Just Another New Year's Eve...
Taking stock of auld lang synes past. An open thread...
Readers,
First of all, happy new year from me to all of you! Wishing you all new beginnings and better things, whatever that means for you, in 2023.
Second of all…what an intense holiday New Year’s Eve is! It’s so bound up in anticipation and expectation that it rarely lives up to. But every now and then, you’ll have an exceptional night you’ll never forget. In the comments, I want to hear about yours…
For me, that night was December 31st, 1980, when I was 15. I’d managed to score tickets to see Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band during The River tour at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, where I grew up, and attended the concert with some older friends I looked up to, who could drive.
Back then, the second a concert was announced on the radio you had to get on the phone to Ticket Master, if you wanted in. I listened religiously to WNEW 102.7 in those days because my friend David, who was like an older brother to me, instructed me to. He’d taken on the project of hipping me—a musical theater geek—to rock and roll, making me mixtapes, loaning me records. The fall morning that the local tour dates were announced, I was on it.
Every now and then, you’ll have an exceptional New Year’s Eve you’ll never forget.
I’ll never forget getting my mom to tell me her credit card number (my friends and I all paid her back with our babysitting money!), then calling from a bank of pay phones at West Hempstead High School—dialing again and again and again after getting a busy signal several times. Landing six tickets for New Year’s Eve felt like a miracle.
The concert itself felt like a miracle, too. Springsteen played for something like four hours. To this day, it’s still considered one of his best shows. (I’m going to treat myself to a little nostalgia trip and download the audio.) It was only the second rock concert I’d ever been to in my life (the prior summer I saw Jackson Browne at Tanglewood), and every second of it thrilled me. At the stroke of 12 a.m. he played Wilson Picket’s “In the Midnight Hour,” and I think of that every single time I count down the last seconds of any given year. (Weirdly, it’s not on the official playlist…I wonder if that’s due to a copyright issue.)
Another song I think of at this time of year is Barry Manilow’s “It’s Just Another New Year’s Eve.” That’s right, I’m admitting to liking a Barry Manilow song, something that was deemed terminally uncool when I got to high school.
What I like about “It’s Just Another New Year’s Eve” is that it grapples with all the pressure placed on this holiday, and how not everyone feels exactly celebratory on it. There’s something inherently melancholy about endings, even when they are one second apart from new beginnings.
Don't look so sad,
It's not so bad you know.
It's just another night,
That's all it is, it's not the first,
… It's not the worst you know,
We've come through all the rest,
We'll get through this.
We've made mistakes,
… But we've made good friends too.
Remember all the nights we spent with them?
And all our plans,
Who says they can't come true?
… Tonight's another chance to start again.
It's just another New Year's Eve,
Another night like all the rest.
It's just another New Year's Eve,
… Let's make it the best.Tonight I’ll celebrate at a very small gathering of friends. (Brian and I had hoped to host a Covid-safe outdoor bonfire like we did last year, but having just recovered from the virus, we’re not up for that.)
Now, in the comments, I want to hear about what you’re doing tonight, and also, what was your favorite New Year’s Eve?
What ever you do to ring in 2023, I hope you’ll be happy and safe, and that the new year will start off in the best ways possible for you. Maybe you’ll even have one of those memorable evenings…
-Sari
For me, NYE, has not been a big deal for the past many years. After too many attempts to party like it's 1999 on NYE, at gatherings of people I mostly did not know, replete with a pervasive sense of desperation and forced gaiety (i.e., joylessness)—and I actually did attend a 1999 NYE party...which, yes, was also dismal—I just decided to forego the whole thing. Instead, I prepare a fine meal, crack a half-bottle of sparkling wine, and sit out on the patio around the firepit (weather permitting, and this year it's definitely not, with waves of atmospheric-river rains here on the West Coast). Then I do some meditation practice and Buddhist rituals (gratitude for my relative good fortune, sending love and prayers to those less fortunate). If I'm still awake at midnight (less and less likely) I will toll a small bell 108 times (another Buddhist tradition) to disperse the "afflictions" (unhealthy mental states) and invite peace and joy for the coming year.
My best NYE was 1982 into '83. I was 19. Having returned to NYC after spending Christmas in Baltimore, my friend Paul had me and our homegirls Lourdes, Camille and Michelle meet him in Rockefeller Center. From there we trooped to the center of Times Square to watch the ball drop. We bought our own champagne that we drank from the bottle. The laws were lax and there were no television crews filming pop music specials. Afterwards we journeyed to to infamous night spot Danceteria located at 30 West 21st Street. We got in without a problem and as soon as I saw a muscled guy dancing on a bar with a yellow boa constrictor around his neck I knew I'd found my people. At the end of the night we wound-up at S.G.S. Donuts on 23rd Street and 8th Avenue where we witnessed a knife fight between two drunk guys. We ran out before any blood was spilled.