One of the first New Year’s Eves I spent in NYC, mid-80s, I worked the coat check room for a private upstairs party at a fancy restaurant. I’d found I made more money checking coats during the winter months at this joint than I had as a waitress in the more funky East Village places where I’d slung plates. This was the era of high-rolling, avaricious Wall Street days and rapacious Odeon nights. Money and cocaine were everywhere. I rarely had either, though I wasn’t completely judgmental about those who had both. Sometimes, like on this NYEve night, standing in a tiny closet-size space, taking fancy people’s slightly damp outerwear, then handing them a slip of paper they were expected to hold onto somehow, a random so&so would palm me a little white envelope and invite me to knock some out, snort it up, and have some fun. Maybe it only happened once, who knows, but what I can recall is how much smaller my space felt and how distant I felt from the world at large in those moments. I was new to the city. I had a lot of things I wanted to happen around success in both career and love. Neither of those had materialized yet: I was six months away from graduating with a journalism degree, a month away from an internship at Rolling Stone, and two weeks out from discovering my boyfriend was cheating on me. All this made me anxious. Not helped probably by the slight headache I’m sure I had from being squished into a tiny space, grinding my teeth while a million perfumes and aftershaves rolled off the hanging scarves, furs, and tweeds fighting to take down my olfactories.

At the height of the party, someone needed something from their coat. The rack was literally bending, not remotely large enough to hold all the stuff it was expected to. I dived in to find said person’s whatever and, like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe*, I was disappeared into an unexpected place. Darkness, weight, the sound of faraway voices, an inability to move. Rather than entering a place of magical creatures and princess people, I was buried under a thousand coats and scarves as the rack collapsed on top of me. I could hear the person who wanted their stuff yelling into the space, Hello? Hello? I struggled to get my head out of the mess so I could breathe. My life did not flash before my eyes. It was more hard buttons and zippers grazing my face. Finally, after clearing away a particularly heavy thing (a full-length fur perhaps?), I scrambled out and back to my post, disheveled but mostly intact. I might have thought this will make a funny story.

Thirty years ago to the day, I’d just gotten back from visiting my mom and her husband in Colorado. It had been tense. Mom-daughter relationships can be fraught and ours was. I’d just left SPIN and was working as a talent booker for The Jane Pratt show on Lifetime. I’d achieved a few things since my coat-check takedown years earlier: success as a music journalist being the main. I was still broke, still not in the kind of relationship I craved. But in the eyes of others and sometimes myself, I’d made it. Hobnobbing with rock stars, seeing my byline on the regular, living on my own in a downtown apartment.

Jane had decided that since I knew Pearl Jam and they were playing at the Academy Theatre in Times Square on that New Year’s Eve of ’92, that I should get tickets for her, myself, and a few of our workmates. So I did. Once we got through the barrier of police guarding the perimeter of Times Square and the voice in my head screaming What the hell am I doing here? had quieted and I’d stopped being grossed out by the group near us talking about wearing adult diapers as they waited to get into the Square to see the ball drop—because this is what you do when you’re about to be locked into a small space with no bathrooms—I was relieved to reach our front row, balcony seats inside the theater. As the lights dimmed and the shadows of the band reflected onstage—my hands-down, all-time favorite moment during shows, followed closely by the very first notes—I tried to let go and just be in the moment. This was an ongoing project (still is). As with most moments in my life at that time, I was worried. About who I was. What I was doing. Where my future was headed. Had I made the right move leaving SPIN? How would I handle the bill collectors leaving endless messages? Why in hell couldn’t I find a good happy relationship? I was emotional. Also pregnant, although I wouldn’t know that for a few weeks to come. All this would add to the rollercoaster beginning of my 1993. An abortion, which I kept a secret from almost everyone. Another job shift as Jane’s TV show was canceled. More bill collectors ringing the phone.

And the band played on. We did go backstage, yes. Fuzzy scenes of a bottle going around. Eddie Vedder balancing on a backstage folding chair, surfing it, daring it to snap closed and bring him tumbling down. All of us laughing as if broken limbs and delayed next shows might be funny. Drummer-at-the-time Dave Abbruzzese not putting on a shirt, even as we all left the theatre and faced January in New York weather. That’s about it on the specifics. Nothing salacious. A scramble to get out of Times Square, a subway ride home, sleep, 1993 began.

Three decades later. I think back to then and it seems like a different life. I do that a lot, feel how the different sections of my past feel like other distinct lives lived. I understand on a basic level how one moment has led to another. Can appreciate that who I am now is because of what I’ve gone through then to get me to now. I’m truly happy to have come to this place and have these stories. I recognize that the trees on this particular stretch of life are more mature. They can hold a rope swing pretty solidly and I can push above the branches and see a bit of the layout below without much fear of what the falling will be like. I mean, I know there will be falls, it’s just I’m slightly better about not fighting it. Stuff will break. Things have broken before and I’ve managed to live through it. Crawled out from underneath and made stories from the experience. I’ve taken in the view from the balcony and held secrets that people discovered anyway. None of it killed me. Some of it made me stronger. Mostly it just reminded me that what will be, will be so why not be in it as much as possible. I’m feeling good about that. Appreciating the view from the trees.

I hope you all find a view you like as 2023 wraps around us, deep pockets ready to fill!

• Now knowing this series was a bit of Christian propaganda makes me sad, yet in my youth, it was one of my favorites. The way insidious things work I suppose.