The Rich and The Righteous [antikvár]

1 January 1969 In January, New York takes on the sullen aspect of a brooding empress, her massive frame wrapped in stark steel gray, her cold glass façade brittle and hurtful to the touch. Icy ruts pockmark her face, with black beauty-spots of soot emphasizing its ugliness. Like some temporarily deposed monarch, the queen of all cities has put away her crown of Christmas lights, all diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Her red-suited, white-bearded troubadours are hushed for another year, her playful courtiers and their jesters departed for the more convivial kingdoms of the Sun. Only those subjects too rich or too poor to escape remain at her feet.- TTie very rich bound by ropes of gold which, in turn, harness their ovm industrial empires; the poor chained by poverty which demands, among other hardships, the endtirance of another New York winter. At eight-thirty on this January night, the poor, muffled in scarves and earmuffs, plunged past the Lexington Avenue entrance of the Grand Excelsior hotel towards the subways which would carry the late-workers home to Queens and BrooWyn. The rich, and those whose livelihoods depended upon their association with the rich, hurried out of their rented limousines and taxis into the Park Avoiue entrance of the hotel, the ladies ducking carefully coifîed heads against the biting winds which raced up the naked avenue. One thousand of these formally dressed people whirling through the Grand Excelsior's revolving doors were en route to a commercial rite known as 'the testimonial dinner'. At least once a week, the Grand Ballroom was the scene of some larger-than-life banquet sponsored by a charity or by a major corporation honoring one of its officers,- In format, these dinners were depressingly identical. The stage at the east end of the room invariably was set up as a three-tier dais, like some elongated wedding cake designed to hold forty-eight rigidly molded, desperately bored pieces of human decoration. The highest ranking guests sat at the lowest tier 5