Trip to Remember
written by Ophira Eisenberg
Having lived in New York for almost eight years, I know first hand that the most daunting task of the year is figuring out what “we” are going to do for New Years’ Eve. I say “we” because I am often appointed as the person responsible for our plans. I don’t canvass for this position, or insincerely lie that I’d be happy to figure it out. I just have one of those deceiving personalities that people assume 
makes me a good salesperson, event planner, and in-the-the-know-woman-about-town. I just smile a lot. That confuses people. I’m a depressive really – just high energy depressed, but definitely too guilty, self absorbed riddled with insecurities and self absorbed to sell anything, plan anything or be in-the-know. And then there is the whole disliking most other people thing.
I have tried different approaches to this grave night of importance. There was the year we went to a bar and paid the $75 cover charge that includes a champagne toast and party favors – which roughly translates to half a glass of Spumante and a dented plastic top hat. Unless you do this with forty-five of your closest friends, it’s like a decorated jail with a bunch of dressed-up assholes and a pricey cash bar. Think the worst wedding ever minus that tenuous connection all of you have to the bride or groom. You get there too early and then you have to stay until late. You leave drunk, mostly on sugar, and broke.
I’ve tried working – performing stand-up on New Years’ Eve, with mixed results. The audience vacillates between needing the night to be one to remember and buckling under the pressure by drinking ridiculous cocktails named the Millennitini or the Two thousand and Seven and Seven in high volume. A few years ago I performed on New Years Eve at a club in Times Square. We were told that the show had sold out and I was honestly worried that I wouldn’t be able to sneak in my friends Paula and Anthony who were visiting from London. We labored over plans to perhaps repel them down through an air shaft. But when we turned up, the showroom wasn’t even half full. It turned out the teenager taking reservations wasn’t aware that they needed to also take a credit card number or people would just blow it off, and, of course, more than half did. I was about to apologize to my out-of-town friends for such a lame looking show by buying them a round of drinks when Paula blurted out that she was pregnant. For the rest of the evening she was pretty miserable not being able to drink and conversely the show had a real “Plan B” feel.
Last year, in an effort to cease the losing streak, I did what most sensible city dwellers do – get the hell out of town. My husband and I were invited to Vermont by our favorite gay couple to partake in a beautiful mansion just outside of Bennington. Once there, they sprung the news on us that they had also invited another gay couple, one of which was in recovery. Yes we could drink around him, but we should try to be sensitive. The poor guy was fresh on the wagon and spent most of his two days in Vermont traveling to AA meetings – and as just a bit of trivia, the founder of AA, Bill W’s home is in East Dorset, VT. You can stop by and see the first coffee pot or something.
He was struggling so much that our favorite gay couple decided to not drink on New Years Eve in solidarity, leaving me dashing off to the bedroom where I had stowed the bottle of wine we brought, and taking swigs from it in the closet. I never felt more like a true alcoholic and also the only one who didn’t want to come out of the closet.
Part of the problem is that I’m chasing the dragon. I didn’t know until recently that the fabulous evening I had as a tourist in New York was an exception, an anomaly and just not anywhere near representative of the norm.
Even though I grew up in a good-sized Canadian city, New York had this out of bounds and verging on magical quality about it – and I never use that word unless I’m mocking Michael Jackson. When I arrived on the 31st of December, 1995 at Grand Central Station (I took the Amtrak in from Montreal) I was completely dazzled. You know that wide-eyed tourist who is practically twirling in the streets like Mary Tyler Moore on crack? That was me. My friend Megan, who I was visiting, was stressed about what we were going to do with the big evening and I told her to relax. I didn’t care. We could just go to a bar in the neighborhood. After a flurry of phone calls she announced that we had an invitation to a house party (technically an apartment party – but no one calls it that) of a friend of a friend whom she knew from fashion school. An official invitation was faxed to us and she grimaced reading that the apartment was in Midtown. I was thrilled!
When we arrived at the address, it started to click together. The apartment was practically on top of where the ball drops. We were greeted by a top-hatted door man who gave us each a glass of champagne and sent us up to the penthouse. This penthouse apartment was ridiculous. It was a palace, donned in all white. White floors, rugs and furniture, opulent in its sleek modernity. I called it the Celine Dion suite because JLo wasn’t a thing yet. I had never seen anything like it and have never seen anything since. Looking back, the twenty-year olds who lived there were clearly trust fund kids - people I would come to hate. But at the time, I just thought this was attainable if you moved to New York City.
The party was draped with fashionista types, intimidating and dressed like pieces of art, but they were so nice and chatty to me, even though now I realize it was probably because they were doing coke. Vodka cocktails and mini-grill cheeses revolved around the room on the gloved hands of the hired help - which was pretty disgustingly decadent seeing that we were all in our twenties and used to a dorm room with a keg and bong. I guess that was just me.
We danced to old Madonna – which we all believed was the only good Madonna, unaware of what was to come. The current album then was Something To Remember, which of course no one does. At midnight, we poured out onto a courtyard-sized balcony to watch hundred of thousands of people cheer and scream below us as the ball dropped. Some Benicio del Toro looking man grabbed me and started passionately kissing me, literally sweeping me off my feet. A matter of fact, I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t Benicio del Toro as it was 1995. As we de-lipped he said, “Isn’t kissing so fun?!” I thought that was so…evolved – treating making out as amusement rather than emotional. It was so New York. Tissue confetti flew in the sky all around us and because of the cold it looked like a shower of sparkles, as if we were in our own snow globe.
Megan and I stumbled out around 3 am to join the war of finding a cab home. I have never played for a hockey team during playoffs, gone to an American Idol audition, or tried to catch a bouquet surrounded by only forty-something year old women, yet I guarantee that those things are only mildly competitive compared to snagging a cab in Times Square on New Years Eve. Megan was like a general, strategizing the best corners and cursing at people who “stole cabs” from us. I, on the other hand, was lost in a stupor induced by my New York experience trying to sustain it by taking photos on the street, asking others waiting for cabs how their night was and enthusiastically wishing them Happy New Years, even after they told me to fuck off. We must have stood on the corner of 6th Avenue and 40th for a solid hour trying to figure out how to get home. While fighting frost bite and a hangover, I just kept thinking, “This is what every New Years Eve will be like when I move to New York.” Little did I know it would never be like that again. O
Ophira Eisenberg is a comedian and writer from New York. Visit OphiraEisenberg.com.