Auld Lang Sigh

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New Year's Eve, of course, is known for disappointment, freighted with the pressure to be the wildest night of the year but often ending in ennui, regret and beer stains. Is this one simply shaping up to be a letdown on a millennial scale? Not necessarily. Party planners and business people predict that customers will start filling hotels, parties and restaurants in the next few weeks--especially if prices drop enough.

But more important, an underbooked New Year's is a letdown only by a fairly consumerist measure, one that assumes you can divine enthusiasm and millennial spirit in terms of buzz and box office, units moved and luxury suites occupied. People are not so much dismissing the event as trying to determine how to mark it in a way that's meaningful to them. So a lot of people are making low-key, local plans, like neighbors and single dads Bruce Rave and Charlie O'Dowd of Albuquerque, N.M., who are planning a minimalist block party. "We'll set up a tent with a kerosene heater for the old people and probably me too," says Rave, 45. There will be meat cooking on propane grills--no electricity at this Y2K-themed party--and plenty of soccer, football, basketball and Hula Hoops. "Kids and adults playing together in the street--a family day," says O'Dowd, 48. "We had this type of party constantly when I was growing up, and I want it to be memorable, you know, turn of the century and family and community."

That's a heavy burden for one little weenie roast. But across the country and the world, people are finding as many reasons to stay in this New Year's Eve as to go out. Most boil down to one thing: other people. With no basis in nature, the passage of a thousand years is a man-made phenomenon, and so are its attendant worries. The question of how you mark this millennium is partly a question of faith--not religious faith so much as faith in humankind. Faith that people can throng by the hundreds of thousands in the world's metropolises without havoc. Faith that one's fellow humans will not--out of their own faith or some twisted private purpose--seek to put a bloody exclamation point on the millennium or precipitate the apocalypse. The most basic kind of human faith, really: the faith that the sun will rise tomorrow on a world more or less like the one it set on.

Still hedging their bets on that last question were the crowds at the Preparedness Expo at the Denver Merchandise Mart earlier this month, where several thousand attendants watched merchants demonstrate how to load a blowgun, use dryer lint to start a fire and cook an egg on a stick. Even survivalist stalwarts at the event were beginning to downplay fears that the Y2K computer bug will cause chaos come Jan. 1. "I don't think that the world is coming to a screeching halt," says renowned survivalist Bo Gritz. But in Paonia, Colo., Joy MacNulty, 69, isn't taking chances. Not only is she laying in food, water, a woodstove and a greenhouse at home, but she's also become her town's volunteer Y2K coordinator, assembling a $1,000 emergency pantry in the community center--though, to her chagrin, almost none of her neighbors see the need to prepare. On the big night, she will have a party with 10 friends to watch TV...and wait: "Maybe we'll try out the photovoltaic stuff and use the Porta Potti."