Diminishing Benefits

THE GOWNS ARE AS ELEGANT AS EVER, BUT IS IT TIME TO SAY BYE-BYE TO THE BLACK TIE CHARITY BALL?

- Wednesday Martin

Taxes. Private school tuition. Mobile car detailing services. Add to the list of realities that people in particular zip codes and income brackets in major metropolitan centers cannot avoid: galas.

Like allergies, galas are seasonal. They emerge with the forsythia, ebb a bit in summer, and hit hard again in the fall. 

And there is no cure. 

No matter how much they complain about spending X nights out in a single week, lament that multiple committee obligations are killing them, or bemoan the number of friends they’re obliged to cajole into buying tables—and buy tables from, in a bizarre twist on what evolutionary biologists call “reciprocal altruism”—the philanthropists keep doing it.

“Plenty of people who aren’t religious still go to church or celebrate the high holy days,” Richard Kirshenbaum, the author of Isn’t That Rich: Life Among the 1%, explained when I called him to get to the bottom of our refusal to let galas go.