As Most Folks Get Set to Cocoon, Others Plan Y2Knockout Revels

Jewel has canceled her New Year’s Eve bash in Anchorage. Ditto for Michael Jackson’s in Hawaii. And recent polls show that 70% of Americans plan to be at home on New Year’s Eve, cozily cocooning, fearful of Y2Chaos.

But from Manhattan to L.A.--and parts in between--not everyone has given up hope of hedonism this New Year’s Eve. There’s still a hefty 30% of us out there ready to be Y2Cool.

“It’s the beginning of a new century, a new millennium. You gotta party,” says partydom’s don, Hugh Hefner, the perennial poster boy for Playboy magazine. Hef’s Holmby Hills mansion bash promises painted go-go dancers and 1,000 confirmed guests arriving in black tie or lingerie.

And at New York’s Studio 54, the staff is fielding more than 50 calls a day about the invitation-only party planned by Ted Field, co-founder and chairman of Interscope Records in Los Angeles.

About 1,200 guests, including politicians, diplomats, Hollywood celebs and rock stars, have been invited to boogie down memory lane at the party that will re-create 54’s flamboyant discoland past on Manhattan’s West 54th Street.

“It’s unbelievably crazy, the amount of calls we’re getting” from people who want invitations, says Josh Hadar, co-owner of Studio 54, which originally was an opera house built in the 1920s and today is a cabaret-style theater.

On New Year’s Eve, 54’s decor will return to its original moon-and-spoon aerial display, with a disco ball hanging over the dance floor. Couches will be arranged in cozy settings, and a rooftop video camera will capture the goings-on in Times Square for broadcast inside. More than 250 photographs of “Studio celebrities”--those famous for being famous, such as Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Halston and Bianca--will be flashed on scrims.

And food and drink will be everywhere. More than 200 cases of a private-label French champagne are being flown in, as are various cheeses from Paris, all selected by Gilles Epie, former chef at Los Angeles’ L’Orangerie restaurant. Epie now is one of three owners of La Bon Vie, a Los Angeles-based party planning service hired to coordinate the evening.

Exotic quiches, mini sausages, canapes of duck, Roquefort cheese and walnuts, 40 pounds of Beluga caviar, 100 pounds of shrimp, a crustacean bar and 850 assorted petits fours handmade by Epie and his staff will be served. Field’s assistant referred all party questions to one of Epie’s partners, John Rosenfield, and no one involved in preparations would even guess the total cost of the evening.

“This is going to be one of the most outstanding parties we’ve ever done--or been to, for that matter,” says Rosenfield. He, Epie and La Bon Vie’s third partner, Elizabeth Nottoli, have already made three trips to New York to prepare for the event, which has been in the works for seven months. “It’s really going to have that exclusive feel of Studio 54 in the ‘70s,” Rosenfield says. “You won’t even be able to get down the street without being on the guest list,” he says, adding that once guests arrive at the club, their invitations will be checked again.

In Southern California, a section of Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station will be transformed into a sleek and futuristic Millennium 2000 party, estimated to cost $80,000.

Mike Mattarocci, a former professional beach volleyball player who now is in business in San Diego, came up with the idea while he and two buddies--one from San Diego, the other from Los Angeles--were hanging out at Hermosa Beach seven months ago.

“I said, ‘Listen, guys, we’ve got to find a venue where we can get a couple hundred friends together under one roof with great entertainment, great lighting, music, drinks and good-looking girls and guys,’ ” Mattarocci recalls, adding that friends have come to rely on him for at least two good parties a year.

“People are basically lazy and waiting for someone else to herd them around,” which is why he says friends don’t mind paying $200 to attend the private party.

So far, 600 invitations have been sent via mail and the Internet. . Los Angeles-based party planner Tony Schubert, whose company Event Eleven handled a pre-party for the VH1 Vogue Fashion Awards in New York last week, has been hired to take care of the rest.

An 8-foot-high, 40-foot-long wall will be constructed at the entrance to the station, now an arts center with 21 galleries, to provide some privacy for party-goers. A 25-foot-tall light tower and several gazebos will decorate the courtyard. Inside, an 18-foot-long wet bar--dubbed the Millennium Bar--will be covered in stretch white vinyl.

The dance floor will feature a mammoth digital countdown clock that will start ticking away at 9 p.m. And every 30 minutes there will be 10 minutes of sensory overload: 25 projectors will beam out images such as scenes from Woodstock, explosions, tidal waves and portraits of entertainers from Janis Joplin to K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Two deejays will spin music between sets from the band, the Supreme Beings of Leisure.

“We’re not offering food at this party because it starts late, 9 p.m., and basically it’s all about the visuals, the dancing and drinking,” Schubert says.

But mostly, says Mattarocci, the party is about “having the majority of my close friends in the same building when the clock strikes midnight. It’s the end of the century, and none of us wants to be in line at a club at 11:55 p.m. with a half-hour wait to get inside.”

For some friends in Houston, the new year will be celebrated in Costa Rica--a party idea in the works for 10 years that has expanded to include a week of snorkeling, white-water rafting, bird-watching and rain forest excursions. Cost: $2,000 per person.

“Since 1989 we’ve been planning for this party,” says Mike Piana, chairman of the Supper Club Limited International, which “really is just a group of friends who got together in 1982 to have supper once a week.”

Every May the club also hits the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. It was there they met other jazz lovers--men and women from around the country--who became members. They all decided to ring in the New Year with a trip and created a party posse to look into ideas, says Piana, vice president of a tax software and consulting company.

They decided on Costa Rica--a suggestion from a member who had been there--and booked the hotel three years ago. On New Year’s Eve, in their Supper Club logo baseball caps and logo-adorned champagne glasses, they’ll dine, dance and toast one another.

“About 15 of us are going, but that’s enough for a party,” Piana says, adding that members from Phoenix, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Austin will make the trip. “We’re a real party group. We terrorize New Orleans every year.”

“We’re all looking forward to being together,” says Mary Stimson, a.k.a. “Wild Mary,” of St. Paul, Minn. “We’ll have time to talk and probably scheme up more mischief for the next New Year’s Eve bash.”

For the hard-partying Supper Club, you bet that’s a Y2Keeper. After all, the millennium technically isn’t until next Dec. 31.