Misadventures in New Years

Every year I conjure in my mind the perfect New Year's Eve: good friends, conversations that are both meaningful and meaningless, silly party hats, good food, better drinks and lots of laughter. In my head these parties play out somewhere a cross between a fancy New Year's ball and a good ole' fashioned cozy party at home.

Yet my track record for New Year's celebrations is enough to show how very far I usually get from this ideal:

• New Year's 1992: My senior year of high school, my friend Sarah and I decided to go to downtown Cincy for the faux NYC ball drop celebration in Fountain (not Times) Square. Despite the obvious limitations of being held in Cincinnati and the fact that we could not get a call-a-cab free taxi ride home until after 3 or 4 am, we had a great time. However, here's the catch: Since my parents were not keen on me going downtown and would have never given me permission to do so, I told them we were going to my friend Teddy's house. A perfectly fine cover if only at the stroke of midnight the @#?%$ weatherman from channel 5 did not tap me on the shoulder and stick a microphone in my face, asking "So what's your name and where are you from?" I must have appeared the idiot on TV because I froze. All at once in my mind I began to contemplate a) turning and runnning like mad, b) giving an alias and hoping I could convince my parents' of the doppelganger theory, or c) feigning a foreign language (which to that point all I knew was Latin). Never a good liar, I chose option d) real name, fake home town. That would throw my parents off. Needless to say, my parents' phone rang off the hook with my appearance and I ended up grounded and shamed. Not a very good New Year's.
• New Year's 1994: I was home visiting from college and went to a party with my high school friend, Tara. Teddy was supposed to come pick me up and we were to go to The Warehouse together. As I recall, Teddy never showed. All seemed to be going well, until right before my eyes, some young, drunk kid reached out and grabbed a woman's ass right in front of me! It was literally a knee-jerk reaction, though I seem to remember the event in Bionic-Woman-like-chhi-chhii-chii-detail, as my well-clogged foot slammed into the side of his head. Kick boxing paid off after all. While I was quite please with my vigilante efforts, the poor boy had his manhood threatened and responded with idle threats to beat the %$# out of me. Unfortunately for him, Tara's male friends took him seriously and gave him the favor of a sound roughing up, hence disrupting the party revelry. Not a very good New Year's.
• New Year's 2001: Josh and I decided to meet up with our friends, Matt and Pauletta, in Atlanta to celebrate New Year's. We spent the day touring Atlanta, visiting Coca-Cola World and having fun. For dinner we ate at a very tasty hip new french-ish restaurant where we did not drink very much, just two glasses of wine with a long dinner (this will prove key to the rest of the story). After dinner we went trolling for a good bar to spend the night. The problem was that all the good bars were either a) packed or b) expensive. So, we opted for the empty, no cover place at the end of the strip...Axis, if I recall correctly. (This should have been a clue for us.) Pauletta and I had a great time...we danced, we drank (again, not alot, just two drinks each) and had fun. Our respective partners on the other hand were not so enthused about dancing to cheesy pop music with trashed people. Sober, they did not find our merry making, well, very merry. However, we persuaded them to come out for just one spin on the dance floor. Midnight came, we cheered, and started to pack up to go home. The only problem was that Josh lost his glasses. He claims on the dance floor, thus making it my fault. We searched the bar from top to bottom and came up empty. We asked the bartender if there were any in the lost and found, we made people get out of their booth and crawled underneath tables, we even stayed until the club emptied out. Nothing. Josh was so angry with me he would hardly talk to me. His silence was not the only punishment I received. Upon waking the next morning I was so sick I wanted to die. Surely, four drinks over many hours could not make me feel this wretched? Calling Pauletta, we found she was even worse off than I was. Apparently it was something we ate. We spent New Year's Day convalescing at home, nursing our poor tummies back to normalcy once again. Not a good New Year's.

You would think I would learn after all these years not to expect the perfect New Year's Eve, yet I do. Why? Because I have hope that there can be one, hope that I garner from the memory of THE perfect New Year's in 2000. That year friends from seminary all gathered at our friend, Sara's hometown for a week of revelry, rest and relaxation. Staying in an eco-friendly lodge in the backwoods of the Ozarks, we had THE perfect New Year's Eve: good friends, conversations that are both meaningful and meaningless, silly party hats, good food, better drinks and lots of laughter. And the minute it was over, we all sensed it would never again be so good.

NOTE: Just in case some folks reading are wondering about this year's celebrations, they were fine. After church I joined friends at a fabulous Irish pub with yummy food (mmmm....gourmet mac and cheese) and a never ending beer list. When Josh and I realized we were extroverted out, we left the party and came home to enjoy the midnight hour in pajamas, curled up with our pooches and Garrison Keeler via TV. The most painful moments were spent on the way too long T ride with drunk college students: the privileged,white men drinking from bottles and proclaiming they would never work past the age of 35, the trashed blonde begging her partner for sex, and the prep-turned-whore group of college cadets wearing the god-awful combination of ragged jean mini-skirts, cheap vinyl knee high boots and no stockings. (By the way, what's up with the no-socks-no-stockings fad in Boston in mid-winter??? Not only is it just tacky, it's stupid. Hello? Cold?)

We were glad to be home and enjoy our introvert celebration.