"You lie. Say you’re 10 years younger. I’m 49 and my husband still doesn’t know."

The 700 women at the luncheon at the Pierre smiled in agreement.

Arpel, whose sister Marilyn, five years older, has breast cancer, said that if her Jewish mother were here she’d be walking from table to table asking every man to fill out a questionnaire—looking for a doctor for Marilyn.

On the other hand, Dr. Sylvia Smoller, a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw and now head of the division of epidemiology at Einstein, is taking a scientific approach to aging. She’s engaged in studying genetics and stroke in women.

"Inside every older woman," she said, "is a younger woman wondering, what the hell happened?"

Dennis Basso, a leading fur designer, appealed to all the women at lunch to stay healthy and strong. "Where would we be without you? Who would be doing all the shopping?"

Hoda Kotb, co-host of the fourth hour of NBC’s Today Show, said you can make big changes in your life by changing the small things. "I hold on tightly to the things I love and get rid of the other things. I’m divorced."

Al Roker sympathized with Kotb: "I was with her when she battled cancer, an insidious disease, almost as vicious as her ex-husband."

Jackie Harris Hochberg, president of the New York chapter of Einstein’s National Women’s Division, presented spirit of achievement awards to Arpel, Smoller, Basso, Kotb, and fashion designer Naeem Khan and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, fashion director at Lincoln Center. Willie Geist, host of MSNBC’s Way Too Early With Willie Geist and co-host of Morning Joe, served as emcee.