On a crisp Saturday night in early winter, an armada of Hyundais and Saturns arrived at the colonnaded Bridgehampton Community House in the center of the Hamptons, a thin necklace of ultra-wealthy hamlets at the tip of New York's Long Island.
The Hamptons are best known as a summer playground for Manhattan millionaires. But this night, the people who service the lavish Hamptons lifestyle were throwing their own party. They caravanned from a nearby church, little girls in frilly dresses and pomaded boys in squeaky shoes, shepherded by their parents--the roofers who tack gray slate to colonial homes, the maids who scrub...