Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 2000)

Ten days before the end of the millennium, nobody I know has plans to celebrate. We've all stockpiled bottled water and canned tuna. As Y2K and the threat of global chaos gets closer—all those computers crashing—it seems a shame that everybody's staying home to guard their Sterno for New Year's Eve.

That day, an ad in the newspaper says the Bagdad Theater is still available. The Bagdad is an Arabian-style movie palace leftover from the 1920s. The theater has a print of the movie Fight Club. This is too much to resist.

Our idea is to hire a staging company to build a dance floor below the movie screen. The Bagdad is huge inside, with balconies and red-velvet seats, spooky alcoves, and fountains in the lobby. It's been restored and converted into a theater-slash-restaurant. We can hire a lighting company. Turn the place into a night club. Make it a costume party with everyone coming as their favorite person from the past century. Serve dinner to some five hundred people and have a special showing of the movie. We'd leave dozens of disposable cameras on every table so people could document the night. Dinner, dancing, prizes, it seems perfect.

We buy several thousand glowsticks to hand out, just in case. We blow up thousands of balloons, including thirty-five silver monsters, big as small cars. The staging company installs bubble-blowing machines. Special-effects lighting. The DJ is booked. The invitations go out, and we're set.

On the last day of the twentieth century, I'm on the sidewalk with a long pole, changing the marquee to read "Special Secret Party Here Tonight," and an old woman in a cloth coat asks if Fight Club has ended its run.

And I'm thinking, In your dreams. I'm thinking, Not your cup of tea, lady?

She's tiny in her coat and old-lady low heels, and she says, "I've heard very good things about it. I was really wanting to see it."

This won't be my last surprise of the century.

Some things you can't anticipate. When the huge silver balloons bounce out of the balcony, they land in everyone's dinner. From then on, they're lasagna and salad-covered blimps, bouncing against everyone, picking up and smearing food on everything they touch. Bottles and wineglasses fall and break, and the moment a six-foot silver balloon covered with food lands in the broken glass—boom—chicken and tomato sauce fly everywhere.

My relatives leave, quickly and politely, before midnight. This is about the same time a group of airline flight attendants rip off their uniforms on the dance floor and starting licking each other's bare chests.

A few minutes before midnight, our special clock for the occasion, it stops.

All of this I find out secondhand. All evening, I'm in the lobby welcoming people or saying good night. Famous people get drunk and fight. Gandhi is stalking Ava Gardner. Hirohito is French-kissing Chairman Mao. There's a three-way between Hugh Hefner and Judy Garland and Albert Einstein happening somewhere in the balcony. Somewhere else, Emma Goldman is smoking dope. Then Ray Bolger leaves, weeping her eyes out. Rosie the Riveter is dancing on a table. People appear and disappear, spattered with tomato sauce and laughing. Every wineglass the restaurant owns gets broken. Every votive candle in a glass holder gets broken. On top of all this mayhem, the bubble machines just keep blowing down bubbles. People dance. The movie plays.

After midnight, my first task for the new millennium is to apologize to the restaurant staff. But they say, it's not a problem. They say this is the kind of party they've always hoped someone would throw at the Bagdad.

Instead of regrets, we have tons of good stories and canned tuna. But the dozens of disposable cameras, they've all disappeared. We're left with memories and not a single picture.