big kiss; New York newlyweds were feted on Park Avenue with violins, caviar, and a thousand society smooches.

Byline: William Norwich

It was a dark and stormy night, and as devoted romantics from here to Hollywood know, dark weather can really set the mood.

Some enchanted evening? Let me try to do justice to the dinner and dance that Samantha Boardman, M.D., and Aby Rosen, the arts patron and real estate mogul, gave in late autumn at the Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue.

"Don't call it a wedding," Aby said. "Call it a party"-and what a party it was. Some 300 of the couple's friends and family, all ages, all walks of social life, the arts, and the financial world, were invited to a belated celebration of Samantha and Aby's marriage last summer, which, by high-society standards, was practically an elopement, so small and discreet an affair was it. Not since the wedding of Marie-Chantal Miller to Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece a decade ago in London-where, under a celery-green-and-pink luncheon tent (or maybe it was the champagne that was pink; whatever, we were awash in pastels and magnificence), I heard a very pearly voice say, "I'd best go home for a lie-down; I've got two parties tonight," and, turning, saw that it was, really, Queen Elizabeth of England speaking-have I witnessed so much sophisticated fun and grandeur at a private do.

Both parties were designed by flower power Robert Isabell. But this time, instead of crowned heads, top hats, and tiaras, we had-well, as decoration, we had Andy Warhol's painting of The Last Supper, approximately 30 feet long, one of the most important religious paintings of the twentieth century, lent by Stephanie Seymour and Peter Brant. The Warhol towered in the Four Seasons' candlelit Pool Room, an altar to the jet set transformed with banquettes, pastries, and buckets of Cristal champagne and platinum Patron tequila into an after-dinner disco for dancing and dessert.

The ladies dressed up, if not beyond, in designer finery. But the gentlemen, in the spirit of the informal host (he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, no tie), were dissuaded from wearing black tie. Dr. Boardman thought pink, the color of her Christian Lacroix evening dress.

At sunset, the skies opened; it was heaving rain, usually the makings of some very lumpy, grumpy gravy in Gotham. However, even the most dampened spirits were elevated when they stepped into the foyer of architect Philip Johnson's masterpiece restaurant in the Seagram Building (which Aby Rosen conveniently owns) to be met by white-tied Russian violinists. Up the staircase to the bar they proceeded, everyone from the opera singer Renee Fleming to Blaine Trump in vintage Celine to Pia Getty in Ferretti to young Fernanda Niven in Vera Wang.