Dozens of onetime aides, friends and supporters of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) are preparing to raise a glass to his memory on Friday, when he would have celebrated his 80th birthday.

They’ll do so both individually and collectively, actually and figuratively, according to Moynihan’s longtime personal assistant, Vicki Bear Dodson. She helped organize an effort to contact those who were in Moynihan’s orbit during his four terms in the Senate, from 1977 through 2000, and throughout his years as an assistant secretary of labor in the Lyndon Johnson administration, a White House aide in the Nixon administration, and U.S. ambassador to India and the United Nations.

“We’re asking people to raise a glass to him wherever they are on Friday,” said Dodson, who now does public affairs and outreach for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Dodson said Moynihan’s widow, Liz, will hold a small gathering at her apartment in New York to toast her husband, who died on March 26, 2003.