V.F.Camera

GOOD TIMES

The ongoing celebration of the 100th anniversary of Adolph S. Ochs's purchase of The New York Times (founded 45 years earlier) culminated in a black-tie affair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the museum's Temple of Dendur, nearly 500 of the city's opinion-makers—a group that included surprisingly few of the paper's current editorial staff—were serenaded by 100 violinists, treated to speeches by Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki (neither of whom was endorsed by the Times), and subjected to a one-act play based on the correspondence of Ochs and his wife, Effie, by Wendy Wasserstein and the former Butcher of Broadway himself, Frank Rich.

IL DUCHIN

I'm used to playing at other people's parties," observes bandleader Peter Duchin on the occasion of the cocktail party thrown by seven of his closest friends marking the publication of his memoirs, Ghost of a Chance. Duchin's Combo entertained at the Morgan Library's Garden Court, and many of the guests—including Amanda Burden, Bill Blass, and Henry Grunwald—appeared to have leapt straight from the pages of the book. "I'm not used to having people throw a party for me," Duchin says. "I dug it."