SOLTuesday: New Year’s Eve

            I went to a New Year’s Eve party last night for the first time in years. I spent most of the time talking to a couple, she’s from Canada and he’s a bartender. But a quirky kind of bartender. At the moment, he and a partner are running a tiny bar (really tiny, like room for only two other people besides the bartender) called the Threesome Tollbooth (perhaps a play on “The Phantom Tollbooth”? I forgot to ask). You have to make a reservation, obviously, but it sounds like fun.

            The party had no TV on, so we didn’t watch the fall drop, which was a relief. Our hostess passed out noisemakers so we could do our own countdown and welcome the year with loud sounds, this apparently a holdover from ancient rituals about chasing away evil spirits in a transitional period as we go into the darkest part of the winter.

           At home, I looked back through my datebooks about New Year’s Eves past. Since 2006, we’ve been to two other parties, gone to the movies (Her, Amour, The Fighter, and Persepolis), or stayed home, eating pate and other celebratory food and switching among the channels to watch the crazy people stuck behind barriers in the freezing cold.

            One year a friend from Croatia was visiting, and she wanted to go to Times Square, despite my strenuous efforts to dissuade her. In the evening we went downtown, had to walk from 59th Street because the nearer subway stops were closed, and never got anywhere near where she could see the ball. Finally, we left. Earlier yesterday I heard someone say she’d been in a Rite Aid at Grand Central in early afternoonn and heard a PA announcement that all the adult diapers were sold out. Ugh. Another reason not to go to Times Square in person for that event.

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