Frank Crowninshield, “Ten Thousand Nights in a Dinner Coat” (via The World in Vogue):
“Consider my plight: For thirty years—simply because I am a bachelor of New York, with a change of dress-coats and some little private means—I have known no solitude whatsoever; I have been forced to eat only the richest food; I have been tossed upon strange beds in the country houses of a thousand distracted hostesses; I have suffered intolerable and nightly agonies at the theatre; I have battled with French pastry, Greek waiters, Nubian bands, Welsh rarebits, Argentine tangos, and English noblemen at God knows how many cabarets. The costliest wines, pâtés, and cigars have been thrust down my throat. Inexorably I have been chained to my dinner-jacket, my week-ends, my auction bridge, and my saxophone dancing. I have spent ten thousand hours at collapsible bridge tables, three thousand hours in looking for lost golf balls, and fifteen thousand dollars on taxicabs. And as for dining out! Merciful heavens, I am prepared to swear that I haven’t dined alone in thirty years!”
Georges Lepape, Soirée de Galas, 1922
Image Credit: Le Bon Ton, 1910-1950, Mode, Theater, und Gesellschaft
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