‘Three, two, one’ is Newport man’s cue

For the last 15 years, Newport Beach resident Treb Heining has made the pilgrimage to New York’s Times Square every New Year’s Eve.

But unlike the observers, who watch the bands and celebrities perform while waiting for the ball to drop, Heining’s role is larger than most. And definitely behind the scenes.

At the stroke of midnight this new year — and every hour leading up to it starting at 7 p.m. — he, along with his crew, will drop a total of 7,000 pounds of confetti on the streets below his rooftop base.

Heining is the “airborne effects master,” as his peers call him, for the New Year’s Eve bash and has been since 1992 when the Times Square Alliance business improvement district was formed to clean up the area and attract business.

The alliance wanted to really spice up the New Year’s Eve celebration.

An acquaintance of Heining called him in for a meeting with the new alliance officials to exchange creative ideas about what other events they could have for New Year’s aside from the ball drop, which first dazzled revelers when the calendar turned to 1908.

Heining “in a way is a genius. He’s amazing and knows how to create a spectacular visual effect,” alliance President Tim Tompkins said.

In this modern world, when pyrotechnics, machinery and computerized effects dominate large events, Heining recruits a team of confetti throwers who join him in simply hurling the shredded paper from a rooftop.

The camaraderie of the friends, neighbors and families who accompany him to the rooftop is something he’s grown fond of over the years.

“In the very high-tech area of Times Square It’s nice to have this old fashioned kind of tradition,” Tompkins said.

This is the first year the event has had what the alliance calls a “practice countdown” at the end of each hour, beginning at 6:59 p.m. When the clock turns to the top of the hour, it’s Heining’s cue. This year, each piece will have a word on it to codify what the alliance and the event’s sponsor thinks New Year’s Eve is all about. Each hour will have a different word such as “dance,” “peace,” or “celebrate.”

“As the ball is coming down during those last 10 or 15 seconds, the crowd noise doubles,” Heining said. “Then it’s just an amazing blizzard of colored paper and the music and the crowd. New York itself is just an amazing place to be on New Year’s Eve.”

Heining is no stranger to major event coordinating. His claim to fame has historically been his pioneering work in the balloon industry.

He started by selling balloons at Disneyland when he was 15 years old, and in the 1970s, he started innovating the inflatable novelty. He was the first to introduce the balloon arch — an arch of spiraling, inflated balloons — and developed the glasshouse balloon, which is now hugely popular at places like Disneyland and South Coast Plaza.

He’s helped color the festivities for the Olympics, about 15 Superbowls, a Playboy New Year’s Eve party and he’s made the Guinness Book of World Records several times for the largest simultaneous balloon release. This year, he developed a ballon that lights up, he said.

But when he was asked to shower New Year’s Eve partyers with confetti at Times Square, he decided he’d skip some of his major events to be a part of it in New York City. He said he’ll keep at the New Year’s Eve confetti business as long as they’ll have him.

“It’s an honor because this is an event known around the world, and it’s got a huge tradition,” he said. “I do a lot of world travel myself, and there’s not a place I go to … [where people don’t] know about the ball drop…. I still get goose bumps and a get a tear in my eye when it happens.”