casual elegance

Last night a dear friend from Montreal, who now lives near Saratoga, swept me away from Yaddo for the evening, Cinderella style, though we drove in a late model Volvo rather than a pumpkin-turned-carriage. Snow boots for glass slippers we slipped into The Gideon Putnam Resort and Spa, quite happy to have found the place, as most of what Barbara had by way of directions was: It’s in a sort of forest. Hmm… We now know it’s in the Saratoga State Park, near the Roosevelt and Lincoln Mineral Baths, golf, tennis and much more! There was an auction going on in the Georgian Dining Room, so we ate in the bar. From our corner table we surveyed the formal wear waltzing by. Most of the women wore evening dresses that differed slightly from one another in the amount of sequins and/or bare flesh shown. One woman walked by in a plain black paint suit. That’s me, Barbara said, That’s what I’d wear. I looked around. I haven’t got here yet, I said. Our Cinderella story shifted into an Eloise at the Plaza adventure as our small square table quickly became littered with cocktails and their accoutrements. Our waiter asked if we were from The City. Yes, we said. Montreal, we said, knowing full well he meant New York. I ordered a Manhattan, to further confuse him, and I told him I was at Yaddo. He said he’d wound up at Yaddo one night at 4AM and drunk out of his mind. That’s some crazy castle they’ve got, he said. They prefer to think of it as a mansion, I said. Since we now had Yaddo in common our waiter took a liking to us, took to slipping us glasses of Chardonnay pilfered from wandering wait staff trays intended for the formal wear clad headed for the auction in the Georgian Dining Room. Barbara and I giggled and gossiped our way through a lovely meal and made it home before her Volvo turned into a pumpkin. We’re thrilled to discover that, according to the postcards we swiped on the way out, The Gideon Putnam Resort and Spa is known the world over for its casual elegance and historic charm.

In “A Century At Yaddo,” the America novelist, short story and travel writer Eleanor Clark wrote of “the usual evening jaunts into Saratoga” during her stays at Yaddo between 1936 and 1951. There was a stable with saddle horses for hire on a side street on the other side of Union Avenue. “I used to ride from there when I could get the few dollars together, and was astonished the first time, on reaching a straight stretch of field of a mile or two, somewhere over by the Gideon Putnam, to have my steed turn on the instant into the equine equivalent of a bullet, headed for the horizon and impervious to bit, reins or human panic. I stayed on, having had a similar experience in Mexico with a horse trained for the movies... My present mount, I learned on slinking back to the stable, was neither a wicked beast nor an aspiring movie prop, but a recently retired race horse just doing his duty when the terrain called it to mind.”
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