What Are You Doing New Year's, New Year's Eve?

The signature event for our ninth grade group was a New Year’s Eve party held in the Wright family’s basement rumpus room which we futilely had tried to transform into a crepe-papered canopied dance floor. Despite the failed attempt at ambience, this turned out to be the night when our stumbling with dancing and fumbling with kissing games opened our eyes to a promising world.

 

“We had a wonderful time. …We worked all day decorating. We strung crepe paper across the ceiling and had signs on the wall and it looked beautiful. But that evening when we started dancing, we bumped into the streamers and they fell down. . . .”                                                       Scrapbook of the author

 

Thus, 1952 was ushered in by selected members of the freshman class and, like freshmen everywhere and in every decade, we believed we were the center of the universe

 

We were on the cusp of discovery that particular New Year’s Eve and this party became the event by which all other high school parties were measured. It also was the last time the unimpressed boys tore down the crepe paper before the end of the evening. After this party we seemed to realize that spin-the-bottle or post office or spotlight were just junior high excuses for necking, and the more interesting activity would be to put on a slow dance record so we could tentatively press our bodies together and go from there.

 

We could not have known that in coaxing the boys to dance we were only a handful of the 32 million people using long-play phonographs that New Year’s Eve. Soon dances and parties—and a portable record player—marked the greatest freedom all American youth would have when they no longer needed to depend on the family radio in hope of finding danceable music.[i]

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[i] Halberstam, p. 473.