flirting with the greatest man of the twentieth century

I asked, as soon as I knew who the guest of honor was, if I would be the captain who had his table. Do you want to be? asked D, who was managing the party. Oh yes, I said. Very much so. So she let me; not surprising, since as a manager myself I tend to get the head table anyway. And I was also the only member of the floor staff who knew who he was. I went back to opening bottles of wine and getting ready for the guests to troop in after the pre-dinner presentation. I was excited in a way I haven't been, catering, in a long time.

The courtyard of the Cantor Art Center on the Stanford University campus now features a scupture of which I am especially fond, Oldenburg and van Bruggen's Floating Peel. It's a 900-pound, 14-foot-tall banana peel. From one angle it looks like a flower blooming; from another a guest thought it was some kind of propeller. I think it's beautiful, and will be sad to see it go when the two-year loan is up. Here's video of it being installed. Anyway, the challenge of having a 900-pound, 14-foot-tall banana peel in your courtyard is that you really need to think about how you're going to decorate your rental tables. The designer on this party had accepted the inevitable and covered the tables with bright yellow linens, centered by small faux Rodin sculptures wreathed in fresh vines. Pretty simple, but effective.

I'm digressing, but I really want to give you an idea of what the event looked like. About a hundred elegantly-dressed guests sitting around yellow-draped tables as night fell, little votives lighting their faces. Waiters in full tux. Bottles of wine, plates with exquisitely arranged portions of salmon and vegetables, postcards of Djerassi Foundation-sponsored artworks propped up in the table number stands.

And a 14-foot-tall steel banana.

The erotic subtext wasn't lost on the guests, some of whom were cracking jokes about the sculpture. Although sexual jokes seem to come easily when you're at a party honoring the man who developed the birth control pill. Even if nobody is talking about how, exactly, he made the money to endow a foundation that supports the arts, in a time where there is almost no money in the state for artists. It's gauche, somehow. Heaven knows how many of the other people present had swallowed an Ortho-Novum 777, or a Tricyclen, sometime during the day. I know I wasn't the only one. But we were not talking about that.

It's easy, if you're socially/morally conservative, to dismiss Djerassi's work because it makes casual sex much less dangerous. There are some people who believe casual sex should be dangerous, that the risk will make people stop and think before they strip down, that somehow the Pill is responsible for the breakdown of the healthy, wholesome society we had back in the Fifties.

Riiiight.

And there are people, such as Barbara Seaman, who worry that oral contraceptives are just one small part of a larger, uncontrolled experiment in which women are the guinea pigs. I have much more sympathy for this idea, in part because I am a DES daughter and thus very sensitive about most things related to nonsteroidal estrogens. I do sometimes worry about all the synthetic estrogen I've been shovelling into my system for the past gazillion years, on top of the existing damage; I take some comfort from my doctor's insistence that the dosage I'm taking is miniscule compared to the early Pill, and that regular Pill use also seems to protect against some kinds of cancer. But it's still a little scary.

But I think about what this man has done to extend the average human female lifespan, and I'm just awed. Forget the sexual revolution. Forget about the religious right and the Catholic Church. Think instead about every woman who has not died in childbirth, or of a botched abortion, or of a general physical breakdown from having too many children, because she had access to the Pill. Think of every woman who, because she can now control when she gets pregnant, has been able to decide that she wants a degree first, or a gallery show, or a book-signing tour--and has been able to have it.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of playing it cool, but he busted me. He noticed that I was serving him first, and being eighty years old (a very well-kept eighty years, let me say) had been to enough formal dinners to know that I should have been starting with the woman to his right. You're serving me first, he asked, with traces of his Viennese accent still audible. Why is that?

Because I'm very fond of you, I responded without thinking. Well, not true. I was thinking. I was thinking, there goes my job if management hears about this. We're pretty strictly schooled in not saying goofy things like that to celebrity guests.

What did you say? At this point, he had his hand on my left wrist. I repeated myself, blushing furiously. That's what I thought you said, he answered. Clearly you have excellent taste, but why are you so fond of me?

You have made certain revolutions, I responded, that have improved the lives of many people.

That's what I thought.

I speak, of course, of your science fiction I added.

Of course. I knew that was what you meant, he laughed.

You're a silver-tongued devil, Carl someone at the table said, apparently able to read my blush even in the darkness. And he is quite charming, as is evident from this interview. Djerassi released my perspiring wrist, but for the rest of the dinner service, he never let up on me--insisting that I taste the wine, thanking me every time I did anything for him, smiling smiling smiling.

Right up there with waiting on Noam Chomsky at his son's wedding (he listened lovingly to his little grandson talking about snakes) and Joan Baez at a fundraiser (terrible flirt, if she thinks there's some treat in the kitchen you might know about).