(photo by ~Bradley)

Santa Cruz, CA, December 1st, 2007: New Year's 2007, the Last Night DIY Parade and Street Party will take over the streets. This year the do-it-yourself, grassroots celebration returns with even more ambitions plans that include a parade, street party, entertainment, and performers well into the night. Organizers hope to attract musicians, street theater performers, puppet shows, square dancers, and circus acts to take over downtown for a whole evening of DIY adventure and entertainment.

In your near future: a New Year’s eve crammed with jugglers, clowns, samba drums, pirates, bikes, and marching bands. The usual city- and corporate-sponsored New Year’s eve event? Hardly. This is Last Night Santa Cruz, a people’s parade and street party. It is a do-it-yourself celebration that goes beyond the now-defunct First Night event, canceled three years ago due to money problems.

Two years ago, the celebration erupted into the national headlines when it was discovered that Santa Cruz Police had violated the civil liberties of organizers by spying on community meetings for months and gathering information about the group and other unrelated activities.

This year, the celebration returns with an unabashedly defiant point-of-view. A manifesto published on the Last Night DIY website states, "Last Night is a decentralized, collective, open, public New Year's Eve celebration, a completely organic event, organized and put on at a grassroots-level." DIY stands for do-it-yourself and the celebration boasts no city-sponsorship and no corporate donors.

The Last Night website (lastnightdiy.org) states, "The parade is not merely a celebration, but a celebration of the power that we all have when we gather together to make something happen. Not just a street party, but a party to reclaim our streets."

This year on New Year's Eve, the celebration will meet at sunset near the Saturn Cafe parking lot on Pacific Ave.

An Open Letter to Our Community

We want to invite you to a meeting to help plan this year's downtown New Year's Eve celebration. Wanna help? It's the Last Night planning meeting & potluck (bring breakfast food this Tuesday). We are brainstorming this year's celebration, and there is all sorts of room and desire for music and politics, guerrilla artists and art, intrigue and adventure.

We invite you to come Tuesday night 6pm -- corner of First Avenue and Atlantic Avenue:

Tuesday Dec 4th 6pm Tuesday Dec 11th 6pm Tuesday Dec 18th 6pm Thursday Dec 27th 6pm

We want to help inspire a DIY New Year's Parade and street party this year. But mostly, we want the opportunity to work with other awesome people who want to help make this happen. Leave your undercover cop (and for that matter, your internal policeman) at home.

Will you join us this Tuesday?