The State - News from Jan. 4, 1987

Groups of private citizens gathered at parties in San Francisco and Moscow to do what they said President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev failed to do: demonstrate good will by swapping holiday messages. “We’ve got ourselves an international party here,” said organizer Joel Schatz of San Francisco/Moscow Teleport, which co-sponsored the TV-telephone hookup. About 200 artists, writers, scientists and other invited guests drank cider, munched on hors d’oeuvres and offered New Year’s toasts to their Soviet counterparts in a San Francisco office building-turned-nightclub in what they billed as “Cafe Diplomacy.” On the other side of the world and 11 hours ahead, a similar number of Muscovites gathered at a discotheque in Gorky Park and in front of an 80-by-50-foot outdoor video screen on the Kalinin Prospekt thoroughfare.