Sometimes a bucket list goal requires lots of time and preparation, and then some opportunities just seem to fall into my lap. In 1989 just a few days before the end of the year a friend of mine from high school called and said that she was going to New York City for New Year’s with her boyfriend, but that they had suddenly broken up and wondered if I wanted to buy her round-trip ticket for $50? She said, “there’s a chance you’ll be sitting next to him,” but encouragingly added, “maybe he won’t go.”
For a $50 cross-country round-trip airplane ticket I figured it was worth the chance of sitting next to Missy’s disgruntled ex-boyfriend for five hours, and the chances of him blaming me for any part of the break-up and successfully bringing a weapon onboard was very slim.
It seems impossible now in our multi-security checks, post 9-11 society, but I traveled across the country using a ticket bearing the name Missy Kenin. My seat was next to her ex-boyfriend and he was sitting there when I boarded. We acknowledged each other, but kept to ourselves until we chatted over a cocktail towards the end of the flight.
It was such an impromptu trip that I hadn’t really made any plans, but I knew I wanted to ring in the new year with a million strangers in Times Square. Around 11:30 pm on New Year’s Eve I walked from my midtown hotel towards Times Square but couldn’t get anywhere near it. As the crowd grows the crowd control officers close-off a block and open-up the next northern block until that one fills with the maximum amount of people allowed. By the time I found an open block I was way up around 7th Ave and 56th Street. The ball was so far away it looked like a star in the sky, and I’ll have to trust that Dick Clark was somewhere in Times Square because there was no chance I’d be seeing him.
The crowd was friendly and festive and it didn’t take long to find friends. I started chatting with three wine-cooler sippin’ Garden State girls and two Portuguese speaking guys from Brazil. It rained continually and my once proud paper party hat soon began to droop as did the Jersey girls big 80‘s hair and their mascara was Born to Run.
We couldn’t hear the countdown from Times Square but some guy near us with a ten dollar Casio counted down the last ten seconds of the 1980’s and everyone went crazy for a couple of minutes until that, now what? feeling set in.
I started the1990’s with wet confetti stuck to my face. I’ve consistently found the New Year’s Eve experience to be over-hyped and under delivered on the fun meter. This “Off- Broadway” Times Square experience was no different. It may not have reached my expectations, but it was a bucket list check-off, and at least I didn’t have to sit next to Missy’s ex-boyfriend on the flight home.