R S V P : Giorgio and Poached Salmon

Even on a good self-image day, I do not belong in Beverly Hills. Oh, I can tuck the discomfiture under a security blanket of sarcasm, but there is no denying that the night is kinder here--even the darkness seems richer, truer, polished by a westerly breeze that no doubt skids to a stop at San Vincente. As it moves past me, I feel hopelessly unpolishable, like a second-string Edith Wharton heroine doomed forever by lack of “breeding.�

Even the parking lot behind Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire sparkles as the valet kindly shepherds my battered Honda far enough away from the Porsches, Jaguars and the occasional Rolls so that it doesn’t die of embarrassment. I’m here, bizarrely enough, to attend a cocktail party in the storied store--the culmination of La France de la Passion Promenade, a weeklong event, like many others in this town, designed to alert those with money (or access to those with money) about the many venues in which they can spend it. I have neither, only a vested interest in seeing what those who do look like. Surprisingly familiar, it turns out.

Not that I recognize this at first. For one thing, the average age of this crowd, clotted restively around the glass double doors outside the store, is about 110. A thank-God-Coco-is-dead-or-this-would-have-killed-her combination of Giorgio, Aramis and the smoke of Kents cloaks the air. Once my friend and I get inside, I discover that this “cocktail party� is more like a Tupperware party and crafts fair for the Louis Vuitton set--artisans demonstrate leather stitching, sugar blowing (sort of like glass blowing but only sort of) while models slink past bearing signs announcing whatever designer they are wearing.

After the amazing and anachronistic appearance of a mime leaves me literally gasping for breath, we head toward the queue at the champagne and food island. Now, I was raised by Irish Catholic parents who survived the Depression; when food, drink or discounts are at stake I know how to hold my own. So with airy confidence, I tell my friend to wait, I won’t be a moment. I turn and suddenly, with a muffled cry, am sucked into a voracious eddy of sheer need. These people want their champagne and they want it now. Bumped, thumped, jostled and completely ignored, I quickly lose my bearings. A frantic attempt to bat out an SOS with my eyelashes to the young automaton plying the crowd with Roederer goes unnoticed. My feet leave the ground at least three times, and I am again forced to wonder how it is that women over the age of 60 know, with surgical precision, the exact point in the small of the back where contact with an elbow results in instant, mind-bending, body-whirling fury.

Finally, a man resembling the late Tip O’Neill takes pity, hands me two glasses and parts the crowd long enough for me to hurl myself toward my friend. Panting, I look back at the teeming mass. “Stanley, Stanley, get four, for God’s sake,� shrills a doyenne who has wisely remained out of the fray. She is wearing a Donna Karan two-piece evening ensemble and seems to possess more gold than the Vatican. Her friend is in Chanel and one of her earrings is worth more, in sheer dollarage, than my entire college education, and I went out of state. She and her friend are deep in conversation, planning, with Patton-like attention to detail, their attack on the buffet, which seems to hinge on establishing a beachhead at the cold poached salmon. Clearly, they will take no prisoners.

I have a friend who can scan any event at which food is offered and in three minutes, name the caterer, price the bar and calculate, down to the last lobster ravioli, which items will run out first. I myself once committed to memory the floor plan of Bloomingdale’s in preparation for the summer sale. But I always thought that these were skills born of need and were, very, shall we say, unpolished. I watch the line ebb and swell at Saks, and suddenly Beverly Hills feels a lot like home.