Photo: David Pelio with the New Year's ball in Times Square yesterday.
Peter Serafinowicz is one of many British comedians heading across the Atlantic for this year's ball.
But imagine the pressure facing guests at this year's ball, on May 6, where the theme, as you might have heard, will be punk.
Before last year's ball, Janice Elliott, the buyer for Gus Mayer, sold $150,000 of Ms. Dennis's party clothes, she said.
A member of Congress took him a puppy, and the mayor of New York wanted him to drop the New Year's ball in Times Square.
Last week, having finished building the first-place trophy for this year's ball (which is made, of course, entirely out of trash), he spoke to us from his home in Beverly.
Going beyond his role as producer, he urged the composer to write additional scenes, including Natasha's first meeting with Andrei at a New Year's Ball, and the war council at Fili.
This year's ball, on Saturday at the Beverly Hilton, will come with its usual over-the-top trappings: chateaubriand and baked Alaska, live entertainment (Gladys Knight will sing "Midnight Train to Georgia"), acres of oversize pink roses.
While hundreds of thousands were expected in Times Square tonight for the dropping of the New Year's ball, officials said the crowds would be nothing like last year's throng of 2 million, who gathered a year prematurely to celebrate the Millennium.
Major public gatherings are cramped, near-desperate attempts to watch staged spectacles of minor importance: the dropping of the New Year's ball in Times Square or the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
