Kissing goodbye to the old millennium

Martin Kuz

Monday, Jan. 3, 2000 | 9:58 a.m.

Forget wheezy party favors and bombastic toasts about the promise of the 21st century. Dennis Kotlar and Joy Navarrete greeted the new millennium in quieter style when the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve.

"We just locked lips," Kotlar said. "Why not start the century with a kiss?"

The San Francisco couple were among the thousands of revelers smooching in the New Year at the Bellagio as the 20th century bowed out Saturday morning. They gathered at the world's priciest resort -- the 15-month-old Bellagio cost $1.5 billion to build -- to celebrate what should be, barring sudden advances in genetic engineering, a truly once-in-a-lifetime event.

Kotlar, 32, and Navarrete, 29, stood outside the hotel as the historic hour approached, a vantage point that provided a view of some of the 300,000 people who again turned Las Vegas Boulevard into the world's longest trash can.

The couple sang and toe-tapped along as Frank Sinatra's "Luck Be a Lady" boomed out over the resort's 11-acre lake during a performance of its dancing waters. They watched as a forest's worth of confetti shot out the top of Paris Las Vegas Eiffel Tower while a team of white-clad acrobats tethered to its shaft performed a gravity-defying routine.

And, of course, they kissed some more.

"Who needs a toast?" Kotlar said with a smile.

The dawning of 2000 received a robust welcome inside the hotel as well. Not long after midnight Max Breakman scored $270 with a single tap of the fingers on a $1 slot machine. The Los Angeles resident and auto repair shop owner said the jackpot marked his first big win after a day-long dry spell.

"The 20th century ended like a bad dream," Breakman, 44, said. "The 21st century is looking good so far."

The crowd swirling inside the Bellagio unofficially ranked as the best-dressed of any casino in town. Women wore mile-high pumps and skimpy black-satin gowns that played hide-and-seek with their skin. Men sported freshly pressed tuxes with lapels sharp enough to shave a 5-o'clock shadow.

They didn't walk so much as float through the hotel, some on their way to a private party hosted by Bellagio owner Steve Wynn, head of Mirage Resorts Inc. Among the attendees was tuxed-out Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who spent part of his evening being interviewed by Connie Chung of ABC News on a stage near the resort's Strip entrance.

"I'm the mayor of the best city in the world at the turn of the century," Goodman said, drifting past onlookers inside the casino. "This is fantastic."

Other visitors dressed to the nines -- make that tens -- dined at any one of the resort's upscale restaurants for their last meal of the century. This was no free lunch: Patrons paid $500 at Olives to partake of a "Mediterranean masquerade" that included a seven-course meal, a five-piece jazz band and keepsake photos and champagne glasses.

Jim and Debbie Williams stopped for a drink at Osteria Del Circo before taking in the invitation-only concert of Harry Connick Jr. at the hotel. The Las Vegas couple, founders of the Jitters Gourmet Coffee chain, offered themselves mock congratulations for braving the Y2-chaos that pessimists had anticipated.

"Yeah, we're gutsy people," Jim Williams said, laughing. "Out and about when absolutely nothing's going to go wrong."

Emily and Pat Wietor, a twenty-something Henderson couple, swung by the Bellagio within an hour of tying the knot at the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel. The newlyweds would have loved to spend New Year's Eve at the hotel, but only found time to grab dessert -- the baby sitter they hired to look after their kids had to go home at 10 p.m.

Each of the Wietors, still dressed in wedding garb, offered a distinct reason for marrying on the millennium's final day.

Hers: "I was kind of hesitant at first. But then I figured it could possibly be the end of the world, and I'd rather be married."

His: "I'll always remember our anniversary."

His reason earned him an elbow to the ribs.

But make no mistake, plenty of ordinary people wearing ordinary clothes traipsed through the Bellagio on what, given the relative absence of mayhem in the city, proved an ordinary night.

They relaxed in the sports book to catch local TV news updates, or window-shopped -- make that window-pawed -- at the resort's swank clothing and jewelry stores. One group of friends played their own low-stakes game of craps outside the hotel's Gallery of Fine Art before a security guard shooed them away.

Joe Smith and his friend Joe Smith -- that's not a misprint -- drove from Los Angeles to hail the new millennium. Both men, their names verified with a flash of ID, gorged on lobster and crab legs served up at the Bellagio buffet for a special New Year's Eve dinner.

The two ordinary Joes savored the $49.95 meal -- more so because they had been comped. Yet even as the younger Smith, a 39-year-old computer programmer, predicted that Y2K would pass without a glitch, he joked about the importance of eating well just in case.

"I suppose it's not good to face the end of the world on an empty stomach," he said.

Whatever their attire, most revelers bolted outside to experience the new year's birth. As the hotel emptied faster than the Titanic, Connie Chen prepared to roust her two young children, who slumbered peacefully on a couch inside the Bellagio's main entrance.

"You bet I'm going to wake them up," said Chen, 40, in town from Los Angeles. "It's once in a lifetime. It's one thousand years till the next one. They can't wait around for that."

The stroke of midnight brought the usual range of reactions. Couples kissed, young men exchanged high-fives, a knot of friends belted out a rendition of "Auld Lang Syne." One man slumped in the shrubbery lining the sidewalk into the hotel. In a futile effort to wake him up, a pal blew into a small plastic horn that he held inches from the man's face. The sustained honk, sounding something like a goose on steroids, had no effect.

Minutes later, with the big moment past and the world still standing, people began to drift back inside.

Daniella Denti, 26, and her beau, Vincent Greco, 32, clutched hands as they strolled amid the thousands of flowers in the Bellagio's conservatory. The couple, visiting from Sicily, said the Italian-themed hotel didn't quite remind them of home, but they were charmed all the same.

"This town, this hotel, it's beautiful," Denti said. "It's been like a dream. It is magic."