Fake fish, giant pickles, flaming farm animals to ring in new millennium
By Wayne Parry, Associated Press, 12/20/99
POINT PLEASANT, N.J. - As humanity enters the new millennium, some great minds are planning to mark the occasion by dropping fish down a pole, lowering a giant pickle from a fire ladder, parading flaming puppets through the streets and skydiving into a volcano crater.
They also think it will be neat to walk across a frozen ocean from one time zone to another, drop the world's largest olive into the world's largest martini, and rally round a bologna.
Clearly, not all millennium celebrations will be solemn affairs burdened by the great weight of history.
Take Mo The Millennium Mossbunker. The fishing community of Point Pleasant has adopted a 10-foot wooden replica of an Atlantic bait fish, covered with 1,500 Mylar scales, as the centerpiece of its New Year's Eve celebration.
The big ball-drop at Times Square will have nothing on Point Pleasant when Mo is lowered down a 40-foot scaffold outside a bowling alley, after being taken a mile out to sea aboard a fishing boat, returned to land and paraded through the streets.
"We fully expect this to be the epicenter of the millennium,'' said Mo's creator, Gene Bissey.
Not if Dillsburg, Pa., has anything to say about it. The town, founded by a man named Matthew Dill, plans to lower an 8-foot papier-mache pickle to the ground from the top of a firetruck ladder in the town square.
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In fact, folks will be dropping all kinds of things come midnight in Pennsylvania. In Lancaster, it will be a red rose, the city's symbol. In coal country, citizens of Wilkes-Barre will drop a diamond. And in Lebanon, the home of Lebanon bologna, it will be a giant bologna.
In Philadelphia, Rocky wannabes will run up the steps in a "Rocky Run'' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If they have any breath left, they can say "I do'' along with 2,000 people tying the knot in a midnight mass marriage. Mayor Ed Rendell and his wife, Marjorie, a federal judge, will officiate.
The New Jersey towns of South Orange and Maplewood are building a replica of Stonehenge out of cardboard boxes, carpet tubes and 9,000 pounds of sand. Participants will write down their wishes, regrets and promises on slips of colored paper and burn them in four 50-gallon steel drums inside Stonehenge.
"The Stonehenge thing has this connection to the millennium and time and people's attempts to understand the world they live in,'' said creator John Kaufman. "Here we are at the tick of a clock that's not much different from your car's odometer rolling over to 100,000 miles. This is we who are alive today looking back 4,000 or 5,000 years to where we were.''
In Seattle, papier-mache figures of farm animals, four horsemen and a giant egg will be paraded through the streets and set on fire. Mayor Paul Schell said the idea is based on centuries-old fire festivals in Valencia, Spain.
"We believe it will be the most unique millennium celebration in the country,'' he said.
Unless you look to Honolulu, where 15 skydivers intend to parachute into Diamond Head Crater at midnight. "This is a silly idea,'' said state Rep. Barbara Marumoto.
In San Francisco, a hotel had planned to slide the world's largest olive down the world's largest swizzle stick into a seven-story martini glass at the stroke of midnight. But the Westin St. Francis Hotel in Union Square didn't count on opposition from church groups, who planned their own service in the square and were, well, shaken by the idea of a giant martini staring down at them.
"We have decided to chill the idea until next year,'' hotel spokesman Michael Cassidy said.
Another chilly celebration is planned for Little Diomede, a rocky 2-square-mile speck of land in Alaska's Bering Strait. Revelers will walk on sea ice across the international dateline.
Ice-walkers will technically need a visa to cross from Alaska into Russian territory, but Dorothy Haller, vice mayor of Diomede, population 136, said she is not planning to check credentials. "I plan to be sound asleep,'' she said.
