Boys' Toys

Boys Toys Castelli's birthday party at Palladium was such a hot ticket that the birthday boy himself stood in line with rubbernecking hordes to get past the velvet ropes of the bouncers—and Whitney Museum director Tom Armstrong almost didn't get in at all. Once inside, the honored seventy-eight-year-old partied for three hours under dangling tricy- cles, occasionally running down the club's byzantine staircases to greet a special guest. Everyone participated in the "little boy" motif: art heavies Robert Rauschenberg, Brice Marden, and George Segal ate cake amid the squawk of noisemakers, and a party-hatted Allen Ginsberg sang poetry into Tony Bennett's ear.

Susan Morrison