Many people have New Year’s Eve traditions and if you are
interested to know mine, it is to barricade myself in my apartment with a bottle
of wine, a book, and big plans for a hearty pasta dinner. In my defense, I live in
midtown Manhattan and it is MADNESS out there. MADNESS. I have not actually
left the building today but I have spent a little bit of time perched on the
couch looking out the window—fun fact, I can (and have!) done this for hours as there is almost always
something interesting to see and if not I can make up stories to get things
interesting. Today needs no such embellishment.
First, they came in cherry pickers to put cardboard (??)
over the “24 HOURS” sign on the parking garage (???) using of course good old
electrical tape. This makes even less sense when you consider that the street
from which one can enter/exit this parking garage is closed to vehicular
traffic. The “PARK” sign is currently lit up and very visible and no other signage
is affected but every instance of the “24 HOURS” claim has been resolutely
covered up. Why??
And yes, I do live directly across the street from a karaoke
place. I have never actually been in there, and only occasionally do
overly-enthusiastically patrons bring their music out into the street with them
(but when they do, it’s at 2 in the morning). Just down from the karaoke joint
is the stage door for Studio 54, which is now a respectable theater, no longer
a respectable disco, and sometimes at night I can hear a cheer go up when
whoever is starring in whatever comes out to greet fans. There is also the
clip-clop of the carriage horses going home on 53rd or to work up 8th
and as lovely and charming as that sound is, I do so sincerely wish they would
get on with banning that practice. The horns, the sirens—there is a fire station
two blocks down—and there are cars, carriages, tourists, delivery guys whizzing
along on their electric bikes, and those bike-carriage guys (what are they
called? Is there a word for them?) coasting along, completely ignoring the
traffic while they solicit pedestrians—“Wanna ride? Wanna ride?—and it all makes
for near-constant chaos. Midtown is, in a word, noisy.
Anyway, as I was doing one of my periodic checks on the
scene outside, I am only a little ashamed to admit I absolutely cackled with
delight when I realized these cops had locked the keys in their little cop clown
car and had summoned a lady with a slim jim to try to break them out.
My delighted laughter comes at the expense of whichever cop
(I think it was the bald one) had the great misfortune of not only being
assigned the clown car but then having to stand around while someone else broke
into it. There were a bunch of other cops gathered to watch since it was early
and the crowds hadn’t yet formed and I am pretty sure this poor gentleman got a
fair amount of ribbing from his colleagues during the excruciating ten minutes I
watched them trying to pop the locks.
Maybe this side?
Finally, success!
When I was in grad school and had a variety of really
strange jobs, one of those was waitressing at the Ruby Tuesday in the strip
mall down the road from my apartment. I really loved that job, though smelling
like a restaurant all the time is suboptimal. One time, I am pretty sure because I was one of the few people at work with both a car and a (valid) drivers license, I was sent from our
restaurant to another one to pick up a box of potatoes. When I got back,
somehow in all the potato-related excitement I managed to lock my keys in my
trunk. I realized my mistake immediately and so, as I carried the potatoes into
the back entrance to the kitchen, I told the manager and he turned to the room
at large, shouting, “Hey! She locked her keys in her car!” and no joke, two of
the line cooks and the guy running the industrial-strength dishwasher all immediately
came toward me, taking off their aprons and ready to bust those keys out. Took
them less than three minutes, after they finished arguing over who was going to
get to do it.
Another good reason to be barricaded in tonight is that I
have been on tour for the past week and that has meant talking to human beings
every single day, sometimes interacting for hours at a time. These humans have
mostly been family members, so they know all about the not touching and getting
cocktail hour going at the stroke of five and being patient with me
disappearing to read a book then reappearing to lurk around the edges of large
gatherings, knitting and wine at hand. Lest you think I am exaggerating, here
is a picture in which my sister meant to capture two adorable little girls
playing together but also managed to get me in the background, knitting and
wine at hand. It also looks awfully day-light-y in this picture which suggests it
was our second Christmas Day and I got into the booze early. Holidays, you
know.
Thanks in no small part to their compassion and
understanding, the week with the fam was really good. My calculations proved correct
and my little niece did the heavy lifting of keeping us entertained. She’s an
adorable 18 months old and while she has a tremendous vocabulary she is still a
little baby and so when she runs it’s this ridiculous twisty, flapping run that
never fails to crack me up. My sister also taught her that “Smile!” means she
should look at the camera while opening her mouth as wide as she can and I made
Shannon promise never to undo this as it results in the most outstanding group photos
you can imagine.
Speaking of my sister, she is a world-class gift-giver. I am
exactly the opposite and so I am constantly amazed at how she does it—the exact
right thing for everybody, every time. She is thoughtful and observant and kind
and she routinely moves recipients to tears with how perfectly she has found
the thing that suits them best. This year she gave me chocolate, a lovely card acknowledging
that I prefer not to receive gifts, and then, unsurprisingly, she gave me a
truly excellent one after all.
She made one for our dad too and it was equally perfect and
if you don’t already have one I strongly suggest getting a sister who is so
tuned into people—mine is a gemini, if that helps you in your search.
Two years ago I was tricked by one of my tricksy friends and
ended up going to the ball drop, if you can believe that. I should probably
think about why I so often find myself surrounded by people who know how to
manipulate me without my realizing until it is much too late. (Cf my sister and
this week-long family tour, the time skfloo masterminded me into going to Game
5 of the World Series, how Goggin lured me to a children’s theater production
of The Wiz—the list goes on. And on.) In this instance, I should have asked
more questions when it turned out some friends were willing to come to midtown
on NYE. But they are good friends and I was happy to have them and there were just
four of us and we had a lovely, cozy evening. I did notice N. seemed to be
texting someone a lot, but I didn’t make much of it. Wisely, she waited until I
had served myself some of my excellent gin/lemon cocktails, and then around 11 I
suddenly discovered (she’d told the others well before) that she knew a cop who
was working the ball drop and if we left my apartment in about 15 minutes he
would meet us at 42nd Street and escort us through to the area
reserved for friends and family and that is how we came to arrive at Times
Square just in time to not see the ball drop because that’s how close we were
to it and to experience the complete insanity that is NYE in NYC. It turned out
to be completely wonderful and I will always be grateful that N. pulled it off
but I do not think I will ever do that again. Did you know they use actual human beings to drop 3,000 pounds of confetti each year?
The NYPD does an amazing job with security, when they’re not
locking their keys in their clown cars, and there is a complicated set of rules
about which cross streets are open and how to get into one of the 80-something “pens”
that have been set up as viewing areas. For security reasons, once you get into
a pen you cannot leave until after midnight, and despite the fact that the pens
do not have access to bathrooms, food, or drink, people start lining up around
two in the afternoon to have a shot at getting into a prime pen position. I am
told some of them equip themselves with DIAPERS and even tonight’s rain doesn’t
seem to have diminished the general desire to jam into an enclosed area with several
thousand wet, diapered strangers and wait there for eight or ten hours in order
to shout out numbers counting down the seconds of one single minute and then figure
out how to get home. Since I first looked around 3pm there has been a line of
people visible out my window, and now it is 6:15 and pouring rain and my view
is still of a line of ponchos and some very wet-looking cops.*
Whatever your New Year’s Eve plans are or were, I hope they include diapers only as are age-appropriate and lead into a very happy 2019.
*Cops are complicated but watching what these do and put up with to keep NYC safe on NYE and every other day of the year is very affecting and I am grateful to and for all those who have dedicated their lives to being the forces of good.
x
Holidays, you know. !!
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