The lights were strung, the stage was set and "Baby New Year" was waiting in a cage, hissing.
Brasstown, once again, was ready for the Possum Drop. Yes, the annual New Year's Eve Possum Drop, the one and only, inspired by the dropping of a certain illuminated ball 1,078km miles away.
Last night, at the stroke of midnight, at the exact same moment that hundreds of thousands of people hollered in the New Year at Times Square in New York, and millions more tipped back champagne flutes and watched it on television, a few hundred people huddled together at a Citgo station in this little town in Appalachia, wearing hunting jackets and those hats with the dangly ear straps, cheering the descent of one confused marsupial.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Talk about parallel universes.
It all started 13 years ago, when someone said to Clay Logan, owner of Brasstown's only gas station and vendor of kitschy possum products, "If New York City can drop a ball, why can't we drop a possum?"
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Logan totally agreed.
At midnight, as he let a rope slip between his fingers, lowering a possum in a Plexiglas cage from the roof of his gas station, Logan yelled out, as he has every New Year's Eve since 1990, "Five, four, three, two, one!"
And then, as the crowd started going bananas, "The possum has landed!" The possum was alive, of course, and was released at the end of the night unharmed, though a little shaken.
And the show was more than just the spectacle of suspending in the air a fuzzy-headed, pink-pawed animal that looked as if it someone stuck it together with spare parts. There were fireworks, the firing of muskets, country food, including peach cobbler and bear stew, and the Miss Possum contest, a cross-dressing affair in which bearded truck drivers wore eye shadow and strutted across stage with hands like oven mitts swinging at the sides of bursting lace dresses.
There was also blue grass music, including the crowd-pleaser that went, "Down in the darkness, much to my delight, there's five pounds of possum, in my headlights tonight."
Life, Logan says, is full of possum-bilities. Over the years he has worked assiduously to promote Brasstown as the "Possum Capital of the World," not for any scientific reason having to do with an unusually large possum population but because Brasstown "desperately needed something."
The town, in the foothills of the Appalachians, north of Atlanta, survives on cattle farming, a few small tobacco plots and industrial jobs where people can find them. Brasstown became famous for 15 minutes a few years ago when townsfolk were rumored to be sheltering Eric Rudolph, the elusive abortion-clinic bombing suspect who was captured in May after five years on the run.
Rudolph grew up around here, not far from the Citgo gas station near Greasy Creek Road where Logan does a brisk trade in stuffed possum toys, cat food-size tins of "possum roadkill" (they're actually filled with dirt), and T-shirts that proclaim, "Possum -- The Other, Other White Meat."
As it says on his Web site, "One man's roadkill is another man's icon."
"We love possums around here," explained Logan, 57, as he spat out an oyster of chewing tobacco juice and wiped his gray beard. "They're an animal everybody says is the dumbest animal in the world, and they probably are. But they'll save your life. If you're out in the woods and you get lost, just follow a possum track and it'll take you right to the road."
Two days before NYE, Logan pumped gas and squeegeed windshields as his friends began to set up the stage in front of his gas station, called Clay's Corner. Electronics included a sophisticated computer system and a 15m-tall TV screen known as the Possum-tron. Logan was expecting up to 1,000 people, a lot for a town with 240 residents.
Then in the afternoon, Logan and his buddies drove out to inspect this year's star, curled up in a wire cage on a breezy hilltop in an undisclosed location (all visitors were sworn to secrecy). Each year, several Brasstown hunters trap a cast of possums for Logan to choose from.
As he scooped the male possum out of its cage and dangled it by its long, pink tail, Logan said, "Ain't it pretty?" His friend, Paul Crisp, nodded, "Now, that's a town possum."
"Yep," Logan said. "Pretty face, nice slick fur."
Later, Logan, who was wearing a possum T-shirt, explained that, "it takes a real artist to draw them. Ninety-nine percent of people make them look like a rat. They don't."
The possum thing is tongue-in-cheek, Logan explained. He is a firm believer of the rule that there is nothing funnier than laughing at yourself.
"We're kind of poking fun at all the stereotypes of rednecks and hillbillies," he said.
His friend, Crisp, who drives an enormous pick-up truck and speaks fluently about gigabytes and microprocessors, said, "We're high-tech rednecks."
Crisp's job last night was to run the lights, the video screen and the computer that controlled the production, culminating in the lowering of the possum from the 20m-high roof. The cage is a pyramid of Plexiglas, complete with a swinging door, air holes and a gold garland sash.
"See, some people think of rednecks as ignorant skinhead types, waving the Confederate flag and living barefoot in the mountains," said Crisp, a building contractor. "We do live in the country. And we like to hunt. But besides that, we're just trying to have fun."
Logan said the festivities cost him around US$2,000, which he hoped to recoup by selling "2004 Possum Drop" T-shirts and special US$20 cast-iron possum bells.
At the inaugural possum drop in 1990, witnessed by about 30 people, Logan used a ceramic possum.
"But everybody told us, why don't you use a real one?" Logan said.
The next year, when they did, one man complained "we were terrorizing it," Crisp said.
"Everybody just laughed at the guy," explained Crisp, who has helped Logan from the beginning. "We weren't terrorizing it. That little fella is just sitting there."
William Reppy, a Duke University professor who teaches animal law, said the possum drop was probably not illegal. North Carolina prohibits unjustifiable physical abuse to animals. But the law does not say anything about psychological pain.
"I don't think any D.A. [district attorney] would touch it with a 10-foot pole," Reppy said.
That frustrates Brenda Overman, president of the Greensboro, North Carolina, chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
"I'm sure the animal is traumatized," Overman said. "You walk up on a possum in the woods, they freeze, they're terrified. They're putting it through horror for hours. Instant death would be better."
Across the country, there were at least two other "drops," inspired by the famous ball drop in Times Square. There was the 363kg illuminated Peach Drop in Atlanta and the Red Shoe Drop in Key West, Florida, in which a 10m-high, high-heel shoe carrying a drag queen was lowered from a balcony.
Logan says he is constantly on the lookout for ways to jazz up his New Year's event.
"Next year, I'd love to get me an albino," he said. "They're rare. And hard to catch. But imagine that. An albino possum drop."
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