RELATED: Photos from MoMA's Annual Corporate Luncheon

The director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry, only wears purple or orange socks, while the museum's curator of film, Rajendra Roy, is known as the No-Tie Man. Mr. Roy, the brother of fashion designer Rachel Roy, shared these sartorial facts with me yesterday at the museum's annual corporate luncheon during the first course of peekytoe crab salad with ruby grapefruit gelée.

But it wasn't until the main course was served — a braised leg and roasted breast of chicken — that things got interesting. That's when the recipient of the event's David Rockefeller Award, a 34-year trustee of the museum and senior chairman and cofounder of the Blackstone Group, Peter Peterson, spoke of a visit he made to a Moscow nightclub with David Rockefeller, a fellow trustee and friend, during a trip to Russia with the Council on Foreign Relations (one of dozens of such trips the two have taken together).

The show was a Russian striptease with elaborate pole dancing, and soon after Mr. Peterson began to watch it, he became "appalled at the possibility that a Russian journalist would capture the rapture of these two aged men, given that they were on a Council on Foreign Relations trip," he said.

After the third act, he suggested to Mr. Rockefeller that they leave. "And he said, 'Oh no, I don't think that would be courteous,'" Mr. Peterson recalled. "So we stayed, through all eight numbers."

With speeches like that, you can bet the luncheon's 300 guests stayed through dessert.

Actually, the more likely reason they did so was the quality of people gathered in the room; they represented the elite leadership of the city's cultural institutions, in both the professional and trustee/ donor categories. To name but a few present: the city's cultural affairs commissioner, Kate Levin; the chairwoman of the Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, Agnes Gund, who is also president emeritus of MoMA; the president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc; the president of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian; the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Emily Rafferty, and museum directors Adam Weinberg of the Whitney and Lisa Phillips of the New Museum.

These leaders knew that rapture was absolutely the proper response when the chairman of the museum, Jerry Speyer, announced that the event had raised $2.9 million for the museum's education programs.

agordon@nysun.com