2008-01-03 - 2:32 p.m.
Nya and I just stayed home and watched the ball drop on TV New Year’s Eve night. Nya was wary of going downtown or anything and having to deal with drunken mobs. I had to agree. Growing up in New York, I would avoid Times Square on New Year’s Eve like the plague with its massive hoards of belligerent out-of-towners. So we first watched the MTV show from NYC and then switched to the Chicago ABC affiliate for the Central Time countdown.
The contrast between these broadcasts was amazing and pretty disheartening. The New York countdown featured huge pop stars. The Chicago show came from a ballroom where (I could not make this up) a swing orchestra was playing (the station proudly announced that the same band had been there for 50 years!) and incredibly old people were dancing. I suppose you could try to justify it and say it’s sweet that elderly couples are still swinging, but does that really need to be televised on New Year’s Eve?
When I was in high school, I read an article that referred to Fort Wayne, IN, as “Market 99”. I believe the story had to do with radio and (at least according to 1990 figures) the Fort Wayne metropolitan area had the 99th greatest number of listeners in America. (Not to pick on Fort Wayne; I’m sure it’s a very nice place and Lady Brett grew up there. You can substitute any other peripheral city if you like – Tulsa, OK, or Kalamazoo, MI, or whatever.)
Watching local television coverage of the events on New Year’s Eve, I felt like I was in Market 99. Oh, the station occasionally switched cameras over to some concurrent country music festival (being headlined by the legendary Keith Anderson – get psyched). And there was apparently a concert by the band Everclear. But although the announcers referred to it several times, but no shots of it ever appeared. Nya suggested that possibly the people in the control room were too drunk to switch cameras (there was a scene of them at one point downing Champagne at the main board).
And occasionally to really drive it home that you were in some backwater, they would switch to a Rat Pack impersonator (well, Dino and Frank – he couldn’t quite pull off Sammy). Yes, right here tonight – our very own ersatz Sinatra! That made me feel like I was spending New Year’s at some Holiday Inn lounge (perhaps on a sales trip or something). I had to keep in mind that I was actually living in a giant metropolis of several million people.
Look, I love living here, I really do. As I’ve mentioned before, Nya said when we first moved here: “Wow, Chicago is just like New York, except everyone’s nice!” But I’m afraid the place will never shake its Second City inferiority complex until it starts acting first-rate. Country singer Keith Anderson indeed…
© 2008 Geoff Gladstone
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