New Year’s Eve 2021

For New Year’s Eve this year, Maya said I could go and see Joyce again, which was good, since Joyce would have been pretty dang pissed off if she had to toast in 2021 without me. We have a nice tradition going of getting all dressed up and watching movies while Joyce serves all those appetizers and ice cream sundaes right before midnight. We were going to continue with that this year, although there was a slight problem, since my tuxedo was in my apartment and Maya still didn’t want me going in there. (I don’t get why. I saw on the news that the virus only lives on surfaces for 48 hours, and even I remember enough from biology to know that viruses have to live in vivo and not in vitrio… Still, Maya’s the boss.) The solution was to send Keaton, who I think has rested up some from all the overtime he put in right before Christmas. He was so burnt out that, when he got home from Christmas dinner, he passed out on the bed and slept for 24 hours.

So Keaton went to my apartment to pick up the tux and all the accessories, which I kept reminding him about. (Keaton: “bubba will you stop being so fuckin gay about your fuckin cufflinks?”) Turns out he even remembered the black silk socks, although it was pretty dang weirdass to get a text from him and then go down and find my tux hanging on the front gate.

I mentioned to the boys that me and Joyce dress up for New Year’s Eve, and they told Maya and the tux suddenly became a whole big deal. If Baseball Boy was gonna go out in black tie, the cameras had to catch me in it before I left. It turned into even more than that once Ethan heard about it, and now there’s gonna be whole gayass segment of me getting ready from the minute I stepped out of the shower. That meant footage of me shaving with a towel around my waist. I drew the line at a shot of me in my underwear, and of course Keaton had something to say about the towel thing, but, let’s be honest, the viewers have all seen me wet in boardshorts a few times already, so how much difference is there gonna be between that and a towel?

The cameras have been pretty much everywhere during the bubble, since they have nowhere else to go and they’re kind of giving America a diary of what life’s like at the Sharpmans during this part of the pandemic. They even got film of me reading one of Rosalind’s speeches lol.

There’s no Rose Parade this year (although there is a Rose Bowl), so there aren’t going to be all those people camped out on Colorado Boulevard, so I didn’t need to worry about getting to the other side of Colorado before they closed it off like Joyce gets all worried about every New Year’s Eve. She still wanted me there by 7. Only getting dressed took forever with the camera in the bathroom, and I started to get pissed off at Ethan when he asked me to wash my hair a second time because they didn’t get the right shot of me drying it. (I should tell y’all that it doesn’t take me a whole heck of a lot of time to blow dry my hair. It’s longer on top than it is on the sides, so that’s really all I have to use the dryer on. I think Ethan thought that it was gonna be a bigger deal than it is. So I finally agreed that I’d pretend to be ‘drying’ it even once it was dry. I’m getting used to being on a reality TV show, but the one thing that still annoys me is when Ethan asks me to do something again because they didn’t get the right shot of it. It’s not reality at that point, and some things can’t be repeated just because your director wants you to.

With the cameras holding me up, it was past 7 before I got out of the house. And of course Joyce was annoyed when I texted her that I was running late. I really didn’t want to end up with a pissed-off girlfriend for a whole night, so I hoped she’d simmer down before I got there. (The drive from San Marino up to where Joyce lives takes around 20 minutes.)

Everything turned out ok, which was a relief. Joyce made a comment or two, but they weren’t directed at me. She put all the blame on the cameras (and, honestly, it really was their fault…I started getting dressed at 5:30…and even a gay dude can get into his tuxedo in an hour and a half lol), and then she blamed Maya more than Ethan…but then Joyce blames Maya for a lot of shit. I mean, yeah, Maya is behind At Home with Maya, but she’s never been anything but super nice to me.

And, no, don’t think I’m so stupid as to go telling my girlfriend that my head gets all fuzzy when I smell Maya’s perfume lol.

I reckon Joyce may be a little jealous of Maya, even though Maya’s married, is my boss, and is the mother of the two boys I’m being paid to take care of. I have breakfast with her and her husband most mornings…so I even see her without makeup sometimes, since it turns out that Maya only gets ready before breakfast if the cameras are going to be there. But it would be soooo weirdass if she were anything more than my boss. I mean, yeah, I’m aware of the fact that I work around two very hot chicks, but I also know I have a girlfriend, and, even though y’all probably think of me as a total horndog, the boring reality is that I’ve never cheated on a serious or even semi-serious girlfriend. Of course, during the periods when I haven’t hand a girlfriend, well, y’all know about 30 chicks/30 days…

I wasn’t expecting it, but Joyce had a new evening gown for this year. It was solid black with lots of black bugle beads and a full skirt (Joyce gave me those words…I sure as heck didn’t know what a bugle bead was before that) and strapless (ok, I knew that word) which looked super hot on Joyce. She admitted that it wasn’t the most comfortable dress she’d ever worn and I could tell she had to pull it up a few times when she got up from the couch, but, then, I don’t reckon that evening gowns are designed to be worn while sitting on the couch leaning up against your boyfriend while he has his arm around you and you’re watching a movie lol.

We pretty much stuck to our New Year’s Eve traditions, which meant all those appetizers (Joyce got that amazing brie in a crust that we both liked so much…and I also really liked the caviar again, although Joyce joked that I shouldn’t get too used to it.) Joyce got in a collection of German beers this year, most of which I never tasted before or even knew about. A couple of them were dang good, the best being Erdinger Weisbier, which was just a terrific lager with a ton of flavor, not too bitter, not too sweet…really just right in every way. It’s better than a lot of craft beers I’ve had, even. I need to tell Keaton about it, although I suspect it’s a little pricey…and I can’t exactly start getting myself used to pricey beers.

Yeah, we danced some. I’m starting to even like some of the music she puts on for us to dance to…although I gotta admit that I remembered very little from what I learned in the three dancing lessons we took before the quarantine shut down Rico and Carla’s studio.

Then it was movie time. Joyce offered me a chance to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, since we hardly got through any of it on Christmas, but I said I wasn’t in the mood for a Christmas movie…even if I have Armenian Christmas to look forward to next week. Joyce said it was just as well, since she was in the mood for…y’all guessed it…an Astaire/Rogers movie. It’s cool…they really are the perfect movies for New Year’s Eve if you’re in a tux and an evening gown. The movie Joyce picked this year was Swing Time, which I don’t as well as some of the others, since I’ve only seen it once before. I gotta admit I didn’t like the comedy as much as the comedy in, say, Top Hat…although we got a big laugh from the scene where that super funny English dude who usually plays the valet runs the dancing school. There’s one cringe number where Fred Astaire puts on blackface, but Joyce said that I should judge it by the standards of when the movie was made…and that seems fair enough. And the tap dancing he does while in blackface is awesome. Even I can tell that. My favorite number, though, was “Never Gonna Dance” right before the end. It’s a very dramatic dance for the two of them – it’s a dance for two people who are breaking up – and I liked it so much that I asked Joyce if we could back it up so we could watch it again. Now that I’m an expert on ballroom dancing (having taken 3 lessons), I was really fascinated by this one part right at the end where she does a whole bunch of turns. Joyce says that they made like 30 takes or something crazy like that before they could get it right, and that Rogers’ feet were bleeding by the end. I can see how they might have been. (And, now that I’m used to getting filmed, I can also imagine how irritating doing 30 takes must have been for her. I got pissed off this afternoon having to do 4 takes of blow-drying my hair lol.)

Joyce came up with an Astaire/Rogers CD and found the song. No, I didn’t try to sing it (it’s such a sad song anyway), but we did try dancing to it. We were hardly Astaire and Rogers, and the carpet was hardly the place to try and do turns like she does, but it turned out that Joyce’s dress swirled around her in a really cool way, even though she only did a couple turns. Actually Joyce’s dress reminded me a little of the dress Rogers has on in the movie, only in black instead of white.)

Joyce always puts by terrific fixings for the banana splits I make for us at around 11:30. A couple years ago was when I first learned about putting sweetened condensed milk on ice cream…and it’s still one of the toppings I use. This year Joyce went and got us vanilla, chocolate and dulce de leche ice cream (usually she gets strawberry, but she doesn’t like how the strawberry tastes when it gets all mixed up with the other flavors…although I’ll take strawberry ice cream any way I can get it lol), and I arranged the toppings with the sweetened condensed milk on the chocolate, hot caramel on the vanilla and hot fudge on the dulce de leche. Then both whipped cream and marshmallow (that’s a tip Joyce got from me that I got from Udderly Delicious in Hickory), then nuts (Joyce makes her own topping from peanuts she chops herself, since she’s ‘a little’ allergic to the pecans or walnuts you get in commercially prepared nut toppings) and, of course, cherries. It’s kind of a messy thing to be eating when you’re all dressed up, but our clothes came out fine. And I gotta say…I make a dang good banana split lol.

That made it almost midnight and time to break out the sparkling cider. We didn’t have the TV on to count down, so we just did it by my iPhone. That probably gives you a more exact timing of midnight anyway.

And that was the end of 2020. Not a moment too soon. We toasted to a better 2021, which I definitely could use.

Joyce always picks a Disney movie for us to watch after midnight. This year she got a copy of Frozen II…but I told her I really didn’t want to see it again, having watched it twice with the boys already this month. (I’ve now seen it 3 times and I still have no clue what the fuck it’s about. Olaf is great, don’t get me wrong…but the rest of it’s still got me puzzled. And that’s after Jacob and Matteo tried to explain it to me.) Never fear, Joyce has plenty of Disney movies in her library…and she suggested we watch The Little Mermaid instead, which she says is her favorite. I was down for that. Joyce got pretty emotional at the end, which is cool…it made me realize that the ending of the movie is a little more complicated than I used to think. Joyce also told me that she thinks that Prince Eric is Disney’s ‘hottest’ prince, which is kinda weirdass, seeing as he’s only a cartoon character, but it was nice to hear that Joyce likes the blue of my eyes even better than she likes the shade of blue that Prince Eric’s are lol.

So that made for another real nice New Year’s Eve spent with just me and Joyce. I reckon you can say it’s one of the more ‘romantic’ things we do, what with the tuxedo and evening gown and the dancing and stuff…but it’s also just a nice tradition we have. And I’ll say this, too…now that I’m getting a little older, staying in on New Year’s Eve is a lot preferable to going out and trying to have a good time. I’ve gone out on New Year’s Eve before, and usually woken up with a nasty hangover the next morning. (I woke up with bruised knuckles one January 1 too. Remember I told y’all that I won one of my two fights with bouncers? The win came on New Year’s Eve 2014.)

So then we changed out of our evening clothes, cleaned up and went to bed. This was my second night sleeping on the pillows I bought Joyce for Christmas, and, if you ask me, they’re dang comfortable. Joyce has had a few more nights to sleep on them than I have, and she says she likes them but isn’t sure she loves them, although she says they’re an improvement on the last pillows she had. Truth is I like them so much that I might get myself one for home (or for the pool house if I stay there much longer…they gave me a memory foam pillow when I moved in, I think thinking that I’d like it, but I reckon I’m just not a memory foam man.)

I slept well…just like they say you will in the pillow commercials…but not long enough before it was time to get up on New Year’s Day.