Dear TIME-Reader:

IN Pittsburgh's fashionable Hotel William Penn ballroom one night last week, the city's 88-piece symphony orchestra, one of the best in the U.S., became for a little while a gay and lilting dance band. Waltzing to Strauss's Tales from the Vienna Woods, and applauding from the $100 boxes were civic and business leaders of Pittsburgh and their wives. The occasion was the TIME of Your LIFE Ball.

Every year the Women's Association of the Pittsburgh Symphony Society sponsors a ball, the city's outstanding social event, for the benefit of the 60-year-old orchestra, whose first conductor was Victor Herbert. This year, I am pleased to report, the association chose TIME Inc. publications for both title and decorative inspiration. Amid the pageantry of the ball, bejeweled women and their white-tied escorts moved from room to room, each of which was styled after a TIME Inc. publication. There were, for example, imitation gold coins and a wheel in the FORTUNE Room, putting greens and a miniature golf course in the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Room -and plenty of vitality at the LIFE Goes to a Party Bar.

In the TIME Room, where cover blow-ups and gold-and-black clocks hung from the ceiling on brightly colored ribbons, pretty debutantes called their requests for songs to four pianists while their escorts paid a papier-mache piper $1 a tune. There, too, handsome matrons and visiting celebrities accepted the invitation on a sign, "See yourself on the cover of TIME," smiling at themselves in small mirrors bearing the TIME logotype and familiar red border.

With 1,500 guests present, the TIME of Your LIFE Ball was gala, and a huge success. To Mrs. H. J. Heinz II, chairman of the ball, the TIME Inc. theme seemed a natural for an affair that was both social and civic. Said she: "Why, everybody knows TIME and LIFE-it's like saying Hello!"

Cordially yours,

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