The Millennium Lunch Club: what do i do?
Attending the Millennium Lunch is easy. Anyone can come. All you have to do is follow these simple instructions:
1) Get hold of a table display. They are available from participating newspapers and magazines, but if you can find one in the press, don't panic - you can get one from here. Just click on the link, print out the page, and cut out, assemble, and display. Easy. Failing that, you can make your own. As long as it displays the words: "Eat, Drink, Think the Millennium, with Jim and Phil's Millennium Lunch (it's the loaves and the fishes all over again)", then it counts. In fact, as long as it contains the words: "Millennium Lunch", that's enough, though we'd prefer you to use the catchphrases if you can. Write the words in silver letters on the side of a helium-filled balloon and float it above your table; print them on a sticker and glue it to your forehead. We don't care - we want the choice to be yours. All we ask is that you use your imagination.
2) Have lunch. This can be on your own or with as many other people as you want (we recommend the latter). Now that the Munch deadline has been extended, you can hold your Millennium Lunch any day between now and December 31st 1999. The only other requirements are that your lunch take place in public and that you display your table display throughout the meal. All other decisions are to be made by you. Book a flash restaurant, or slip down to the café round the corner. Want to eat sushi on top of a traffic light on Madison Avenue? Go for it. Prefer to prepare spagetti on a pavement in Brixton? You have our blessing. Where you eat and what you eat is entirely up to you, as long as you do it in public (no morose and solipsistic little Millennium Lunches on your own - that's not in the spirit of the thing). But whatever form it takes, try to make it an adventure, a special event. Be nice. Invite somone random along. Join forces with other millennium lunchers in the same establishment or in the vicinity. Treat your friends, your office, your self-help group, your carpool. Surprise your lover, your husband, your wife. Eat Millennium Lunches everyday throughout August and get yourself sponsored to raise money for homeless families in Kosovo. Use a Millennium Lunch as an excuse to raise awareness on some political issue close to your heart. Have a dance lunch, a liquid lunch, a drug lunch. We don't mind. We just want you to be happy, and to claim a little piece of the Millennium for yourselves while there's still time.
3) (optional) Discuss your plans for celebrating the Millennium. This third requirement will not be strictly enforced, but the Millennium Lunch marketing department felt that there should be a point to the Millennium Lunch - that you, the public, would not swallow it otherwise. We, the organisers, have deferred to the greater knowledge and wisdom of those trained in this kind of thing, and have decided to insert such a point. And the point of the Munch is, should you choose to accept it, to discuss your plans for the Millennium. We feel that the Munch now provides a public service, a low pressure way to plan your celebration. Or an ideal forum for dismissing the whole December 31st 1999 to January 1st 2000 thing as a complete waste of space, an accident of history, another human attempt to imprint meaning on a disinterested cosmos.
4) Send a description of your lunch, along with photographs and till reciepts if you can, to: millennium@lunchclub.freeserve.co.uk (please note: this email no longer active). Include details of any plans you might have made or realisations you might have come to (if any), and if we haven't got anything better to do we'll put you in the hall of fame and give you free lifetime membership to The Millennium Lunchclub of Great Britain.
Have fun!