around the house (really) and highly authoritative people said it was only a temporary phenomenon. As we’d say today: Not.

Then about eleven, Chris Cerf, a rock and roll virtuoso on the piano sat down to play and Lynn Sherr and Betsy Gotbaum proceeded to sing every famous rock and roll song in the 1958 through 1971 catalogue. Well, almost every. Everyone else stood around amazed at how these two girls knew every word!!! Memories are made of this!

Then at 11:30, the club called it a day. Or a night. Out on the streets of New York, the witches and the goblins were first coming out to play.

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