ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : For Cigar Smokers, an Evening of Paradise : At the second annual smoker at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, civilized life among males of the species reaffirmed itself. It was what a boys’ night out would be if it were orchestrated by David Niven.

There was Prince Philip, back when he was just plain old Phil Mountbatten, resplendent in his Royal Navy full dress blues, rocked back luxuriously into a big cushy sofa next to his even more resplendent uncle Dickie, both of them waving big cigars in the air and grinning like they’d just reacquired India. It was a photo of Philip’s bachelor dinner at the Savoy Hotel, and it filled me with an acute sense of comradely male bonhomie to look at it.

Now that, I remember thinking, is the way to spend an evening: dressed to the nines in some classy hotel, packing away a bunch of impeccably prepared yet manly chow with the guys and then retiring to some richly paneled room to swirl a little cognac and fire up a couple of Montecristos.

But that doesn’t happen in real life, and particularly not in the corner of the world that gave us the lime green polyester leisure suit, the hourly rate motel, Chicken McNuggets, Brew 102 and the conviction that anything containing tobacco is tantamount to Kryptonite.

Well, wrong again. Earlier this month at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dana Point, civilized life among males of the species reaffirmed itself. The occasion was the hotel’s second annual cigar smoker, an elegant homage to good food, good drink, good talk, good manners and, especially, good cigars. Great cigars.

The hotel’s general manager, Henry Schielein, who loves cigars only slightly less than life itself, dreamed up the idea when he was running the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. It worked there. It works here.

It goes like this: Schielein compiles a list of guys who think it’s perfectly logical to go Concording off to Geneva for a couple of boxes of Havanas, sends them invitations (“Black tie requested”), fills them up with champagne, caviar, steak tartare, smoked salmon, Rothschild wines and a filet mignon you could cut with a sharp look, encourages them to light up at the table, and then leads them upstairs to the Library, an elegant, dark, wood-paneled room furnished with sofas and cozy chairs and bookshelves and a fireplace.

The Library has been designated by Schielein as a kind of cigar smoker’s demilitarized zone, where devotees can enjoy their tobacco without being glared at by prigs who think cigars are smoked only by flophouse night clerks named Al. On the night of the smoker, a large table in the center of the room is laid on with dozens of boxes of the finest cigars, and the guests are invited to help themselves. And everyone disappears into a graceful blue haze of conviviality and Louis XIII cognac.

So it was at the cigar smoker. God was in His heaven, the Davidoffs were in their humidor, Gloria Allred was miles away and you didn’t have to apologize if your smoke trailed up into the nostrils of the person you were talking with.

It was what a boys’ night out would be if it were orchestrated by David Niven.

It was also a lovely anachronism. Because in the era of the unisex hair salon, the forced neutering of the language (aren’t you sick of having a “server” bring your coffee?) and the co-ed gym, there are precious few places where a man can go to enjoy the cheerful company of other men. Some guys, lacking nothing more than a membership in a decent men’s golf club, try to get back to their male roots by going on one of those weekends where groups of insurance salesmen squat around a fire and grunt and beat on drums and talk about Thor.

I don’t know about you, but for me, slipping into a tux, dining on four-star grub, toasting everybody with wine that comes by the jeroboam and discussing it all through a fragrant blue wisp of panatela smoke beats baying at the moon and telling Wotan stories all to heck.

So call it male bonding if you like, but it seems such an antiseptic term to use to describe something that’s so elegant, so satisfyingly proper and so damn much fun. It doesn’t reaffirm your masculinity, or reconnect you to some manly life force, or make you want to go out and strafe Tehran. It just makes you feel good.

Besides, anything that George Burns does has to be OK.