Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...remain perennially susceptible to New Year's Eve's specious allure, annually convinced that next year's shebang may somehow be different. And when it comes to the pathos of impossible expectations, there's never been anything like this: New Year's Eve Y2K. The millennium, baby! The expectations for this year's gala are pathologically high. An apocalyptically giddy time is expected to be had. We seem to be demanding nothing less than a cosmic collision of the dimensional trajectories of time and space in which, for one amazing instant, the entire universe becomes an unimaginably immense T.G.I. Friday...
...those who chafe at purely vicarious New Year's Eve thrills, may I suggest giving birth? We're talking first baby of the millennium! If you're not due but are somewhere in the ballpark of viability, get a C-section. It shows a hell of a lot of moxie to be lying split open on an operating table on a night when the hospital's monitoring equipment will probably shut down thanks to the Y2K computer crash, while you're at the mercy of a skeleton crew of probationary interns who are so low in the hospital pecking order...
...from a monumental letdown, we need to recognize its true ritualistic function. New Year's Eve--and nye-y2k beyond any other--is not a celebration of the future. It's an elegy for the past. As I sit here, on the brink of the fin de millennium, I'm already misty-eyed with nostalgia. I'll miss the 20th century. I really liked it. I liked the abstract art, the 12-tone music, the absurdist theater, the austere furniture, the Manichaean bipolar geopolitics. And so, given my longing for an irretrievable past, I think insularity and exile...
...down on my bed, close my eyes and imagine Times Square, desolate save for Vladimir and Estragon, the stammering tramps of Waiting for Godot...waiting for the millennium that never comes. And the famous ball--by dint of Zeno's paradox--falls but never reaches its destination. It's an infinitely deferred climax, a perpetually peaking party, an existential rave...
...walled, tourist-courting studios; platonic marriages of male and female anchors (the assumption that Gumbel's partner would be female was so absolute that CBS dubbed the search Operation Glass Slipper). The producers describe their differences with vague intangibles, complete with promises to be "the show for the next millennium...