For probably anyone born before 1990, and definitely before 1980, you grew up imagining how totally wild a party it would be on the last night of 1999. The phrase “party like it’s 1999″ needed no explanation when Prince wrote a hit song about it, and like everyone I danced to it in eager anticipation. I know people who arranged special trips, spent obscene amounts of money, or booked concerts, nightclubs, or whatever months in advance for what would literally be the Party of the Century.
But as the date approached, I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed a fitting way to celebrate it. Jetting to the International Date Line to reach the year 2000 ahead of everyone else was out of the question. The parties seemed overpriced and overhyped. I found myself experiencing a strange sense of perspective on the whole situation: spending a lot of money getting drunk and disorderly in a crowd just didn’t seem like the way to go.
Good enough to just spend the night at home, with the TV on, watching cities in one time zone after another set off fireworks and scream as the clock ticked over. And when 2000 finally arrived in Michigan, celebrate like it was 1999.
Yes. It wasn’t the best year for me as I had just lost my lover a month earlier on World AIDS Day to AIDS, so irony ruled the day.
Yeah, the holidays that coincide with the tragedies in our lives tend to get tarnished by those events. Labor Day’s become a difficult one for me.
But this particular day was one of the good ones for us.