If you think that your New Year's Eve was mild, not wild, in comparison to how others celebrated the last day of 2023, take heart: likely our night was just as unexciting.
We did go out. To a neighbor's house. Which took a whole three minutes of driving. (They have a really long driveway out here in rural south Salem; otherwise it would have been quicker.)
The get-together started at 6:30 pm. Most of the attendees were old, so there's no way we were going to party on until midnight.
After snacks and conversation, Pictionary took center stage. Laurel, my wife, had played Picitionary, while I couldn't recall doing so. During the short drive I got tips from Laurel about the game. "You're given a word, then you draw a picture of it and your team tries to guess what it is."
Okay, pleasingly simple. Here's a photo of Laurel drawing her word. I'm visible over her shoulder studiously ignoring her (it was girls versus boys, so I wasn't involved in guessing her word).
When it was my turn, I uttered an expletive when I saw the word I'd gotten. "Pope." I would have been even more distressed if I hadn't had a glass of wine that relieved to some extent my first-time-player Pictionary anxiety.
Since there were red and black markers, I drew a stick figure with a red triangle meant to represent a Pope's fancy headgear. That elicited exactly zero decent guesses from my team. With my mind frantically racing, I came up with an idea: add a cross!
Now the stick figure with a red triangle on its head had an arm with fingers holding a large cross. This elicited "Bishop," which became after some nonverbal encouragement from me, "Pope." Yes, I screamed, feeling like the King of the World.
I blurted out, "Now I love Pictionary." But not enough to stay past 8:30, because I wanted to return home and compose a New Year's Eve post for my Church of the Churchless blog, plus save our dog from a lonely evening.
When Laurel got home via a ride from a neighbor, we settled in for our traditional New Year's Eve watching of CNN where Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen hold forth in New York at Times Square. Thankfully, after last year's alcohol-free event, Cooper and Cohen had shots of smuggled tequila.
Geez, CNN. Loosen up. They aren't driving. Seeing Cooper and Cohen get steadily more tipsy as the clock draws closer to midnight has always been one of the best things about watching CNN on New Year's Eve.
They were entertaining this year, as always. A memorable humorous comment came when Cohen was taking the lead in talking with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, I think it was, and the conversation turned to movies the three of them liked.
Observing the exciting talk about movies I'd never heard of either, Anderson Cooper said something like, "I'm used to being the Gay Guy in a group, but I've got to say, I have no idea what you three are talking about." Meaning, they were acting much gayer.
Paul Anka sang "Imagine" this year as the Times Square ball dropped at midnight. Laurel and I thought he did great, after we got over the shock of Paul Anka still being alive. He's 82, which isn't that much older than my 75.
I was shocked to see on Facebook that some people trashed Anka's singing, saying it was way off-key. I'm a lousy singer, but I feel like I can tell if someone is singing well, and Anka seemed to do just that. See what you think.
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