Are your New Year’s resolutions polished up just waiting to be broken as the year progresses? I don’t even bother making resolutions, knowing how low my resistance is to temptation. Sometimes, I can keep one Lenten resolution that involves giving up something I particularly yearn for. When I was a day student at Notre Dame Academy in Southern Pines, I always gave up smoking for Lent but I couldn’t tell the nuns what my sacrifice was because I was too young to be smoking in the first place.
New Year’s Eve. Now there’s a holiday I really can’t stand. If you have a husband or significant other, it’s probably bearable. But to go to a party unescorted by a male is to me a real bad scene.
When I was very young, probably just in my late teens, I did go to New Year’s Eve parties at the Resort (original) Clubhouse, usually with a party of friends or former schoolmates.
At one of these dinner dances, we sat at a table of eight, one of them, a very recent mother. At the stroke of midnight, her husband came back to our table bearing the infant all gussied out as the New Year baby.
That was kind of fun, not just for us but the baby enjoyed being the center of attention as most newborns do.
The next New Year’s Eve I recall, I stayed home alone and had the pleasure of watching Sir Laurence Olivier throw up over a porch railing in his role in “Come Back, Little Sheba.”
After that I decided I’d better seek some kind of entertainment involving other celebrants on that night that presages the New Year.
So the following year, my son, Brian, who was 18, and I got together a party to go to the Pine Crest Inn to see the New Year in with all the noisemakers, champagne and crazy hats.
We started out in the bar with about four people and went to dinner in the dining from winding up with a party of 18 at our table.
It was well after 9 p.m. before we got into dinner. I was starving and cold sober since I can’t drink (no, I’m not a reformed alcoholic, just deathly allergic to alcohol).
Believe me, it’s not easy spending a long evening with bracing drinks of iced water when everyone else in the room is getting happily and noisily bombed.
My son sat across the table from me next to a former Powers model who paid attention to him as though he were an adult. He fell immediately in love with this angelic vision who drifted around the dance floor in a cloud of apricot chiffon and passed out twice having just 10 days previously had a hysterectomy.
My dinner partner on the right was this vision’s husband and he kept looking me in the eye appearing quite sober to me, but apologizing for how drunk he was.
Mother and I usually went to Southern Pines close to midnight on New Year’s Eve to wish my editor, Cad Benedict and his wife, Peggy, to wish them a happy New Year. Cad always accompanied us back to our car and one evening, an ex-military friend we had just met came out too.
Cad and I shook hands and before I knew it, this perfect stranger had his alcohol-laden tongue down my throat.
When I indignantly complained about this to Cad, he was vastly amused.
New Year’s Eve is definitely overrated.
Mary Evelyn de Nissoff may be reached at maryeve@earthlink.net.
