THE PIARIST DEBUTANTE BALL
Late January · The University Club, New York · An Evening
The Piarist Ball is the oldest debutante ball in New York, and the only one at which the debutantes are presented under two flags. It is held at the University Club on a Saturday at the end of January, and it runs until one in the morning.
Everything raised goes to the Piarist schools in Hungary, which have taught poor children without charging them for four hundred years.
The Order
Joseph of Calasanz was a Spanish priest who opened a free school for the poor children of Rome in 1597. The order he founded took the usual three vows and added a fourth: to spend their lives teaching the young. They have kept it since 1622.
In Hungary the Piarists taught in Hungarian at a time when the fashion and the pressure were both toward German, which is one reason the country’s intellectual class came out of their classrooms for two centuries.
The communist government took their building on the Danube embankment. In the summer of 1953 the fathers were given a few weeks to move into a place a third the size that had never been meant as a school, and they went on teaching there until 1989. Nine schools operate in Hungary today, and more beyond its borders for Hungarians who live outside them.
That is what the ball is for. It has been held for more than sixty years, with a gap in the middle of them, and the New York Hungarians brought it back.
The Evening
The order of the night has not changed in decades and is followed to the minute.
A jazz quartet plays through the cocktail hour. At a quarter to nine the colours are presented, American and Hungarian together. At nine the committee is introduced and the opening Csárdás is danced.
Five minutes past nine is the reason for the evening: the debutantes are presented, one at a time, by name. The opening waltz follows.
At half past ten the room stops for the Grand Palotás, the processional dance of the Hungarian nobility, performed by the Hungarian Scouts of New Brunswick. It is the part of the night that surprises people who came expecting a charity dinner.
The Lester Lanin Society Orchestra plays without a break until one. Lanin himself played for four presidents and two royal weddings, and the band has outlived him.
What to Know
It is a benefit rather than a party, and it is dressed as one. Evening dress throughout, and the University Club keeps its own standards besides.
You do not need to be Hungarian. A good number of the debutantes are not, and the room runs to diplomats, alumni and New Yorkers who simply come every year.
Places are taken as patrons rather than bought as tickets, and the levels are published in advance.
The Palotás at half past ten is the thing to stay for. People who leave after dinner miss the best twenty minutes of the evening.
The mistake is to treat the presentation as ceremony to be sat through. Seventeen-year-old girls are walking across a ballroom in front of four hundred people, most of them people their parents know. Watch it properly.
The Court
The Piarist Ball is not the Court’s own. Patronage, seating and a place at a table are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the evening: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.
