So, About New Years

I love girlfriends. My best friend, Clairanne, who I've known since 7th grade, was in town for Christmas and she and I and our husbands got New Year's night off, while our parents were watching all our kids for the night. We thought real hard about where we would go(the possibilities were endless!), but we thought so hard that Monday turned into Friday and we still didn't have anything booked so we went with a recommendation of one of her friends and made a reservation at a restaurant at one of our trendier neighborhoods. As soon as we walked up to the restaurant place New Years Eve, I remembered I had been there before. It was the time when I was in my early 20's fresh out of college and still poor with my first job at a tv station at the bottom rung on the ladder and one of my co-workers and I went out for martinis at this place. It's kind of a jazzy, hip martini bar-slash-restaurant. At the time, it was way above us. We already had a few martinis and we wanted an appetizer but remember this is back when we were poor, and we knew that if we had an appetizer we wouldn't have money for a tip. UNLESS we used our laundry quarters for a tip! Sweet! Appetizer, it is. Yes, not one of my grandest moments, but our stomachs were full and we didn't stiff her, so hey!

So this is where we were for New Years, and as we walked in through the door, with a Donna Summer-like singer belting out some serious classics, and people were already dancing! yes, dancing already! The night was filled with promise. The hostess led us to our table and I stood there in disbelief thinking as I saw the back of her head flittering away...uh.. wait.. wait? THIS is it? This. is where we're sitting. We're literally right exactly directly in front of where the waiters and waitresses pick up all the food. No wall in between, the servers grab the food which could seriously hang directly over our heads while they're piling the dishes on their arms. IN the kitchen. It is a table with giant, wingbacked chairs, that looks like it was thrown together at the last minute and the chairs were pulled out from the back somewhere. When Clairanne's husband began eating his salad, I outbursted laughing because he looked so tiny in that big chair, and the table was so high up, and we felt like we were all at the kids table. Don't get me wrong, big huge comfy chairs usually make everything better for me. And it almost did. It became the novelty of the night and we were sorry we hadn't brought a camera (can you believe that! no record of this at all!) and after two martinis it became kind of funny. Until the real band came on. No dancing. No lovely donna-summer-like tunes. Hmm. How to describe it? A bunch of just over 40ish middle aged white men wanna be rockers stuck in the really bad rock of the 70's? Not the good kind. I like 70's music. One of them wearing a string tie. I can usually suck it up for any type of music. But we were all in agreement that we just couldn't this time. And it was the really obscure stuff that no one knew any of the words to. Actually, maybe I mean no one our age would know the words. But this was sort of the crowd that could deal with that, and I'm not sure what that means, but they weren't young, and they weren't our age, I guess they were older, in a weird sort of way. So we went to an Irish pub nearby, because it was popular and you could hear the crowd from far away, and this was at 10:30 and we thought this might be a good place to spend the new year. As we walked in and saw the very youngish crowd, the bouncer at the door waved us off of showing him our ID's and we knew we weren't really going to particularly fit in here either, but this was it, this was where we would stay. He actually took a look at us and said no, I don't need to see your ID's come on in. This is actually the place we would have been 10 years ago. We were at least 10 years old than everyone in there. A young man passed me and called me ma'am. I am a ma'am now. I had 4 drinks immediately.

But you know, we had our kisses and our hugs and watched the ball drop with the new youth of today, and we were with the people we wanted to be. My best friend, and our best friends. It was nice. But boy were these new year's events laughable, because aren't they all, really? We always make these plans to have the best night ever and it always turns into a airquote -experience-unairquote. Last year, I woke Evan up at midnight to toast our sparkling apple juice because I was pregnant and we stayed home. The year before that we went to Vegas and the milk in the mudslides turned on me before midnight and Anna Nicole Smith was there doing the countdown and Evan thought she was eating a huge celery stalk on stage when it was really a noisemaker. He was actually convinced it was a celery stalk and I had to show him the next day with the pictures that no, she was not eating celery during the countdown. I did one Time's Square new years, worked on the millennium because the world was supposed to collapse and I worked in news, fought with my boyfriend on at least 3 new years occasions, spent it with strangers in a bar in Brooklyn... you know. The string of New Years events are always comical to me in hindsight but as long as I'm with people I love dearly, I know it's going to be a good one. That's what counts, right?