Just Like Old Times

“HELLO and welcome to the 1920s,” two women dressed as flappers said to guests arriving at a neo-Georgian building on Park Avenue and 63rd Street on Monday night.Inside, old film clips from the period played as guests in fringed dresses, pearls, feathers and white dinner jackets mingled and drank “Black Tuesday” cocktails.

It was the first Decades Ball benefit gala for Lapham’s Quarterly, a heady magazine with at least one foot firmly planted in the literary past.

Not all the guests wore period costumes as suggested. But many looked relieved to be away from our app-crazed and graceless present.

“The world is going very fast,” Sam Waterston said.

“I’m so old, I’m still on A.O.L,” Calvin Trillin added.

Colin Donnell, a young actor who just finished in “Anything Goes” on Broadway, stood by his table in a dark suit and bow tie, looking like a character from a Wodehouse novel. “I love this period, the culture, the manners, the cocktails,” he said. Nearby, Mary McFadden, Cleopatra-like, said she preferred ancient Egypt.

Ralph Nader said that as long as the past was acknowledged, he didn’t care when. “If you don’t look backwards, you won’t be able to look forward with any vision,” he said at his table, which was festooned with peacock feathers, black gin bottles and vintage boxes of matches. “You need a sense of history.”

Humor was on the menu, too. Mr. Waterston read a piece by Don Marquis, the Evening Sun columnist. Benjamin Walker read Ernest Hemingway. And Anne Hathaway, in a pixie haircut, read as a neurotic, horny and single Dorothy Parker, sounding surprisingly like someone from HBO’s “Girls.”

And when Ron Chernow, the biographer who was presented with the evening’s award, talked about celebrities bilked by Wall Street before the Crash, Florida real estate speculation gone awry, and the schadenfreude that the public felt about the 1 percent of the nation invested in the stock market at the time — well, it was goodbye 1920s, hello today.

“There are definitely parallels between then and now,” Mr. Chernow said.

But why get too heavy while the vintage band was playing on?

“There’s Champagne on the tables and the bar is open,” Lewis Lapham, the patrician and liberal editor of the quarterly, declared at dinner’s end. “The purpose is to have a good time.”

With the cheer of dedicated revelers at a Gatsby party, the guests did so, dancing and drinking, all the while keeping smartphones and business cards in their pockets.

“Would you like some vintage candy,” a waiter in a gangster suit and hat asked them, holding a tray of wrapped Mary Janes, Slo Pokes and Bit-O-Honey.

Yes, they would. As they left — taking goody bags with books by Sinclair Lewis and Hendrick’s gin and then, on the sidewalk, bags of warm pecans from a waiter in white jacket and tie — they looked let down to leave the past and step back into today.