What was it like in the twenties?

How did it last?

"Sure I remember how we met," said Lil.

Nat laughed and said, "I think she picked me up somewhere. . . ."

"Oh, you, " said Lil, waving a hand at him. "No . . . actually, I knew his brother. One day he brought your grandfather over to meet me, when I was sitting on the front stoop."

They were married six months later. The Jazz Age was beginning. "We were the gayest of the gays during the Prohibition era, tootsie," said my grandmother. "We always liked parties, you know? And did we go to speakeasies! . . ."

"They used to dunk the cases of beer in Sheepshead Bay to prove it was fresh off the boat," said Nat.

"Oh, I remember," said Lil. "There used to be a place called The White Horse. They had the best food you could get for a little money-$1.25 maybe. But drinks were two dollars; they'd bring them in little demitasse cups. . . ."

My grandmother had two younger sisters who lived with the newlyweds. "We had two little girls before we had our own two little girls," Lil said. My grandfather worked as an accountant, but the Crash came and nearly wiped him out.

"You might say I was one of the few guys who didn't jump out of windows," he said, smiling. "There used to be a joke: a guy walks into a hotel, asks for a fourteenth floor room and the clerk says, 'Is that for sleeping or for jumping?'"

In the early thirties Nat packed up the family and moved to Washington, D.C., where he put his remaining assets into a wholesale paper goods business.

"We moved," said Lil. "We had to make all new friends. We came here four years ago, we had to do it all again. You know, in making friends in a new city, you can't always be yourself. You have to accept their idiosyncracies. . . ."

"They have to accept ours, too," interrupted Nat.

"Yes," said Lil, "But the younger people-the ones who are only in their sixties-accept us. We've always had what I call the 'young approach.'"

Are any of the old Washington friends coming down for the party?