Traffic is, in fact, pretty light on the way back to Manhattan. At home, with some time to kill before going off to meet Bill [Blass] at 7 P.M. at the New York Public Library's Ten Treasures Benefit Dinner, I thumb through the new (June) issue of Vogue, which arrived in today's mail. Inside the magazine I spot a photo of Bill standing between Annette Reed and Sharon Hoge. Sharon, wife of Daily News publisher Jim Hoge, and Bill made up one of the ten teams who were asked by the library's ten most treasured books, maps, or prints. They are posing next to a book placed on a large pedestal, with oversized books scattered on the floor in front of them. The accompanying story by William and Chessy Rayner is about the Ten Treasures benefit. Happily, I settle in to read about what to expect tonight.

As I read, my happiness turns to dismay and then to horror. Not only have the Rayners written the story as if the Ten Treasures benefit has already happened, but they say it has set a whole new standard for entertaining for the people who "not long ago" forked over hundreds of dollars for tickets to charity dinners and then were forced to eat food "sure to run a close second to that on a no-frills flight" and endure waiters who "would clash the dishes together as if they have received their training playing cymbals in a marching band."

But, they write, things "seem to be changing for the better" . . . if the party "held in May for the New York Public Library . . . [is] any indication. . . ."

Lying through their teeth, they tell the 1,202,471 Vogue readers that the library benefit's menu "by Glorious Food [was] superior, the service impeccable, and the decorations perhaps unmatched since Francis I entertained Henry VIII on the Field of the Cloth of Gold."

"To call the exhibitions the library mounted for its evening 'decorations,'" the story says, "is as inaccurate as to say that Cheops' pyramid was really built to embellish a package of Camel cigarettes. Indeed, they were among the most creative efforts ever undertaken."

Now mind you, since magazines work three months in advance, this story for the June issue had to be filed by the Rayners in March. The exhibitions were just set up in the library this week, so there's no way in the world the Rayners could have seen these "most creative efforts ever undertaken."

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