The Junior League Turns 100, Elegantly

The women I was introduced to were pink and blonde?and maybe, in Mailer's words, lobotomized away from all sense of sin. They wore brooches and pashminas (now revitalized as contemporary Upper East Side boas after being sold in the pages of the Star for under 200 bucks?proving again that if you go too far in one direction, you come out on the other), and pearls that choked the throat or drooped from clavicles in a thousand interesting ways. If the women had been anything less than Quaker with me (there were only several top-down glances, and then only from the matriarchs) or if I'd been a different person (and I was, several years ago, before being surprised by a sort of second-stage beatitude), then I would have overlooked the goodness of the New York Junior League, and that would have been a shame.

Two Thursdays ago there we were: volunteers, congresswomen and maybe some others like me?"press"?skulking around the superlative cheese platter, at the League's headquarters, a five-story limestone Georgian townhouse on the Upper East Side, to celebrate the League's centennial anniversary. State Sen. Roy Goodman was there, being lauded for 32 years of service, which was significant not only because the intro speeches were short and self-effacing, but because his was, too?and because he was one of only three men in attendance, not including the epistolary presence of Mayor Giuliani, who'd dictated a letter of thanks for the ladies' efforts.

There was also, in its own patrician way, the issue of female empowerment to deal with. The almost-2800 League volunteers sent to the NYPD, Bellevue, a women's prison. The "I Have a Dream" program. The League's four-tier mission statement: Domestic Violence, Healthy Foundations, Family Life Skills and Cultural Enrichment of Youth.

The League occupies digs in the house originally built for Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Astor, and second wife Brooke, 98?that plenipotentiary of socialites, still actively blessing art around town?she most recently oversaw the conversion of her former bedroom into the Junior League rape crisis center. "I never thought rape would be discussed in my bedroom!" Brooke Astor, a gal of the times, reports via a League spokeswoman.

This might have been the beginning of one of those boarding school movies about intercultural allegiances, with the bunch of girls good-natured and confused and all putting on their makeup in the ballroom bathroom, but getting everything right in the end. But they were also brisk, and their hair was streaked and carefully managed with an under-uplift. Their arms were toned, and they were friendly. Fastidiousness has its own pleasures, too. You wanted press, ladies? I'm more than willing to give credit where credit's due.

Grow up in suburban Jersey, a Jew, in one of those model minority enclaves where your parents teach you about what might be one of the best deals of postwar American living?that money buys class?and you don't know much about debs or WASPS or Mayflower clubs?white unguents. Are you white, too? It takes you until college to even consider this question. Your best friends are Jewish or Korean; and even when they're not, they're not so in such a deliberately thoughtful, careful, polite way (there are mangers only on the wrong side of the tracks) that you hardly notice you're not ubiquitous. It's like, you later think, living in Denmark among the Righteous Gentiles.

Then you show up at something like this. But you're welcomed and you listen. About Junior Leaguer Eleanor Roosevelt in 1903, teaching dance lessons in Lower East Side settlement houses, "occasionally inviting her future husband and our country's future president to accompany her home." Here, in 1933, are the Junior League Players performing Maeterlinck's Blue Bird for the edification of those without perennial theater seats. And here, in 1951, is the first of what will be the Junior League's most enduring tradition: the Mardi Gras Ball. Why not? No reason to skip out on all the fun (or fake a sense of guilt). Dealing with this inhumane disparity between have and have-not, the League is?finally?elegant.