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list,” said Dinah. “Brad is expecting us.” Mr. Patten was a producer she’d never met. Brad Taliaferro was the star of the play. Just then, Tommy appeared holding a clipboard.
    â€œCan I help?” he asked the usher.
    â€œDinah Kittredge,” said Herself, looking relieved. “We’re on Mr. Patten’s list, friends of Brad Taliaferro.” She even knew to pronounce it Tolliver.
    Tommy ran his finger down his clipboard, looked troubled, then said to the usher, “I’ll take care of it.” The usher was thoroughly relieved, and we were led off to the house seats, side aisle, third row. In gratitude a seat was found for Tommy in the back, he told us at intermission. After the curtain call, Tommy tapped another usher with his clipboard and murmured, “Brad is expecting Miss Kittredge in his dressing room. Could you?” We were all three led backstage, down a rackety flight of stairs, through a boiler room where the dressers ironed and mended costumes, then up two more flights of stairs. The usher knocked on a door, announced, “Mr. Taliaferro, your friends are here,” and left us. The famous voice called “ Entrez, ” and we did.
    Here was the toast of Broadway in a grimy terry cloth robe with a jar of cold cream in one hand and a weird net on his scalp where moments before had been his glorious thatch of ash blond hair, which was now perched on a wig stand on the counter. He looked at us with happy expectation as we trooped in. After his smile faded only one degree, he said “And you are . . . ?”
    â€œAbsolutely nobody,” said Dinah, and Brad (we soon called him Brad) laughed.
    â€œMarvelous! What would you like to drink?”
    The friends he was really expecting arrived while he was in the shower. They were much entertained by the story of how we got there and insisted on taking us with them to dinner. I didn’t get to bed until three, and Tommy and Dinah went on with them afterward to some place like the Peppermint Lounge where, it was claimed, society girls in miniskirts and go-go boots did the Twist on top of the tables.
    I ’d almost forgotten how much fun those days were. Dinah would disappear for long stretches when she had exams or papers due. Then she’d reappear, full of appetite and news. She and Tommy broke up, but it hardly put a hitch in their friendship. We still see Brad, although his salad days are behind him and he is not always such good company now. Tommy finally grew into his slightly crumpled face around the time he turned forty and began getting lead roles. He’s been nominated twice for an Oscar, and Dinah thinks that this year will be his year.
    Next she took up with a rising young editor at the Herald Tribune . When the Trib folded, he moved to the Times, and when she finished college Dinah went to work there too. She used to love to say that she slept her way to the middle and made it the rest of the way on talent.
    D inah could really write. I always thought we’d see her name in lights, one way or another, that she’d go to Hollywood and make movies, or write famous plays, or at least win a Pulitzer for journalism. Gloria Emerson was reporting from Vietnam for the Times, Gloria Steinem had founded Ms. magazine. Things were changing for women and we who had Known Her When thought we’d see Dinah on the barricades. Instead, at the Times she dutifully wrote about family, food, furniture, or fashion for the ghetto of the women’s pages, left the office at five, and was out virtually every night building her Rolodex. She went to art openings, book parties, discotheque openings, luxury product launches, and even celebrity funerals. Sometimes she was on assignment, but much more often she just found a way to be where the heat was being generated, for its own sake. Andy Warhol noticed her. So did Charlotte Curtis, who was writing about society for the Times in a way it had never been