By Grant McGee
I covered the news in Pensacola. There had been talk of keeping the “Pelican Drop” alive. The Pelican Drop is a New Year’s tradition…like the crystal ball of Times Square in New York, like the Moon Pie Drop in Mobile, Alabama. Like the Albuquerque tradition of running the Sandia Peak Tram up the slope of the Sandias on New Year’s Eve. The run was timed so the tram car reached the top at midnight and lit up. I once called the tramway office to ask about it.
“Yeah,” said a disinterested 20-something woman. “They don’t do that anymore,” she said in a familiar Millenial deadpan tone. “That was years ago.” Suddenly I felt old.
Anyway, the new executive director of the board of businesspeople who “OVERSEE ALL THINGS IMPORTANT THAT INVOLVE LOTS OF MONEY” is thinking about keeping the Pelican Drop alive because the board of businesspeople had decided to drop sponsorship, no pun intended.
I know The Pelican Drop won’t be replaced by naked people spinning flaming batons as the New Year begins.
Allow me to explain.
I once lived in a place where naked fire dancers welcomed in the New Year. I don’t know if they still do this in Bisbee, Arizona, but it happened once when I lived there. It wasn't like it was done all the time and I haven't heard that it's happened since.
The city had closed off one of the streets in the center of the historic district. I had been there with hundreds of other townsfolk, visited with my pals, then decided to head home before the beginning of 2002. That’s why I missed out on all of the “fun.”
The next morning I popped out of my front door and waved to my across-the-street neighbor Linda.
“Did you stay for the naked fire dancers last night?” she called out.
She had my immediate attention.
Linda proceeded to tell me that the revelry continued into the wee hours of the morning. The music was loud, people were dancing in the streets when somewhere around 2 a.m. some new arrivals from Seattle emerged in the middle of the crowd, doffed their clothes, lit some batons and proceeded to do a fire dance to welcome the New Year.
“Yeah,” Linda said, “there were five or six young women with dreadlocks, seemed to really know this fire dancing stuff. The crowd went wild. And these weren’t skinny, scrawny women either.”
Linda went on to say this was all pretty exciting to her 18-year-old son who was visiting from Phoenix. “Yeah,” she said, “he turns to me with these big eyes and says, ‘Mom, I want to move to Bisbee.’”
I get the impression folks doing naked things in public is an accepted part of the Pacific Northwest lifestyle. For instance in the past year I’ve stumbled across news from the town of Fremont, near Seattle, where a summer solstice celebration features naked people marching in a parade. I haven’t heard of this in any place I’ve ever lived: Roanoke, Virginia; Naples, Florida; Amarillo, Texas; Roswell or Clovis or Albuquerque, New Mexico. Now there was that busty, topless rollerblader in Phoenix but that was in broad daylight one August and the she turned out to be a he…but that’s another story.
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