Your choice for exclusive Bicentennial Gala coverage -- now with pictures.

(Updated on Sunday morning because I forgot to append the ending)

Downtown New Albany was all abuzz last night, because it was the long-awaited Bicentennial Gala. Despairing of the future, the city looked instead to its distant past to celebrate a time when women couldn't vote and minorities were third-class citizens -- in short, New Albany's good old days.

Attendees partied like it was 1899.

The Grand was decked out as never before. According to some of the revelers, the  watercress sandwiches were the best they'd tasted since the administration of C. Pralle Erni.

Just down the street from the party, NA Confidential's staff downed Progressive Pints and pondered whether it would be worth crashing the party. Then we had a great idea.

Someone needed to say it, and well, why wait for the Harvest Homecoming parade when there was a far better occasion, right now?

With two-way streets, we could have gotten there quite a bit more quickly.

"I hate those guys," said Dean Wormer.

But before the NAC Deathmobile even reached the Grand, Bill Allen's building finally fell down, and he was given a Pillar Award by Develop New Albany for painting the rubble.

And that's your white bread Bicentennial moment for January. We'll be back with the rest of the story once the coast is clear. Like maybe 2014.

January 26 Shadow Gala at BSB: Last call for ideas.

The New Albany Bicentennial Gala will be worshiping the past to the exclusion of the future on Saturday, January 26, at the Grand.

Given that a gal a day always worked fine for me (thanks, Groucho), it's one of those paint-by-numbers, big-ticket, business-as-usual productions that we'd expect from the Coup d'Geriatrique, and I simply cannot muster the energy to care very much.

By the way, exhaustion with the irreversible mandates of genteel opinion is why NABC will skip brewing its Bicentennial beer, and instead fashion one for the Tricentennial in 2113. Drink now, celebrate later. That's a full one hundred years away, and so once again, the city has at least a fighting chance to get a commemorative right ... next time.

Does anyone want to have a Shadow Gala Party in the Reading Room at Bank Street Brewhouse on the evening of the 26th? If so, should there be a theme? Maybe "Hoptimus Vs. the DAR"?

A midnight walk to piss on Rent Boy Park as a sort of baptism, pre-birth?

Or, maybe just drink some beers? Let me know, either here or at the usual channels.