New Year's is, traditionally, the season for resolutions. The particular New Year's you have in mind may, of course, vary in favor of the conventional January 1, or Russian New Year or Yom Kippur or even, conceivably, Happy New Fiscal Year. To the essentially urban intelligence, however, the New Year comes at a period indeterminate in the calendar but nonetheless strictly identified by the disappearance of summer attire in public places, summer buffets from restaurants, and summer faces from hotel lounges, and the happy reappearance of bowler hats, first nights on Broadway, and Beth Leary at her accustomed table at the Colony. People are back in town: Southampton tans are fading, advertising executives have long since disposed of fall fashion schedules and are thinking of Florida exploitation, and the doorman at Monte Carlo has changed into his winter uniform. In a word, the season is on.
The phrase “the season” has about it an undeniable cachet of urbanity and snobbish superiority, simply because a “season” is unthinkable without open town houses, dinner parties, the opera, and, in good times, the Horse Show, debutante balls at the Ritz, and the other identifying hallmarks of metropolitan existence. New York's “season” has expanded itself over the years to include almost everything between the opening of the first Shubert musical of the fall to Harvard-Yale boat-race week at New London. In much the same manner, San Francisco gets a head start on everyone by having its very splendid and very gold-and-white opera in the improbable month of September.
The impending autumn in New York is freighted with fair promise of being the most stupefyingly elegant and probably the most expensively upholstered period of concentrated essence of urbanity since before the wars even began to be thought of. The prices on everything are undeniably up, and people's inhibitions about almost everything are equally patently down. Grouse from the Scotch moors are again in the restaurants; Moët and Chandon, through the monocled agency of Nino lo Savio, have declared a new vintage year of Dom Perignon Cuvée for 1928; Justerini and Brooks's 1878 Cognac is $38 a bottle at Sherry's and, what's more, selling; there will be no fewer than four ballet companies competing for the favor of the fevered balletomanes of Manhattan; a new Noel Coward play is scheduled, and the one and only Clifton Webb is back in town to appear in it. Labor organizers are sporting $275 dinner suits and brushing their teeth in English export champagne; Rolls Royces with footmen are back in circulation; the Public Library lions have had their faces lifted; Jack and Charlie are considering a businessman's lunch for the modest consideration of $8 a serving; and Random House has sold out an edition of Thomas Aquinas at $18 a copy.
You tell me what the answer is!
In the face of all these superlative circumstances this department thought it might not be ill advised for it to make a few resolutions for the beginning of its own personal New Year which begins coincidentally with Margaret and Brock Pemberton's first cocktail party in honor of somebody connected with Harvey. They include the following:
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