As we stumble toward another year, the third or fourth in the new millenium depending upon your interpretation, everyone’s looking for a good time. There doesn’t seem to be any logical explanation for the phenomenon, but for some reason all of Western civilization feels the need to get bombed on New Year’s Eve (or feels the need to act self-righteous about not getting bombed.)
As you’ve probably guessed, I fall into the former category, but it’s no big thing; New Year’s is no better an excuse to party than Groundhog Day or Invention of Philips-Head Screws Day. Prominent in my butler’s pantry/bar is an Esquire-born tome of about 1956 that includes, beyond recipes for hundreds of esoteric drinks, a list of 365 reasons to have a party. This, truly, is one of America’s greater contributions to humanity. (Yes, Philips-head screws are on the list.)
A recurring problem of New Year’s Eve is that it’s Amateur Night. For a vast beige segment of the population, this is the only night of the year that it’s okay to get blitzed, don a lampshade, kiss the boss’s wife and do the Charleston with a coatrack. Thus, every bar in every city is flooded with people who, to be blunt, don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
Of course, there are alternatives. Dear God, are there alternatives. The Politically Correct (read: annoying) thing to do now is a First Night celebration. There does not seem to be any cultural precedent for these awful things, but they proliferate. From what I can gather, the idea is to take a traditionally lewd boozefest of a night and turn it into a Kids ’n Kool-Aid yawn competition. Apparently, “The Arts” are involved, but given that the local version happens in pretty but sleepy Annapolis, I’m not too convinced of the pedigree of the arts in question.
In decades past, it was possible on almost any night of the year to go to a Big Downtown Hotel for drinks, dinner and dancing. Any city worth its salt had several behemoth hotels with house orchestras and cork-padded ballroom floors. New Year’s Eve would be a little more spiffy, a little more charged, and they’d hand out confetti. Now New Year’s Eve is the only night of the year that the few remaining grand hotels do something like this, and it’s depressing. The cost hovers around $200 per couple, and you get rubber chicken, flat champagne that may have been produced in used Pontiac gas tanks, and dancing on a much-reduced ballroom floor to the mellow strains of... a DJ??? These affairs are saddest at the old grand hotels; it’s hard to be in a place like the Virginia Room at Richmond’s Hotel John Marshall and not imagine what it would have been like with Glenn Miller’s Orchestra instead of some pimply DJ.
I’ll avoid commentary on the Cool Kid nightclub scene on New Year’s. Let’s just say that I’m over 25 and don’t fit in, and that if I wanted to listen to screaming, wasted peroxide chicks and equally wasted steroid boys, I’d attend a perfectly good mob riot.
This year I will again have a party at home for the Few, the Elite, the Too Broke to Do Anything Else. For the rest of you, enjoy the evening and best wishes for 2003. And don’t forget — Drink Responsibly! Champagne does not go in a martini glass!
As you’ve probably guessed, I fall into the former category, but it’s no big thing; New Year’s is no better an excuse to party than Groundhog Day or Invention of Philips-Head Screws Day. Prominent in my butler’s pantry/bar is an Esquire-born tome of about 1956 that includes, beyond recipes for hundreds of esoteric drinks, a list of 365 reasons to have a party. This, truly, is one of America’s greater contributions to humanity. (Yes, Philips-head screws are on the list.)
A recurring problem of New Year’s Eve is that it’s Amateur Night. For a vast beige segment of the population, this is the only night of the year that it’s okay to get blitzed, don a lampshade, kiss the boss’s wife and do the Charleston with a coatrack. Thus, every bar in every city is flooded with people who, to be blunt, don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
Of course, there are alternatives. Dear God, are there alternatives. The Politically Correct (read: annoying) thing to do now is a First Night celebration. There does not seem to be any cultural precedent for these awful things, but they proliferate. From what I can gather, the idea is to take a traditionally lewd boozefest of a night and turn it into a Kids ’n Kool-Aid yawn competition. Apparently, “The Arts” are involved, but given that the local version happens in pretty but sleepy Annapolis, I’m not too convinced of the pedigree of the arts in question.
In decades past, it was possible on almost any night of the year to go to a Big Downtown Hotel for drinks, dinner and dancing. Any city worth its salt had several behemoth hotels with house orchestras and cork-padded ballroom floors. New Year’s Eve would be a little more spiffy, a little more charged, and they’d hand out confetti. Now New Year’s Eve is the only night of the year that the few remaining grand hotels do something like this, and it’s depressing. The cost hovers around $200 per couple, and you get rubber chicken, flat champagne that may have been produced in used Pontiac gas tanks, and dancing on a much-reduced ballroom floor to the mellow strains of... a DJ??? These affairs are saddest at the old grand hotels; it’s hard to be in a place like the Virginia Room at Richmond’s Hotel John Marshall and not imagine what it would have been like with Glenn Miller’s Orchestra instead of some pimply DJ.
I’ll avoid commentary on the Cool Kid nightclub scene on New Year’s. Let’s just say that I’m over 25 and don’t fit in, and that if I wanted to listen to screaming, wasted peroxide chicks and equally wasted steroid boys, I’d attend a perfectly good mob riot.
This year I will again have a party at home for the Few, the Elite, the Too Broke to Do Anything Else. For the rest of you, enjoy the evening and best wishes for 2003. And don’t forget — Drink Responsibly! Champagne does not go in a martini glass!
posted by Daniel | 12:02 PM
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