How long are we going to go on referring to our year by its formal name, “two thousand ten”? After all, way back in the last century, I bet you never heard anybody say “one thousand nine hundred ninety nine,” when they were giving you the date, did you?

Of course not.

Naturally, during the “zeroes” or the “aughts,” we didn’t have to face this problem. Which was good, because we had lots of other problems that were more pressing: planes flying into the World Trade Center, for instance, plus an economic meltdown, a major hurricane, a tsunami, and a whole bunch of sex scandals.

Everybody was happy to just go around saying, “two thousand one,” “two thousand two,” and all the way up to “two thousand nine.”

But I think it’s time we rethink things. After all, the changeover to “twenty” has to happen sometime—surely we’re not going to be saying “two thousand ninety-nine”—and I say future generations would appreciate it if we’d just make the change right NOW and spare them the problem. They’re going to have their hands full with fixing the mess we’ve done to the planet, and the least we can do is pass down the best way of saying the year. They’ll thank us for it. I can just hear our great-grandchildren saying, “Well, it’s true that they pretty much destroyed all the rain forests and killed off the polar bears, but by God, they gave us the best darned way of thinking of the date.”

Besides, “twenty-ten” sort of has a nice, cool, compact ring to it. And just think, when we get to “twenty-twenty,” there can be all kinds of clever puns about perfect vision, and that will be fun.

Last night, listening to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, I did an informal study of how each of them referred to the new year, and I’m disappointed to say that these two trend-setters flipped back and forth, but mostly landed on saying “two thousand ten.” That’s to be expected, I suppose, as we, as a culture, learn to wrap our tongues around this whole new way of saying the date.

But today at Starbucks, a whole group of people waiting at the counter to pay for their coffees got into a major discussion of this problem, and the view was resoundingly unanimous: TWENTY-TEN IT IS.

The People have spoken.

So how many times have you said the name of the year so far? And what are you calling it?

If you haven’t seen it, it’s really an astonishing four minutes in the Antwerp train station when Julie Andrews’s clear, high voice starts singing over the public address system, and seemingly from out of nowhere, people start performing a choreographed dance–the crowd of dancers growing larger and larger, much to the amazement of the regular folks in the train station.

The dancers are all ordinary looking people of all ages, some wearing business suits and carrying briefcases, others hoisting backpacks. They look like ordinary passengers–only they all know the same steps, and THEY ARE DANCING TOGETHER, performing wordlessly in straight, precise lines. The crowd of onlookers can’t stop themselves from looking stunned and delighted as the folks next to them suddenly join in.

When I watched it, it made me smile–and then without warning, my eyes were filling with tears.

But why? I had no idea. I watched it five more times the first day, and since then I’ve seen it perhaps ten more times, and each time I feel this tugging at my heart.

I figured I was just losing it. But tonight, on salon.com, a commenter on Table Talk put into words just what I’d been feeling. Here’s an excerpt from it:

The dancers are presenting the purest form of art imaginable: art simply and truly for the sake of art.

What they are presenting to the people in that station (and the rest of us, of course) is the ideal of human co-operation. They’re showing us the possibility that a bunch of unrelated, unconnected people could spontaneously burst into a song and dance routine in a train station because that’s what they all wanted to do and that’s what we could do too, if we set our minds to it.

They have shown me a little bit of what it is to be human again.

And if we can be human again, maybe there’s hope for us as a species. And that, I think, is why I love to watch it. It just feel so good to think of ourselves as part of something bigger, something joyful and lovely and filled with hope. It’s the best of our humanity.

As my conductor friend Bobby said in his wonderful blog, Bobby Derailed, how long before this breaks out in Grand Central? We could use a little of this close to home.

People keep emailing it to me, which usually means that everyone in the universe has seen it already…but just in case you haven’t, and you’d like, say, just one more little case of the chills before we tuck this Election Fever away…go to this link and just watch as your computer unfolds an amazing palette of electoral happiness before you. (I mean, really, how often do you get to have electoral happiness?)

After this, I really am going to try to get over all of this and go back to my regularly scheduled life. If I can remember what that is. (As I recall, it doesn’t involve quite so many instances of hugging perfect strangers and crying in public.)

Thanks, too, to open palm, whose beautiful blog brought this to my attention!

I’ve been the tiniest bit tired even through my happiness. Maybe it’s because I drank two glasses of wine and stayed up too late watching everything I could about the election numbers, just wanting to stay there and bask in it longer and longer. Some of us admitted today that we were afraid to go to bed, afraid that when we awoke in the morning that somehow the election would have turned the other way. (It did sort of happen that way in 2000, you know.)

My friend Mary Rose called, and we huddled together on the phone through the tense time before Ohio came to save us. She is the only Democrat among her circle of friends, and a person couldn’t talk only to Republicans last night. It wasn’t possible.

Then I called my 20-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who is at school at NYU. She had to be in a rehearsal last night until nearly 11 p.m. ("The show must go on!") She’d been so disappointed to miss the whole evening’s news reports, the suspense we all were immersed in. When she got out of rehearsal, she said the streets of Manhattan were like a party, filled with people dancing and yelling. The first person she saw was a guy talking into a cell phone, saying, "What? And did he even win Florida? Really? He DID, but he didn’t even NEED IT?" And that’s when, she said, she knew it had been BIG. We held onto the phone last night and listened to Obama’s speech together.

Today, everywhere I went, people were exhausted but exhilarated. At Starbucks, we all went out of our way to be gentle with the worried-looking Republicans, who looked baffled by what they’d seen on television last night: the weeping and laughing, the surging crowds, the dancing in the streets. By the time I left my Starbucks office (the arm chair in the corner), I felt like somebody who needed to go right home to bed. All that talk. All that spent relief. As I drove home, a caller on NPR was arguing that yes, it was amazing, but it really wasn’t going to cure anything. It was just symbolic, not based on anything that would change the real world, or racism. People called in and argued or agreed with this position.

I went to get my oil changed.

The man behind the counter–I’ve seen him before, but we’ve never talked–was an African American guy, who is always nice in that business-friendly kind of way, commenting on the weather and the selection of candy bars in the machine there. But today–in the gray drizzle of November, and with no one else in the place–he was simply beaming.

He was 37 years old, he told me, and he had voted for the first time in this election. He took all his five children with him to the polls and let the littlest one fill in the bubble. He was from Louisiana, where in his childhood it was simply unthinkable that this could ever happen.

"I thought blacks could only go so far," he said. "And I was sure my vote would never count. I wasn’t part of the system. I just worked in this country and lived here, but the way it was running never had anything to do with me. How could it?"

But throughout this election, he said, the hairs have stood up on his neck whenever Barack Obama spoke. For nearly two years, he’s watched every speech, every television clip. He’s talked to his children about this amazing man. He’s made other people pay attention, too.

Last night, he said, he jumped up out of bed and rummaged through his house looking for a blank videotape so he could record Obama’s speech. "I just want to always have that," he said. "I may need to watch it over and over again."

His eyes filled up with tears as he described watching Jesse Jackson and Colin Powell watch that momentous night, when he saw all those people–black and white and Asian and Latino–standing together, all of them outside waiting and cheering in cities all over the world, erupting in joy when the election was called for Barack. "And did you see Kenya?" he said. "They’ve declared a two-day holiday for Barack Obama!" He shook his head in wonder. "The whole world is cheering for us," he said. "They believe in us again."

We both just stood there, nodding and smiling and shedding tears.

"You know what I love the most?" he said. "It’s that it was for YOU and ME. That we can have this conversation today, that we come from different backgrounds, but now we can reach across those differences. You know something? It is going to change EVERYTHING. And you know who we have to thank? It’s the kids. They got involved, and they changed the whole election."

My oil was changed by then. We shook hands and then we hugged.

"It’s a GREAT day!" he said, and he was right.