Entertainment

Toast of the town

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The birthday girl is lounging on a couch at the posh lounge called Back Room, nursing a drink. She’s wearing a flapper-style glittery headband, laughing and chatting with about 20 friends and family.

There’s nothing unusual about area denizens convening on the Lower East Side for a birthday party — but this celebration is a little bit different.

For one thing, the birthday girl, Lillian Sarno, is turning 102. And it turns out she’s no stranger to this bar.

When Sarno first partied in this neighborhood as a 20-something who loved to dance the Charleston, the paint was still wet on the George Washington Bridge, “King Kong” was playing at Radio City Music Hall — and a subway ride cost 5 cents.

This past weekend, with family in town early to celebrate her April 30 birthday, the Upper West Sider journeyed down to the bar where she’d celebrated in 1933 after passing the New York State bar exam, at age 24. (That was also the year Sarno married her NYU classmate Herman Sarno, and honeymooned at the Chicago World’s Fair. Her husband died in 1965.)

The trouble with coming back to this spot was that Sarno couldn’t remember the name of the place — or if it even had one. (At that time, Prohibition was still in effect.)

“It was a speakeasy,” she recalls of the bar at 102 Norfolk St. The younger of her two sons, Jonathan, 65, did some homework, discovered the spot now exists as a bar called Back Room, and made a reservation.

New York nightlife trends being what they are, the space is now a faux speak-easy (think velvet-covered walls and tin ceilings), with a private lounge area that can be accessed through a revolving bookcase.

In the ’30s, being “on the list” was a considerably bigger deal than it is now. “You had to be admitted and they had to know you; [the operators] didn’t want to get arrested,” recalls Sarno.

“[At this place,] we had to walk downstairs and then through a separate door. The person greeting you [would] open the door, and it was like we were selling him something he didn’t want. Then he’d close the door . . . and come back and say, ‘You’re OK.’ He was checking the names.”

Sarno’s not sure how it was that her name got onto the lists of such places, but she was a well-connected lady. Her father was a prominent attorney, and many of his friends were officers of the court — so she wasn’t worried about getting caught.

One of six women in NYU Law School’s graduating class of 1931, this New York career girl had all the flapper accessories and loved going out, but only came to this particular speakeasy on special occasions.

“Nobody could come here often,” she says. “It was expensive.”

Granted, her $10-a-week salary as a landlord-tenant attorney didn’t go a long way, but paying the bar bill wasn’t a problem if you found a chivalrous gentleman to buy your cocktail.

“I wouldn’t know,” she laughs when asked how much drinks cost in 1933, the last year Prohibition was in effect. “I never picked up the tab.”

At Back Room, owner Johnny “B” Barounis serves the drinks in teacups, because that was what real speak-easies did in an effort to be discreet. That’s what he thought, anyway — until now.

Not so, says Sarno, as her Pinot Grigio is delivered to her in a cup. She says restaurants served booze in teacups, but speakeasies used cocktail glasses.

“That was an epiphany for me,” says Barounis, whose research included conversations with the landlord, whose family has owned the building for nearly a 100 years. He now thinks the family’s Delancey Street restaurant, which had a secret passage to the speakeasy on Norfolk Street, used teacups, while the speakeasy itself possibly did not.

“There are a lot of faux speakeasies, but they can’t fake this history,” says Barounis. “Having this woman in here was fantastic. You didn’t know for sure the earth was round until the astronauts went up there and said, ‘Yeah, it’s round.’ It was an honor to have her.”

The good old days were fun, but Sarno doesn’t wax too poetic about that time. In fact, she figures New York City nightlife is doing just fine. “It should be more fun now,” she says. “There are more places to go and things to do.”