Team Gets a Toast From the Town: Fans May Have Been Double-Booked, but Festivities Went on ? in Front of TVs

By Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Jan. 1–It’s New Year’s Eve in the club room of Clare Meadows II retirement community and a couple dozen people are cheering, hooting, hollering, drinking libations, eating hors d’oeuvres and celebrating. They’re not shouting “10, nine, eight . . . ,” to count down the last seconds of 2006, they’re yelling “All the way, all the way, all the way!” as Packers safety Nick Collins intercepts a pass and runs it in for a touchdown. Like many Packers fans who wanted to celebrate New Year’s Eve, the residents of the Franklin independent living facility were forced to make concessions when the game time was changed on short notice. The four-piece band featuring concertina, saxophone, tuba/bass and drummer, which has played polkas and holiday tunes at Clare Meadows II’s annual party for six years running, agreed to play a night early. That freed up the club room for a Packers watching party. Otherwise few people would have turned up to celebrate the New Year as long as the Packers were playing. “Bummed? We were in crisis,” says Evelyn Repech, 80, as NBC analyst Al Michaels finally stops talking and the Bears kick off. “I wasn’t going to come,” adds Don Biondich, 75, who saw the Packers play at State Fair Park decades ago and vowed to skip the party to watch football in his apartment. Mary Jane Kasza, 83, has been a Packers fan since she was a teenager, long before even Vince Lombardi was pacing the sidelines. She loves the Packers, and she loves to go to the New Year’s Eve blast and dance. What to do? “It was kind of frustrating because you didn’t want to watch the Packers while the band was playing,” Kasza says right before hollering at the TV as her favorite player, Brett Favre, takes the first snap. But Vern and the Originals juggled their music-gig calendar. Residents pretended Dec. 30 was Dec. 31 and counted down the seconds to 11 p.m. — when the Times Square ball would be dropping. Crisis averted. When NBC decided last week that the Packers game would be played at 7:15 p.m. instead of noon, it forced many Packers fans/New Year’s revelers to make a Solomonic choice — the Packers or champagne. Back out of New Year’s Eve plans and risk angering non-Packer watching spouses or skip the game and not enjoy the festivities because, after all, the Packers were playing the Bears, and it could be Brett Favre’s last game. While some folks turned the game into the cornerstone of their New Year’s Eve bash, some had to make do with keeping one eye on the game while partying. At the Mitchell Park Domes, which has offered a New Year’s Eve celebration for families for several years, a TV set up in the educational center was tuned to the game. Folks drifted in and out of the room as two party-goers were rooted in front of the TV: Margaret Leech, 77, and her pal Millie Miller, who gave her age as “senior citizen.” Both love to come to the Domes on New Year’s Eve, and both are Packers fans. But the pair would have chosen the Green and Gold over the Domes. “I told Margaret ‘I’m not going,’ ” Miller said of when she first heard the game time would conflict with the Domes’ merriment. “Then we were just going to come for the first half of the game” and return home to watch the rest of the gridiron action, Leech said. Instead, the two ate bratwurst, which Leech washed down with champagne, and watched the Packers just a few steps away from the Show Dome featuring hundreds of red, pink and white poinsettia plants and a pianist playing “Auld Lang Syne.” When conservatory director Sandy Folaron heard the Packers were playing during the 6-10 p.m. New Year’s Eve celebration, she figured the event would be a bust. But more than 600 people showed up, twice what was expected. “Some people are getting their (Packers) fix and then going back out” into the Domes, Folaron said before halftime. At Clare Meadows II, residents clad in cardboard New Year’s tiaras and Packers sweat shirts grabbed their canes and pumped their fists as Green Bay jumped out to a 7-0 lead in the first quarter. At the back of the club room, Anne Felton, who helped organize the New Year’s Eve Party, smiled as she listened to her neighbors cheer. “Most people didn’t want to have to choose between the Packers and the New Year’s Eve party. Now we’ll have two parties,” Felton said.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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