Anderson Cooper Needs a New Year's Date
CNN pops on its homepage today a fresh Anderson Cooper Details column from the archives, this one from December 2004, about New Year's Eve. (Because, hey, who's not ready to read about New Year's on the first day of November?) The Coopster first reveals his profound distaste for the holiday — "If you go to a party and drink on New Year's Eve, it's inevitable: You will at some point find yourself alone and despondent," he writes, and we can't imagine why he'd feel alone — but confesses that ultimately, when he started covering New Year's for CNN, he grew to like it. Oh, the wacky times he had doing the broadcast:
I started a new tradition for CNN, although I'm not sure it's going to last.
In addition to the ball drop in Times Square, we had cameras covering the Drag Queen Drop in Key West, where, at the stroke of midnight more or less, a drag queen named Sushi, sitting inside a giant ladies' shoe, is lowered from the roof of a gay bar.
We'd interviewed Sushi live a couple of times throughout the night, and by midnight ... well, let's just say that Sushi was no longer too fresh.
When she started to descend, something malfunctioned, and the shoe stalled. The last we saw of Sushi, she was crawling on all fours along the roof of the bar.
I told the director to cut away. Seeing a drag queen actually drop off a roof is not how I wanted to kick off the new year.
Under the roof, however, and inside the gay bar — well, that's a whole different story.
