ninevirtues | First Night Raleigh

For New Year's, we went to Raleigh's First Night celebration. The idea: Pay $12 each for a button; get access to a variety of different shows and things to do located at various sites around Raleigh's downtown. At the end of the night, go to the park and watch the giant acorn drop. (It's a Raleigh thing.) First night is alcohol-free, kid friendly, and arts oriented. We got to see the downtown, which includes some streets paved with brick, and some historic signs indicating what happened where. (Andrew Jackson was born in a kitchen located in Downtown Raleigh. Sherman, Grant and Lee met to sign surrender papers for the War in the old statehouse. Wow, Raleigh is old. History happened there. Oh myyyyy.) Perfect!

Here's the website: http://www.artsplosure.org/firstnightraleigh/2006/

What we saw: We saw the blues (Mookie). Verdict: A blues show in a church, for a family-friendly audience, puts a damper on that hard-luck dirty blues vibe.

We saw the community fire calendar (Oooo, burning stuff.) Verdict: Worth five minutes of looking).

We saw the sand-covered beach dance pit. In theory, members of the Carolina Shag club were there to teach you how to shag. And would I like to learn the Carolina Shag? Ohhhhh yeahhhhh. But when we got there, the DJ was teaching some form of the electric slide to a mass audience. No shagging, no experienced shaggers. Verdict: Dang!

We saw the Exploris museum. (It's a kids museum that offers a multicultural viewpoint with tons of hands-on activities and a very liberal viewpoint.)

Last and finally, we saw the giant plaza and the acorn. We were distracted by barbecue sundaes at a food booth-- take an eight ounce cup, put pulled pork barbecue in the bottom, cover with a layer of baked beans, cover with a layer of coleslaw, add a fork and voila'-- a barbecue sundae. (I suspect that one is a new Instant Tradition; it was good!)

Sundaes finished, we looked at each other. We're tired. We're still sick, and the antibiotics we're both still taking suck the life out of us. I eyed

rstapleton speculatively.

"Are you really interested in watching the ball drop, or would you rather celebrate New Year's on Virgin Islands time and get going?"
"Huh?"
"I think the Virgin Islands is an hour ahead of us. Therefore, 11 PM our time is midnight their time, and it was New Year's for them thirty minutes ago."
"Oh. Yeah. And we can beat traffic."

And thus it was.