Marissa J. Lang, with a beautiful story for The Washington Post:

The table was set. The pastries arranged. A white tablecloth dangled placidly in the early morning mist, surrounded by 12 golden-hued high-backed chairs.

Five decades ago, a dozen friends gathered here, on the National Mall, for breakfast. They wore morning coats and floor-length dresses, dined on oysters, drank champagne and danced together as a string quartet played in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.

The extravagant scene on July 19, 1974, drew in a Washington Post photographer, who captured the moment in an image that would ricochet around the country in newspaper reprints.

While I’d seen this photo in passing, I never gave it much thought. It was not a story I expected to move me, but by the end I was wiping away some dust from my eye.

(Via Steve Herman by way of Michael B. Johnson.)