Wednesday, January 1, 2003
Ah, it's been a quiet New Year's, perhaps my favorite kind. Midnight found me online with good friends, surfing the Web, and editing a choice piece of smut, so if it's true that what you're doing at the stroke of midnight on New Year's presages what you'll be doing all year, well, I'm set, and very little will be changing from last year. Heh. Heh. Heh.
So after I changed the kitty litter and gathered up the trash (never let anyone tell you that getting older means your life becomes boring! it's a thrill-a-minute around here!) I thought that I'd tell you all about the best New Year's I ever spent.
I was seventeen, and it so happened that I was in New York City without my parents.
How? Well, my high school's drama department offered this absolutely wonderful package trip. For some really quite reasonable price, you got airfare to and from NYC, transportation to the hotel, the actual hotel room, and tickets to four shows, three Broadway, one off-. This is how I got to see shows like Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables on Broadway, with decent seats, and let me tell you, those trips are some of my fondest memories.
Important details: The trip left on December 26th and returned -- you guessed it -- January 1st. The hotel in question was literally right around the corner from the theater where Phantom of the Opera was playing, and less than a block from Times Square. Times Square for New Year's. God only knows how the organizers of this package trip managed to keep their prices reasonable.
Anyway.
My junior year, both I and my mother went. My mother was so horrified by the antics of my fellow high school inmates that she made me spend New Year's Eve proper with her, which wasn't actually so bad, because I wasn't too fond of my fellows in the first place. With Mom and her VISA along, I got to see a stunning seven Broadway and off-Broadway shows in six days, but didn't see much of anyone else, and actually, that was perfectly all right with me. Mmm, Broadway.
But my senior year... my senior year, I got to go by myself.
Unsurprisingly, it was a lot of fun, but for completely different reasons.
New Year's Eve rolled around, and I found myself hanging around with a completely different tour group from somewhere like Nebraska. Our group and their group were sharing a floor at the hotel, and I liked these new kids better. A small group of us didn't really want to go to Times Square, so wearing our very best togs we swung out of the hotel looking for somewhere to go.
Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves a block away, jammed into a tiny little piano bar called don't tell mama. The place was packed; nobody was bothering to card anybody (as you can tell by the fact that I was there) and nobody could tell who'd already had their minimum two drinks and who hadn't. We all pounced on an itty-bitty round table as it was deserted (a Christmas miracle!) and ordered screwdrivers and watched the crowds. The piano player was brilliant, the singers were great, the crowds were raucous and surged back and forth (and, unless my gaydar completely misses its mark, were composed largely of gay men, whose outfits put ours to shame).
We found ourselves laughing and joking with the crowds of men at the tables to either side of ours. Oh, they were drunk and they were dressed up and they were beautiful and so happy and everything was just wonderful. I remember somebody bought me another screwdriver.
Around about 11:40 an extremely drunk older man (mid-40's or so, gray hair, little mustache) came staggering up to our table and gave me this sad little puppy-dog smile and said in this perfect British accent, "Excuse me, but may I kiss your hand?" And I smiled at him and said "You may!" and held my hand up, and he took it and kissed the back of my hand, then clasped my hand to his chest and beamed and burbled, "You're so beautiful." And then he let my hand go and toddled off into the crowds. As you can see, I've never forgotten it.
Midnight rolled around and the place just exploded. Everybody was yelling and hugging each other; I've never been hugged so much. And then the pianist played 'Auld Lang Syne' and the cabaret singer led us all in singing it and we all draped our arms over each other's shoulders and swayed back and forth and sang along. Someone was handing out cheap cardboard tiaras that said 'Happy New Year!' on them, and we all put ours on.
The place started to clear out fairly quickly after that, and we tromped out about twenty minutes later in the middle of a huge crowd of well-dressed young men, and peeled off and went back to our hotel and ended up sitting up for most of the night having the sort of Deep Conversation that you have when you're in high school, you're hanging out with people you don't really know, and you're ever so mildly tipsy. And I almost kissed a guy that the others assured me was an asshole, but then I hit him instead. And he didn't like that and went to bed, and I felt bad about it later and hung my cardboard 'Happy New Year!' tiara on his doorknob as an apology.
And then the next morning we went home.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 03:09 AM EST
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