Pretty healthy dinner tab

Due to open in January, the facility will provide primary care, mental health, dental and some specialty services to uninsured and underinsured people.

A chunk of that total came from bidding on Whitney and Hendrickson's "spontaneous" offer of dinner at Cady Hill, the Whitney estate on Geyser Road in the Spa City.

The unannounced item, delivered verbally to the plummy-voiced auction manager, who normally handles Fasig-Tipton thoroughbred sales, was Whitney and Hendrickson's way of kick-starting a capital campaign for a new intensive-care unit at the hospital.

After selling a Boston sports weekend (Celtics and Bruins tickets and accommodations) for $2,000 and Lasik eye surgery for $2,200, the auctioneer tried to start bidding at $10,000 for the "quiet dinner for two" at Cady Hill.

The 90-minute live auction was ostensibly the centerpiece of the evening, held under a pair of tents decorated, respectively, in white and red to echo the fete's "Fire and Ice" theme by Michael Panza.

In truth, however, only a minority of partygoers appeared to be paying attention to the selling of restaurant dinners, trips, sports items and other indulgences ($2,100 for a 4-foot-long outdoor fire pit, $2,300 for a home sauna, $3,400 for a shopping spree at Nordstrom in Chicago, San Francisco or Newport Beach).

Besides the $176,000 Whitney-Hendrickson-Riggi dinner, the evening's two priciest auction items both involved housing: a custom-built, two-story, 300-square-foot, chateau-style child's playhouse, complete with copper roof accents, from Bella Home Builders; and a year's free rent on a brand-new, two-bedroom condo in downtown Saratoga at Market Square Apartments.