Memo Pad: Kate Moss Takes Action... Speak, Twitter... A Ceremonial Toast...

A CEREMONIAL TOAST: It took a lot of Googling, Facebooking and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting to track down nearly all 300 same-sex couples that have appeared in the Sunday New York Times’ wedding pages since gay ceremonies were first included in 2002. (Contact information is jettisoned after three months for privacy reasons.) But there many of them were, beaming and mingling at The Times Co.’s cocktail party Tuesday night, a Pride Month celebration.

Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. led a toast, surrounded by the first couple to appear in the pages, as well as the most recent pair. He expressed the wish that “our children and our grandchildren” see the right of gays to marry as being “as natural as the air we breathe.” Raising his glass, he said, “To marriage equality!” And then, “The bar is open!”

Sulzberger told WWD the decision to open the pages to gay couples six and a half years ago was “surprisingly not a big deal.” He recalled a lunch with then-executive editor Howell Raines and now-chief executive Janet Robinson in which Raines asked whether there would be negative business implications to the decisions; Robinson thought not.

New York Times staffers in attendance included food reporter Kim Severson, whose commitment ceremony appeared in the paper in 2006; Style editor Trip Gabriel, and style reporter Eric Wilson. The grim economic realities of the newspaper business intruded somewhat on the cheerful occasion, as the publisher of the Boston Globe, Steven Ainsley, noted from the podium that his spirit felt “lifted in a way I haven’t experienced in awhile, since these are not joyous times in the newspaper business.” The New York Times Co. has been locked in a bare-knuckle fight with the union that represents the Globe’s newsroom employees over proposed cuts in benefits and pay, and earlier this year The Times Co. threatened to shut the paper down. The most audible laugh at Ainsley’s comments — albeit a nervous one — was Sulzberger’s.

— I.C.