Sunday, December 28, 1997

Americans are taking back New Year's Eve

By JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN / Bridge News

Jejune joy

Turns to sorrow;

Beer today

Barf tomorrow.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda-water the day after. -- Byron

NEW YORK -- So wrote Lord Byron, ostensibly the most elegant of 19th-century poets, about New Year's Eve.

The fact is, with its long, reprehensible history, New Year's was never that great a holiday to begin with. From its earliest times, New Year's tended to be about drunkenness and debauchery.

The very idea of reflecting backward (with all its regrets) and looking forward into the future (with all its fears) has always lent itself to the comforts of alcohol.

Like Christmas, which early church fathers created to replace the pagan feast of the sun, the church's Jan. 1 feast celebrating Christ's circumcision was an attempt to replace pagan revelry with a sober religious observance.

Yet unlike Christmas, New Year's as a religious holiday foundered. With no real substantive strength of its own, the New Year's tradition of debauchery continued through the centuries.

It's hard to know quite when New Year's Eve became so pointless that many Americans just stopped celebrating it. But band leader Guy Lombardo, joking on a television show in the 1960s, seems to have prophesied accurately that "when I die I am taking New Year's Eve with me."

New Year's Eve as we knew it may have died right around 1977, along with Lombardo and his benign, slightly schmaltzy interpretation of the holiday.

Leisure industry surveys showed that many people simply stopped going out for New Year's Eve in the 1980s. Over 60 percent stayed home. And why not? Nearly 80 percent of Americans say they feel less safe on the roads during holidays because of drunk drivers. And they are repelled by the slovenly behavior of drunk celebrants. Drunken revelry is no longer an admired part of American culture.

But here's the amazing part: Americans didn't take the death of a holiday, however sorry and disreputable it had become, lying down.

New Year's has been recreated by the forces for good. In 190 cities and towns across the United States and Canada, civic groups and volunteers have gotten together to organize a better, safer, nondrunken New Year's Eve. They call it First Night.

The movement started in 1976 in Boston, that bastion of grass-roots American democracy.

A group of artists decided to hold a huge downtown block party providing an evening of inexpensive, alcohol-free, family-oriented but top- quality cultural events and performances.

That first year, they held 14 events and drew 60,000 people.

Boston's First Night has received 1 million-plus visitors every year since 1992, proving the sureness of the concept. Other cities noticed. Local activists would adopt the Boston model, with help from the original organizers, but mold the celebration to reflect their own regional traditions.

Edmonton, in the Canadian province of Alberta, for example, lures some 40,000 people to its ice-sculpture contest and pageant welcoming far-off spring. (The temperature there has reached minus-30 degrees Celsius on New Year's Eve.)

Raleigh, N.C., focuses on bluegrass music, which was developed in the surrounding mountains.

Annapolis, Md., features the Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, a world-famous troupe that tours with Riverdance and does Appalachian clogging, flat-footing and African-American hambone.

Salt Lake City emphasizes kids, keeping open its Hansen Planetarium and Salt Lake Art Center, both of which have had record crowds.

Organizers in St. Paul, Minn., consider their city to be a "jewel" that has gone unrecognized by locals. With generous corporate support from Minnesota companies like 3M, the organizers see First Night as a showcase for downtown.

St. Petersburg, Fla., offers opera and gospel music.

Even New York City, den of iniquity and cultural capital of the world, got on the First Night bandwagon in 1991.

"Expense and alcohol are the two things that were wrong with New Year's Eve," says Dan Biederman, president of the Grand Central Partnership and founder of New York's First Night. "And New York City had plenty of both."

New York does First Night in high New York style -- it puts on world- class performances by the likes of Broadway star Donna McKechnie and principals from the New York City Ballet.

It provides fabulous stages, such as the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, for people to dance salsa, tango and fox trot to top-of-the- line bands. It offers pony rides for kids in Bryant Park, midnight skating in Central Park and shuttle service all over the island. All for the cost of a $25 button.

But what does the city do about unruly crowds? Donna Lieberman, executive producer of New York's First Night, says it's not a problem: "A sober crowd is a civilized crowd."

Indeed, last year the New York Times asked, "Has New Year's Eve even been tamed in New York?"

Not tamed. Civilized. And that may be the finest innovation in New Year's Eve since the Druids invented wassailing. First Night has converted what had become a repellent revel into a glorious communal holiday.

Julia Vitullo-Martin edited Breaking Away: The Future of Cities (Twentieth Century Fund Press).

Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services