Y2K Eve Stirs Big Fears--of Datelessness
Thirteen days until New Year’s Eve and Bill Kalmenson is checking airline flight schedules. To Tonga. To Peru. He wants adventure. He wants beautiful scenery.
Mostly, though, he wants out of L.A. As Dec. 31 looms, Kalmenson has no plans and no date.
“It’s bad enough when Saturday night is coming at you--that’s a train that runs over me every week,” mused Kalmenson, a 43-year-old film writer and director. “With the millennium train coming, people are scrambling for dates, and if they don’t have them by October or November, they’re scrambling for hide-outs.”
In the calendar of dating and romancing and socializing, New Year’s Eve can be the year’s most demanding and potentially heartbreaking event.
No matter what day of the week it lands, it’s the biggest Saturday night of the year--a bacchanal that commands you to be with someone special at midnight, the night that makes you feel like a dismal, pathetic failure if you’re home, eating chips and watching TV with your parents or a pile of laundry.
And that’s in any routine year--say, 1996. Now comes the New Year’s Eve of the millennium and the pressure is a thousand times more intense. Sure, Sharon Stone is staying home with her husband and a few friends, and other celebrities are chirping about how they’re going to play board games. But celebrities are always out celebrating. For them, staying home is novel.
For the rest of the world, New Year’s Eve 1999 demands an epic experience: a trip to Bali or tickets for Streisand in Vegas or dinner with the love of your life. Or, at the least, a really cool party. There’s almost a stigma to staying home, with neither companion nor plans.
“I always have a standing offer from a married couple,” said Genevieve Migely, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University. “My friend says, ‘You can come over and have dinner with us.’ I say, ‘How depressing is that?’ She says, ‘You can bring your dog.’ I say, ‘Oh, great.’ ”
Observers of social angst--sociologists, psychotherapists and dating service professionals--all concur that New Year’s Eve in general can be rough on the psyche. This one in particular looks to be torturous.
The dating service Great Expectations reports business is up 50% over last year. “People seem more motivated to make more changes,” said Dennis Durante, chief executive of Great Expectations. “The millennium plays little subconscious games with people.”
A Time for Self-Criticism
Of all the holidays in the U.S., none focuses so specifically on having a date. (Yes, some sociologists think it’s more intense than Valentine’s Day.) In addition to the commercial pressures to dine and to dance, there can be an internal pressure to size up yourself romantically.
“An inescapable stock-taking goes on,” said USC sociologist Judith Stacey. “It’s an occasion for examining the state of your relationship and seeing how wretched it is--or how great.”
The pressure of the what-are-you-doing-New-Year’s-Eve question increases significantly after Christmas, said USC psychologist Jerald Jellison. He, by the way, claims to have no plans for New Year’s Eve.
Really? No plans?
“See?” he said, chuckling. “It’s in your tone of voice.”
Our activities define who we are, Jellison said. And having plans on New Year’s Eve signals that life is good, we’re good, and we’re connected to the rest of society. “So when people ask that question and you’re not doing anything, it raises this question in the other person’s mind--why don’t you have things to do?” Jellison explained.
In one turn of a calendar page, all the pressures of living in a social world collide on one night--the need to be part of a celebration, the need to be coupled.
Since there is little cosmological significance to the turning of all those zeros--it’s not like the stroke of midnight will trigger a lunar eclipse--some see no reason to celebrate in an unusual way. “I’m Jewish and we’re on the Jewish calendar,” said film director Kalmenson. “We’re in the middle of 5K.” (5760, to be exact.)
Of course, purists insist that 2000 is not the watershed year.
“The millennium is next year, not this year,” said Eduardo Sanchez, 43, an art conservator at the Getty Center. He nonetheless has gently but firmly asked his mother--flying in from Miami for the holidays--to return home by Dec. 27.
“New Year’s Eve, I have to spend with friends or by myself,” said Sanchez, who’s readying his ski rack in case he suddenly decides to take off for Mammoth. “The first thing, of course, is to have a romantic evening. That is the supreme fantasy to me.”
Some people are simply making a point of not making plans, a backlash against the hype.
“It’s kind of rammed down your throat, the millennium,” mused accountant Amy Honbo, who lives in Hollywood and declines to give her age--”I can pass for younger than I am.”
“Whereas normally I might want to go out and be enthusiastic about going to a party, it makes me contrarian and want to stay in and order a pizza,” said Honbo.
She has put off answering several party invitations. She has thought about inviting a few friends over for champagne. Like other skeptics, she has dim hopes for achieving the out-sized level of fun being advertised for New Year’s Eve 1999.
“You’re only destined to be disappointed,” Honbo said. “It’s the reason I didn’t go to see ‘Titanic.’ I thought it was so hyped up and blown out of proportion. I kind of knew that I probably wouldn’t hate it, but I didn’t feel like being part of one of these incredibly overblown events.”
She still hasn’t seen the film. She knows, however, that her resolve to abstain from New Year’s Eve revelry will eventually wilt. “I guess it would be pretty sad if Domino’s rings the doorbell and I’m here in my fluffy slippers,” she said.
She did have a brainstorm.
“Maybe you should take all the people who don’t have plans and have a party,” she said, laughing.
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
One matchmaking service has already thought of that. Debra Winkler Personal Search is holding the Gala Millennium New Year’s Eve Celebration at the Renaissance Hotel at LAX. It’s $100 a person in advance, $150 at the door. Anyone can go, “but 90% will be singles,” said Craig Donaldson, president of the company.
Can you think of anything more grisly? Donaldson won’t be there. He has a date.
Holiday business at the service spiked early. “People realized this was a big New Year’s Eve coming up so we saw more people in September and October,” said chief executive Debra Winkler.
It’s not too late if you call today. Like a department store at the holidays, they have expanded hours and hired additional help.
Some people, even those with a date, are refusing to go out for practical reasons: traffic, drunk drivers, inflated prices and the knowledge that New Year’s Eve rarely meets expectations.
“You could hold a gun to my head and you couldn’t get me to go out,” said Julia Johnson, 40. “I’m going to be home with my manual can opener and my flashlight.”
Johnson is the mother of two small children and wife of “Frasier” TV show writer Chris Marcil. (He co-wrote the upcoming “Frasier” episode in which the cast celebrates New Year’s Eve. Hint: They definitely don’t stay in.) When she was single, Johnson went out of her way to avoid dates on Dec. 31. “I would paint my apartment on New Year’s Eve,” she said.
There are two main categories of people with no plans--couples and non-couples.
Couples who say they have no plans are, at least, spending the night with each other. Johnson, for example, figures she and her husband may pop open that bottle of Dom Perignon given to them by an agent. Only singles face the possibility of being alone.
“There are a lot of single people who are feeling more single and more left out,” said psychiatrist Mark Goulston. “I tend to see one of the elements of despair as being unpaired in a world where it feels like everyone else is paired up.”
But some single people are reveling in their aloneness.
“I’m kind of an individualist,” said Rob Hannan, 26, an analyst for PM Realty Advisors in Newport Beach. He has no date and has yet to accept a New Year’s Eve party invitation. “I won’t wake up Jan. 1 thinking I’m a loser if I don’t have a romantic explosion on New Year’s Eve.”
And why should he? Blessed with the good looks of an actor, he has no insecurity about dating. So if he chooses to be alone on New Year’s Eve--the chances of which, he said, are very high--he will “watch one of my favorite movies, cook a great meal. Maybe I’ll have a friend over. . . . The thing I would like to do is see Al Green [at the House of Blues].”
Rina Rubenstein has little desire to join the fray of this New Year’s Eve. “I’d rather be doing something than not doing something, but I don’t care,” said Rubenstein. She catalogs Holocaust testimony for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation--a job, she said, that “does give you a perspective about what’s important and what’s not important.”
Rubenstein said she may attend one of the city’s street festivals. “Or be at Canter’s,” she said of the Fairfax Avenue deli. “I don’t know anybody who has any kind of plans. So it’s possible we’ll all wind up doing nothing.”
Couples are not immune to the pressures of New Year’s Eve.
“Even if you have a husband or a boyfriend--and I’ve had both--they end up bombing out and ordering in and watching movies you’ve rented,” said Migely, 29, who also teaches at Cal Poly Pomona.
Yet part of Migely is still longing for a special occasion. She bought a sleek black fringed skirt and skimpy top. She has dropped hints to a man she’s been dating, but he’s been less than enthusiastic about venturing out on New Year’s Eve.
“You’re supposed to have fun,” Migely said. “It’s this little voice inside you on New Year’s Eve saying, ‘You’re sitting in front of the TV, you’re doing the same thing you did last Saturday night.’ ”
There’s only a small chance that Terri Hartman, an antique hardware store owner, and her husband, Doc Farnsworth, will be sitting in front of the TV on New Year’s Eve.
Farnsworth is playing this game: What’s the best ocean cruise at the lowest price he can book within a couple days of New Year’s Eve? He checks online travel services daily. He sifts through cruise line brochures, hunting for discounts. He’ll book at $1,000 a person, but he’s hoping for lower. His tuxedo is ready.
“We’ll even take an inside cabin,” he said.
“It’s a complete gamble,” she said.
And that’s what they want. For this couple, the fun of New Year’s Eve is waiting to see what happens.
