My lack of enthusiasm for New Year’s Eve had been blamed on my James Taylor albums, my dates, my lack of dates, and my general inability to stay awake past eleven on a weeknight. My problem was not genetic. It was generational.
My parents’ New Year’s Eve parties were legendary. They lasted a minimum of forty-eight hours, and stretched over every square foot of our six-room home to contain the extended family. From our doorway, you could barely see across the clump of folding chairs to the paper tablecloth that held obscene amounts of appetizers: trays of pepperoni and nitrified meats, cheese, breads, cookies, and the big coffee urn. Cigarette smoke as thick as melted mozzarella cast a soft-focus fog on the kitchen, which made it nearly impossible to discern one relative from the other-such was the similarity of our appearances.
A skilled domestic bred into this environment, I grated cheese, rolled meatballs, pressed cookies, filled ice buckets, emptied ashtrays and couldn’t squeeze out of the kitchen even if I hadn’t been shackled by my gender to the stove. I listened to stories through the six or seven conversations being verbally spiked from wall to wall, some monologue, some dialogue, each with its own lot, passion, and moral. Quiet gatherings were cultural anathema, and what was loud for others was standard dinner chatter for us. It was evident these chosen inheritors of Italy’s great operatic vocal chords exercised them without inhibition, without taking turns, and without any orchestrally polite dips in volume. It was a melodious chaos of highs, peaks, and laughter blasts generated by at least a dozen women in housecoats, men yelling directions at the women in housecoats, cousins raising the volume on the television to drown out the yelling and the periodic pounding on the only bathroom door, the ceaseless ringing of the phone and doorbell-all of this a grand prelude to the accordions, guitars, tambourines, noisemakers, and bilingual sing along yet to begin.
Sure, the police came. They were unaccustomed to this degree of noise generated by happiness, for such thunderings were infinitely more common to domestic disputes, hockey games, or heavy metal concerts. One meal, and we knew they’d be back next year. The cuisine was unsurpassed at inducing gluttony in even the most conscientious dieter. My father, a mathematician by nature, took a normal Sunday dinner for six, multiplied it by the number of guests we were expecting, and factored in the sale price of lasagna pans to arrive at an amount ten times over what we would need to feed the entire population of New Jersey. If the surplus pleased my parents, the geometric array of bubbling disposable pans and trays upon our beat-up holiday table thrilled them. So what if the tomato sauce aroma was enough to kill the last remaining scent of the Christmas tree, and the pots were so large and so full you practically needed a jack to raise them from the stove? This was the way you threw a party.
The joyous atmosphere perplexed me. I could see celebrating Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. I understood the importance of birthdays, First Communions, Confirmations, name days, First Fridays, Holy Days of Obligation, Halloween, and the political correctness of attending the last annual birthday parties of our ageing great aunts and uncles. I could not grasp how the turn of a calendar page could inspire such merriment.
Even as I conceived of these cynical wonderings, I had to weave them through the bending choruses of “Volare,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Santa Lucia,” and “Take Me Back to Hoboken.” It was inevitable that one day I see a less exaggerated perspective of the New Year beyond the reverberating walls of my home. This was the commitment I fashioned as Guy Lombardo and his tasseled-hatted audience fox-trotted across the white television screen, and dissolved into live video from Times Square.
When the ball had descended, and my hearing once again been reduced by the merciless bangings, blowings, and shakings, I had to kiss my way through the room. So much drinking had occurred, no one remembered who they had kissed, so usually, another round or to was distributed for luck. One by one, they hugged and kissed even the unfamiliar faces still entering. No one bothered with the doorbell after eleven. Acquaintances, neighbors, and friends of friends simply poured in.
After years of these celebrations, my expectations for a modern, American New Year’s party were high. I could only imagine how wonderful it would be to embrace the culture of my own age group.
A fugitive from Little Italy, I at last began to experience quieter celebrations, like the year I went to Times Square. I attended formal parties, dance parties, money’s-no-object parties, parties for people who had no party to attend, non-parties of people in denial of the New Year, other people’s favorite parties, Hippie parties, Yuppie parties, and movie marathon parties. There was mostly unabashed complaining about marriage, money, politicians, and corporate calamities, which climaxed with a diary of depressing events. It was worse than reading a newspaper.
If you could ignore the whining commentary about the unpalatable food, watered-down drinks, off-key entertainment, parking fees, lack of service and general disgust with the human race as a whole, perhaps a good time could have been had by some. Not by me. I had grown up in the center of an ethnic civilization, where first-generation Italians were still stunned by their good fortune at having made a life in America. I knew what was going on at home. While I spent my dismal holiday with acquaintances who bemoaned their lack of possessions, my parents were dancing the tarantella, splashing champagne on the ceiling, and feeding people they had never met. Had they gone out to celebrate, they never would have overheard the complaints on the dance floor, or noticed the shredded glass on the city streets near Time Square. They would only have seen things as they could one day be. They were in America where all things were possible.
As I grew older, the family New Years’ parties diminished, and my parents’ lives ended. But the beauty of their optimism stayed with me, like the family recipes, and the guitar they put in my hands. Life was worth celebrating, each calendar day to be treasured. And through my hazy recollection of the thunderous midnight cheering, amid the fading strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” I can almost hear them shouting, “This year we’ll win the million. Then we’ll have a real party.”
By: Linda A. RentschlerAbout the Author:
Linda Ann Rentschler, author of the novel Mother, a main selection of The Literary Guild and Doubleday Bookclub. Author of the novel Jitters which was produced as a Lifetime Original Movie. Playwright, best known for Deathbed. IWWG. Dramatist Guild of America.
http://www.larentschler.com Write to her:
linda@larentschler.com
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