The party took place on a Friday night in May after the latest in a string of long winters. There was a full moon, you could felt it.
The crowd overflowed the third-floor apartment — down the stairs, over the stoop and out onto a street lined with brownstones. Hundreds of people came and went before the bash was over. It was a party for the ages.
Most of the partiers had moved from smaller towns to try their hand at advertising. Success depended on being interesting and fashionable or fashionably unfashionable (only few could pull that off). It was a crowd that paid attention to these things.
They were in their twenties, a few in their thirties. Some of them had been married. They were as young and as beautiful and as available as they would ever be, and they had apartments.
They had been raised with their parents’ traditional mid-century values about love and marriage. “Barbie and Ken sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
But by the Seventies those things had changed.
Casual physical adventures had become respectable. Older values like trust and commitment had become suspect. Being earnest was out of style. Marriage was retrograde. Everywhere you turned, there were ball bearings under your feet.
It was in the wee hours of the morning that the last of the guests walked out to hail cabs or hop onto public transportation. As always, especially in the Seventies, a number of them went home with someone new.
Mating rituals may change over time but biology does not.
If you had followed the birth announcements the following winter, you might have seen the names of a few people you met at the party that night.
The species would not to be denied, 
