An Uncondensed Celebration
Social changes on the East End are a bit like the game "red light, green light" - while you're looking, nothing seems to change, but turn your back for a minute and all hell breaks loose.
The season used to be from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and then the place would drop into a hibernating torpor until the next spring. Not anymore. Now we're Hollywood East, now we have film premieres, now executives can work year round from their country homes. And here comes the latest twist - those executives are organizing their corporate wingdings out here, miles from their home bases.
The first was Martha Stewart, who took over Guild Hall for a company meeting to launch her new K-mart line last fall. But she was far outdone by Reader's Digest, which celebrated its 75th anniversary on Saturday with a stunningly orchestrated extravaganza, complete with a performance by Jay Leno, at Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk.
The setting was beautiful, and the coolest touch of all was that to reach the huge double tent a green carpet was laid right through the stables, with surprised horses peering from their loose boxes on either side as if to say, "Now we've seen it all!"
Phalanxes of elegant and efficient New York City waitstaff swanned between the tables of middle-aged, homogenous corporate employees, advertisers, and their families from Pleasantville, N.Y., and other non-party-worthy points elsewhere in the U.S. Eight hundred guests, a quarter of whom were put up in hotels, were bussed in, given twinkling security bracelets, and wined and dined in great style. They were a quiet and orderly bunch, maybe as surprised to find themselves in a horse field in Montauk as the horses were to see them.
After some exhortatory uncondensed company speeches - "biggest, best, 100 million readers, 48 editions, 19 languages" - Paula Poundstone, the first performer of the evening and working completely off-the-cuff, was brilliantly funny. Jay Leno, after one joke about "left-wing publishers" that sank like a stone, slipped into a familiar and generic comic schtick on plane crashes, cats and dogs, and VCR-challenged parents.
Mr. Leno's act was followed by dancing till midnight, but that didn't prevent a throng from attending a beach barbecue the following day at the Napeague Harbor house of the publisher, Gregory G. Coleman. What with the band, ventriloquist, and a bunch of security men with walkie-talkies and teal T-shirts with "investigations" emblazoned upon them, there was no skimping at that party, either.