Happy New Rear

So we went to a New Year's Eve party at the home of a couple we've known for a long time. The guests were all folks who are also old friends -- literally, since I was the youngest guy in the room, save for a couple.

Good food, good wine, good conversation. We brought six pounds of boiled shrimp and my homemade cocktail sauce and it seemed to be well-received. They ate it all. (Recipe: Three parts ketchup to one part yellow mustard; one part horse radish sauce, one-to-two parts lemon juice, dashes of Tabasco Sauce, soy sauce, and maple syrup, to taste.)

Several of the party-goers elected to stay over for a New Year's Day breakfast -- there were spare beds and rollaways scattered hither and yon, in a condo that is maybe four times as big as my house. Those folks got pretty plowed since they didn't have to drive. I nursed a glass of really good wine, and had half a flute of champagne at midnight to toast the new year, but since we were driving home, I kept it light.

Always fun to be sober in a room full of happy drunks, and all of them were that. Sweet people.

The hosts passed out copies of the Oregon Writer's Colony fundraiser calendar, in which I was Mr. October. This was cause for much merriment, hoots, and hollers ...

We clicked on the TV just before midnight and watched Dick Clark for the countdown in NYC -- delayed for our time zone. Jennifer Lopez's skintight spangled cat-suit was fun, but --

-- Clark, born in 1929, had a visage so smooth that it would put a baby's butt to shame. He had a stroke a few years back, and obviously some plastic surgery since, and it was spooky seeing an eighty-year-old man without a wrinkle on his forehead. You could bounce quarters off his face. His voice was not good, and you have to give him credit for trying, but it was kind of sad to see the world's oldest teenager trying so hard to hang on.

Of course, the alternative is Ryan Seacrest ...