WED., DEC. 27, 2006

This year, New Year’s Eve falls on the Lord’s Day, which is surely happy news for recidivist 12-stepping alcoholics, but for the rest of us, it requires an extra step of irksome planning. Part of the fun of New Year’s is that last-minute run to the liquor store to grab a frantic armload of hooch for the evening – liquors you purchase by color rather than label or name; those last remaining off-brand bottles distilled in tin-sheds by toothless hillbillies in remote hollers in Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia; the kind of stuff you don’t take out of the paper bag until your friend screams incredulously between convulsive fits of projectile vomiting, “What was that shit?!” Of course, that’s only part of the fun, but if that’s the fun you’re into – that being a profound state of drunkenness nearly worth the wicked hangover – you’ll need to cross the threshold of a liquor store no later than 8:59pm Saturday night. Texas is God’s country, and God, according to Texas statutes, don’t roll on the Yom Rishon. He don’t get his drink on neither – except in certain counties like Travis, home of Austin, the “Sodom of the Southwest.” Bottom line is that if you procrastinate like most respectable alcoholics, you’re going to end up underserved come Sunday night. That ain’t right. You don’t want to be wearing the elastic banded cone paper party hat sober. You don’t want to blow the duck whistle without wetting your own. You can’t do justice to a garbled Gaelic clusterfuck of lyrics like “Auld Lang Syne” with a blood alcohol content less than .10, and you certainly won’t want to engage in a spirited tonsil hockey match with a total stranger at the stroke of midnight unless the booze has got your back. Roger? Of course, you could do all the preceding sober, but then the fun onus is on you. You’d have to dream up something pretty spectacular to wipe out the memory of being a designated driver. Chin up DD, the Drafthouse has something for you. New Year’s Eve they’re hosting a skate party at Playland featuring the K-Tel Hit Machine and Tosca Strings covering tunes from the Electric Light Orchestra. Skating goes from 9-11pm and a dance follows. Seventies disco attire is recommended, skating drunk is not, but oh, the memories.