Cocktail Drinks Quotes

We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.

I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm". At the time this was the last thing on my mind...

Cats don't drink cocktails,' I said. 'Cats don't shoot lasers from their eyes, either, but here we are, Carl. Mama needs a night off.

I have literally always been the kid who believes in fairy tales but I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a kid, I was a twenty-something in a cocktail bar who never feels old enough to drink

I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

Nick: "Don't you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?" Nora: "No, thanks." Nick: "Maybe it would if I took one.

Well, I drank enough to sustain a small Spanish village, I haven't had an orgasm in a thousand years, and I will probably die old and alone in a beautifully designed apartment with all of Clive's illegitimate children swarming around me...How do you think I feel?

Austin and I proceeded to knock back a couple of Ketel One and grapefruit juices, which happened to be my drink of the moment. Someone told me that grapefruit was a great detoxifier and I decided I wanted to start cleaning out my liver WHILE I was having a cocktail.

A woman sat alone at her dining table, reading and drinking a cocktail. It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.

They talk of my drinking but never my thirst. - Scottish proverb

I drank a portion of her blood, just enough to keep the virus under control, but not enough to kill her. It was like drinking one of Ophelia’s cocktails. The alcohol in her bloodstream filled me with dizzy thoughts, while the blood filled the virus with more hunger.

Well...yeah. It just goes to show. (Peabody) Show what (Dallas) You should get dressed up, go dancing, drink grown-up cocktails, and have sex as much as you can before you're dead. (Peabody)

For here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in a time of war. And here at the heart of the city, right under the sweep of the searchlights, was Rick’s Café Américain, where the beleaguered could assemble for the moment to gamble and drink and listen to music; to conspire, console, and most importantly, hope. And at the center of this oasis was Rick. As the Count’s friend had observed, the saloonkeeper’s cool response to Ugarte’s arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.

Cats don’t drink cocktails,” I said. “Cats don’t shoot lasers from their eyes, either, but here we are, Carl. Mama needs a night off.

How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work…We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us. No.

Think about today, not tomorrow. Dance over the cracks so you don't fall into them. Drink champagne in the afternoons and invent ridiculous cocktails to make the ruined world glitter again. Keep going, one foot in front of the other. Don't look down.

Now, if you will excuse me, a dead woman is trying to convince me to drink something that comes in layers.

Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle —

You know that movie, where the little boy says 'I see dead people'? The Sixth Sense. Well, I see them all the time, and I'm getting tired of it. That's what's ruined my mood. Here it is, almost Christmas, and I didn't even think about putting up a tree, because I'm still seeing the autopsy lab in my head. I'm still smelling it on my hands. I come home on a day like this, after two postmortems, and I can't think about cooking dinner. I can't even look at a piece of meat without thinking of muscle fibers. All I can deal with is a cocktail. And then I pour the drink and smell the alcohol, and suddenly there I am, back in the lab. Alcohol, formalin, they both have that same sharp smell.

A proper drink at the right time—one mixed with care and skill and served in a true spirit of hospitality—is better than any other made thing at giving us the illusion, at least, that we’re getting what we want from life. A cat can gaze upon a king, as the proverb goes, and after a Dry Martini or a Sazerac Cocktail or two, we’re all cats.

So that night it’s only Athena and me at a loud, overpriced rooftop bar in Georgetown. She’s flinging back cocktails like she has a duty to prove she’s having a good time, and I’m drinking to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead.

By drinking, a boy acts like a man. After drinking, many a man acts like a boy.

I’m pretty sure if I stopped drinking for even one day, the accumulated hangover would probably kill me.

You should get dressed up, go dancing, drink grown-up cocktails, and have sex as much as you can before you’re dead.

I have seen purer liquors, better seagars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans here, than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.

Tabitha stuck a finger into her cocktail, turning the drink an offensively bright shade of pink. “What’d you just do?” I asked around a mouthful of half-popped popcorn kernels. “I turned it pink,” she said. “Why?” She shrugged. “So it’ll be pink.

She was teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Three-quarters child, one-quarter yearning. Her dreams were confused kaleidoscopes of swanning through the sets of TV shows, drinking cocktails that looked like vodka martinis and tasted like Sprite, wearing lipstick and pumps covered in red craft glitter, and marrying someone who was half pop star and half stuffed animal.

Strawberries in June are ordinary. Still, they are luscious and sweet, all the same. But I was just that: a June strawberry, one of many in a fragrant basket. Not the choicest Chilean import which would grace the cake of a December wedding, or a particularly succulent one, singled out to sweeten a fruity cocktail drink in a swanky bar.

Trying not to poke myself in the eye with the rosemary. I wonder how everyone else with a gin and tonic is managing it without injuring themselves. Maybe that’s a thing that you get taught at private school - how to drink cocktails with unwieldy garnishes.

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.

It's like liquor. You can struggle and drink it straight, or you can make yourself a mixed drink. Life works better with other people around. Always go for the fruity cocktail.

If you can't be a good example, at least be a terrible warning!

I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.

lavender and brandy under your tongue for an entire weekend. blessed. joy as a watermelon seed i keep swallowing on purpose.

You’re not addicted to a drink or a drug; you’re addicted to the chemical cocktail your brain serves up when you feed your addiction.

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore--a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.

I thought of all the nights I’d spent in temperature controlled clubs and restaurants, under artificial lights, drinking artificial cocktails with artificial friends. Artificial problems. Artificial drama. How many real, glorious nights had I missed? Nights like this, when the universe dances for you, and you become a tiny but beautiful note of the magical song it sings.

How many'd we do?" is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails,

We're young. We’re supposed to drink too much. We're supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each other's brains out. We were designed to party. We owe it to ourselves to party hard. We owe it to each other. This is it. This is our time. So a few of us will overdose, or go mental. Charles Darwin said you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. That's what it's about - breakin' eggs - by eggs, I mean, getting twatted on a cocktail of class. As. If you could see yourselves... We had it all. We have fucked up bigger and better than any generation that came before us. We were so beautiful... We're screw-ups. I plan on staying a screw-up until my late twenties, or maybe even my early thirties. And I will shag my own mum before I let anyone else take that away from me!

Rather than finding my identity in my relationship with God, I was finding it in my drive to do “good work.” The more I dove into Scripture, the more I realized that I had been deluded. I had grown up drinking a dangerous cocktail–a mix of the gospel, the Protestant work ethic, and the American dream.

You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

She's flinging back cocktails like she has a duty to prove she's having a good time, and I'm drinking to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead.

In pictures, Grace’s parents are always drinking translucent cocktails next to terrible things like horses or politicians or rosebushes.

When life hands you lemons, grab the nearest bottle of vodka and make yourself a cocktail.

If the ambiance is right, you'll get your high on a mocktail in a cocktail glass, as it is a guilt-free drink.

Regular drinkers don’t have cocktails in order to relax after a rough day; their day is filled with tension and anxiety because they drink so much.

Cats don’t drink cocktails, but here we are, Carl. Mama needs a night off.

In AA, you are brainwashed into believing that all the good stuff happens only after you stop drinking. Clearly they are lying; my life improved significantly as soon as I ordered a cocktail.

An ice-cold Martini is like the first sip of water for a desert strandee — nectar from the Gods; a warm one is a human rights violation and tastes more like Bear Grylls' regular drink of choice

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. (James Meek in interview with TMO)

I gather from Audrius that that concoction contains ten different ingredients. In addition to vodka, rum, brandy, and grenadine, it boasts an extraction of rose, a dash of bitters, and a melted lollipop. But a cocktail is not meant to be a mélange. It is not a potpourri or an Easter parade. At its best, a cocktail should be crisp, elegant, sincere—and limited to two ingredients.” “Just two?” “Yes. But they must be two ingredients that complement each other; that laugh at each other’s jokes and make allowances for each other’s faults; and that never shout over each other in conversation. Like gin and tonic,” he said, pointing to his drink. “Or bourbon and water . . . Or whiskey and soda . . .” Shaking his head, he raised his glass and drank from it. “Excuse me for expounding.

Kos had different tastes. He was on the lookout for that Midwestern housewife attending a conference with her husband. There was usually at least one in the hotel bar. She was always seated in a corner drinking a cocktail and pretending to read a novel while her husband was off doing manly things. Kos knew something Mason didn't—stewardesses partied in every port, but housewives were still waiting for the party.

I have literally always been the kid who believes in fairy tales but I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a kid, I was a twenty-something in a cocktail bar who never feels old enough to drink so I said, “I don’t know.

...But a cocktail is not meant to be a mélange. It is not a potpourri or an Easter parade. At its best, a cocktail should be crisp, elegant, sincere—and limited to two ingredients.” “Just two?” “Yes. But they must be two ingredients that complement each other; that laugh at each other’s jokes and make allowances for each other’s faults; and that never shout over each other in conversation. Like gin and tonic,” he said, pointing to his drink.

The thing I love about a blue drink is that it isn’t pretending to be anything other than a prissy, made-up concoction for people who can’t drink their whiskey straight. A cocktail with the courage of its lack of conviction.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

And she would hope that the girl who had tittered was living in a shitty tract house with a goy husband who beat her, that she had been pregnant three times and had miscarried each time, that her husband cheated on her with diseased women, that she had slipped discs and fallen arches and cysts on her dirty tittering tongue. She would hate herself for these thoughts, these uncharitable thoughts, and promise to do better – to stop drinking these bitter gall-and-wormwood cocktails.

toxins overloading it, it often pushes them out through the skin. Hence, heavy drinking shows on your skin. Also, beer and cocktails are loaded with candida; a fungus that leads to outbreaks. Booze shrinks the pores, making them more prone to blockages.

Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck’s Fizz and being friendly to one another, and so what if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred kilometers of a coastline if they think we’ve violated the Benthic Treaty?

It's just drinks,” Heather said, lifting the second cocktail up and smiling at the men, too. “It doesn't mean anything else.” I nodded, but I didn't know how to tell her how wrong she was. That it's possible for a man to interpret a woman's initial permission as license to steamroll over any boundary she might set after that. That once a woman says yes, it's possible a man might not give a shit when she changes her mind. He might tear off her clothes; he might bruise her body and send splinters of blistering fear into her soul. He might do this even if he's someone she knows, someone she loves and trusts. And then she might end up in a bar with a fake smile plastered on her face, trying to act like none of it mattered, trying to believe, despite the agony deep down inside her bones, that she's over what he did, desperate to pretend she's safe.

Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word. This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves “so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.” The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God (Jn 17:21).

It was one of those special cocktails where each very sticky, very strong ingredient is poured in very slowly, so that they layer on top of one another. Drinks like this tend to get called Traffic Lights or Rainbow’s Revenge or, in places where truth is more highly valued, Hello and Good-bye, Mr. Brain Cell.

He thought of his old name. He’d almost forgotten it. He said it out loud, and it sounded as though he were being called by some stranger. He felt the familiar pressure in his head after yesterday’s drinking. Because it must be noted that Chinese people have two names: one given by their families, used to summon the child, scold and punish him, but also the basis for affectionate nicknames. But when the child goes out into the world, he or she takes another name, an outside name, a world name, a personage name. Donned like a uniform, a surplice, a prison jumpsuit, an outfit for a formal cocktail party. This outside name is useful and easy to remember. From here on out it will corroborate its person. Best if it’s worldly, universal, recognizable to everyone; down with the locality of our names. Down with Oldrzich, Sung Yin, Kazimierz, and Jyrek; down with Blażen, Liu, and Milica. Long live Michael, Judith, Anna, Jan, Samuel, and Eryk!

Nick and I, we sometimes laugh, laugh out loud, at the horrible things women make their husbands do to prove their love. The pointless tasks, the myriad sacrifices, the endless small surrenders. We call these men the dancing monkeys. Nick will come home, sweaty and salty and beer-loose from a day at the ballpark,and I’ll curl up in his lap, ask him about the game, ask him if his friend Jack had a good time, and he’ll say, ‘Oh, he came down with a case of the dancing monkeys – poor Jennifer was having a “real stressful week” and really needed him at home.’ Or his buddy at work, who can’t go out for drinks because his girlfriend really needs him to stop by some bistro where she is having dinner with a friend from out of town. So they can finally meet. And so she can show how obedient her monkey is: He comes when I call, and look how well groomed! Wear this, don’t wear that. Do this chore now and do this chore when you get a chance and by that I mean now. And definitely, definitely, give up the things you love for me, so I will have proof that you love me best. It’s the female pissing contest – as we swan around our book clubs and our cocktail hours, there are few things women love more than being able to detail the sacrifices our men make for us. A call-and-response, the response being: ‘Ohhh, that’s so sweet.’ I am happy not to be in that club. I don’t partake, I don’t get off on emotional coercion, on forcing Nick to play some happy-hubby role – the shrugging, cheerful, dutiful taking out the trash, honey! role. Every wife’s dream man, the counterpoint to every man’s fantasy of the sweet, hot, laid-back woman who loves sex and a stiff drink. I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it. I don’t need pathetic dancing-monkey scenarios to repeat to my friends, I am content with letting him be himself. I don’t know why women find that so hard.

MATTIE FAE: I don’t believe you. Watchin’ the baseball game and drinkin’ beers. Don’t you have any sense of what’s going on around you? This situation is fraught. CHARLIE: Am I supposed to sit here like a statue? You’re drinking whiskey. MATTIE FAE: I’m having a cocktail. CHARLIE: You’re drinking straight whiskey. MATTIE FAE: Just . . . show a little class.

I want to try one of Miss Beatrice’s favorite drinks. Either a Sex on the Beach or a Long Island Iced Tea. Or that one. What is it, Carl? She always says it’s her Kryptonite.” “A Dirty Shirley,” I said. “Yeah, I want to try that one.” “Cats don’t drink cocktails,” I said. “Cats don’t shoot lasers from their eyes, either, but here we are, Carl. Mama needs a night off.

. . . and I had a cocktail,’ Alice said. I was impressed, and asked her if she had enjoyed it. ‘Well, truthfully, not very much,’ Alice admitted. ‘But we shall have to get used to them, you know.’ We both agreed about drinking being one of the things you had to do when you were grown up. Fortunately we already enjoyed smoking, so we wouldn’t have to bother about that.

Is it because I’m marrying a woman? Is that why Orion hasn’t responded? He’s never been homophobic, but maybe this strikes too close to home. Bruises his male ego. That time when we met with the lawyers to negotiate the terms of the divorce, he’d already been drinking. I could smell it. And it wasn’t exactly the cocktail hour; it was 11:00 A.M. I’d wanted to say something to him about it after we left, but I didn’t. I was still trying to figure out what the new rules were about such things, now that we were almost divorced. The other day, I tried imagining what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot—if he had left me for a man. It was a ridiculous exercise: picturing two hairy-chested men in bed with each other, one of them Orion. LOL, as Marissa would put it. LMFAO.

At its best, a cocktail should be crisp, elegant, sincere—and limited to two ingredients.” “Just two?” “Yes. But they must be two ingredients that complement each other; that laugh at each other’s jokes and make allowances for each other’s faults; and that never shout over each other in conversation. Like gin and tonic,” he said, pointing to his drink. “Or bourbon and water . . . Or whiskey and soda .

Captain Thomas Walduck in 1708 neatly summarized the development of the West Indies: “Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.

He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual’ world within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea—the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people ‘good’ by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be ‘priggish’, ‘intolerant’, and (of course) ‘Puritanical’. Meanwhile

It's common knowledge in the industry that people often lie, or minimize things, when they participate in surveys, No one wants to tell a stranger they drink four cocktails a night, or eat junk food for every meal. It's the same with their views on candidates and political issues. Most people won't tell you they don't like someone when they have to look you in the eye. None of that would matter for me, though, because I would know their true emotions whether they shared them or not.

Little known fact: One bee sting begets others. When a honeybee stings you it simultaneously releases a pheromone cocktail that lets the hive know it needs defending. The dominant ingredient in this pheromone, incidentally, is something called isoamyl acetate, which is a common ingredient in certain kinds of candy because it tastes like bananas. It’s also used in Hefeweizen beer. In other words, don’t eat banana-flavored Runts or drink a wheat Bavarian beer before rummaging around in beehives.

Barbara and I had arrived early, so I got to admire everyone’s entrance. We were seated at tables around a dance floor that had been set up on the lawn behind the house. Barbara and I shared a table with Deborah Kerr and her husband. Deborah, a lovely English redhead, had been brought to Hollywood to play opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. Louis B. Mayer needed a cool, refined beauty to replace the enormously popular redhead, Greer Garson, who had married a wealthy oil magnate and retired from the screen in the mid-fifties. Deborah, like her predecessor, had an ultra-ladylike air about her that was misleading. In fact, she was quick, sharp, and very funny. She and Barbara got along like old school chums. Jimmy Stewart was also there with his wife. It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d worked for Hitchcock. It was a treat talking to him, and I felt closer to him than I ever did on the set of Rope. He was so genuinely happy for my success in Strangers on a Train that I was quite moved. Clark Gable arrived late, and it was a star entrance to remember. He stopped for a moment at the top of the steps that led down to the garden. He was alone, tanned, and wearing a white suit. He radiated charisma. He really was the King. The party was elegant. Hot Polynesian hors d’oeuvres were passed around during drinks. Dinner was very French, with consommé madrilène as a first course followed by cold poached salmon and asparagus hollandaise. During dessert, a lemon soufflé, and coffee, the cocktail pianist by the pool, who had been playing through dinner, was discreetly augmented by a rhythm section, and they became a small combo for dancing. The dance floor was set up on the lawn near an open bar, and the whole garden glowed with colored paper lanterns. Later in the evening, I managed a subdued jitterbug with Deborah Kerr, who was much livelier than her cool on-screen image. She had not yet done From Here to Eternity, in which she and Burt Lancaster steamed up the screen with their love scene in the surf. I was, of course, extremely impressed to be there with Hollywood royalty that evening, but as far as parties go, I realized that I had a lot more fun at Gene Kelly’s open houses.

TRUST IN ONE’S ORGANISM A second characteristic of the persons who emerge from therapy is difficult to describe. It seems that the person increasingly discovers that his own organism is trustworthy, that it is a suitable instrument for discovering the most satisfying behavior in each immediate situation. If this seems strange, let me try to state it more fully. Perhaps it will help to understand my description if you think of the individual as faced with some existential choice: “Shall I go home to my family during vacation, or strike out on my own?” “Shall I drink this third cocktail which is being offered?” “Is this the person whom I would like to have as my partner in love and in life?” Thinking of such situations, what seems to be true of the person who emerges from the therapeutic process? To the extent that this person is open to all of his experience, he has access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior. He has knowledge of his own feelings and impulses, which are often complex and contradictory. He is freely able to sense the social demands, from the relatively rigid social “laws” to the desires of friends and family. He has access to his memories of similar situations, and the consequences of different behaviors in those situations. He has a relatively accurate perception of this external situation in all of its complexity. He is better able to permit his total organism, his conscious thought participating, to consider, weigh and balance each stimulus, need, and demand, and its relative weight and intensity. Out of this complex weighing and balancing he is able to discover that course of action which seems to come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation, long-range as well as immediate needs.

We started getting hungry again, and some of the women started chanting, "MEAT, MEAT, MEAT!" We were having steak tartare. It was the only appropriate main course we could think of, for such a graceless theme, and seeing as nobody in the club was confident making it, we had to order it in. I made chips to serve with it, though. I deep-fried them in beef fat. The steak was served in little roulades, raw and minced, like horsemeat. It was topped with a raw egg yolk, chopped onions, pickled beetroot, and capers. I had wanted to use the Wisconsin version, which is served on cocktail bread and dubbed "cannibal sandwich," but Stevie insisted we go classic. Not everyone could stomach theirs with the raw egg yolk, too, and so, unusually for a Supper Club, there was quite a lot left over. We took another break to drink and move about the room. Some of us took MDMA. Emmeline had brought a box of French macarons, tiny pastel-colored things, which we threw over the table, trying to get them into one another's mouth, invariably missing. For our proper dessert, we had a crepe cake: a stack of pancakes bound together with melted chocolate. We ate it with homemade ice cream, which was becoming a real staple.

She watched as he put a few ice cubes in a heavy glass, then expertly curled a strip of grapefruit rind from one of the fruits in a bowl on the bar top. "This must be a favorite," she commented, nodding at the supply of grapefruit nestled in the bowl along with the usual lemons and limes. He poured a generous measure from the black bottle and handed it to her with a cocktail napkin. "See for yourself." Gemma wasn't in the habit of drinking gin neat, so she sniffed, then took a tentative sip. The flavors exploded in her mouth- coriander and juniper and lime and... grapefruit. "Oh, wow," she said, when her eyes stopped watering. "That is amazing. I'm converted.

he placed the drink down carefully in front of me. “I call this one the Huxley,” he said. “Excuse me?” I glanced down at the…whatever it was. A cocktail of some sort, in a tall glass with crushed ice. Smooth, jet black in colour, and garnished with a strawberry. When I looked back up at Cole, he was biting down on his lip in a really distracting way. “Uh. The Huxley. It reminds me of you. Same colour as your nails. Bitter coffee for your broody personality, a bite of ginger for your, uh, fiery moments, and sweet blackberry and raspberry for your sweet tooth. And vodka, because of those vodka shots we did at the wedding. It’s supposed to be garnished with blackberries or raspberries, but I used a strawberry because they’re your favourite.” I wanted to kiss him more than I’d ever wanted to kiss anyone in my life.

FLETCHER: The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker. Why did Charlie Parker become Charlie Parker, Andrew? ANDREW: Because Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him. FLETCHER: Exactly. Young kid, pretty good on the sax, goes up to play his solo in a cutting session, fucks up -- and Jones comes this close to slicing his head off for it. He’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And practices and practices. With one goal in mind: that he never ever be laughed off-stage again. A year later he goes back to the Reno, and he plays the best motherfucking solo the world had ever heard. Now imagine if Jones had just patted young Charlie on the head and said “Good job.” Charlie would’ve said to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a good job,” and that’d be that. No Bird. Tragedy, right? Except that’s just what people today want. The Shaffer Conservatories of the world, they want sugar. You don’t even say “cutting session” anymore, do you? No, you say “jam session”. What the fuck kind of word is that? Jam session? It’s a cutting session, Andrew, this isn’t fucking Smucker’s. It’s about weeding out the best from the worst so that the worst become better than the best. I mean look around you. $25 drinks, mood lighting, a little shrimp cocktail to go with your Coltrane. And people wonder why jazz is dying. Take it from me, and every Starbucks jazz album only proves my point. There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than “good job”.

I attempt to chew the popcorn gag Dean just stuffed into my mouth, but a kernel gets sucked into the back of my throat. I hack over the bar--my hands splayed wide as I brace myself for impending death. Dean absentmindedly pat mys back because let's face it, I'm coughing so I'm breathing, but his swats are not helping. I beat my chest to try to prevent myself from asphyxiating as I grapple for my drink, which is woefully empty. I grab Dean's draft beer, but as soon as the golden liquid hits my tongue, I dry heave from the horrid taste. Holy shit! Kate's right, IPA beer tastes like poison! My face screws up in disgust as I force the liquid down my throat and suck in a big breath of cleansing air. With a pathetic whimper, I wave my hands in front of my face and search for a cocktail napkin. Mr. Mustache bartender is still balls deep in the blonde, so I'm forced to use the back of my hand to wipe the dribble off my chin. When I finally regain some semblance of composure I turn around to glower at Dean. "Your beer tastes like a skunk's ass.

If more Christians today summon the courage to take seriously the dark sides of our history, we will wake up to the degree to which our religion still interprets the Bible exactly as our misguided ancestors did.28 (No, we don’t draw exactly the same conclusions, but we have neither acknowledged nor rejected the method of reading the Bible that made those unacceptable interpretations acceptable.) If we face our past, we will see how many power centers within the Christian community still carry white Christian supremacy and white Christian privilege cards in their back pockets, often without even knowing they do so, and as a result can be found consistently allying themselves with oppressors rather than the oppressed. We will see behind the curtain, so to speak, exposing how many Christians still drink the old cocktails: of God and gold (including the “black gold” of fossil fuels), of Christianity and white supremacy, of Christianity and privilege, of Christianity and colonialism, of Christianity and exceptionalism, of Christianity and violence.

In Taiwan, where bubble tea was invented, people have been drinking Chinese tea styles with milk since Dutch colonization in the seventeenth century. But milk tea-- specifically, Indian black teas where milkiness is as important as the tea-- arrived late, some time around the Second World War. As the story goes, a former bartender, Chang Fan Shu, thought to serve it cold, and shake it like you would a cocktail. When he did this, the fats and proteins in the milk allowed it to form a foam, and he made what people started to call bubble tea. Some shops started serving iced versions, shaken like a cocktail. And then in the eighties, in a Taiwanese tea shop-- and nobody can agree which one-- someone had the idea of adding chewy pearls of tapioca starch to the bubble tea, making bubble tea-squared. New variants quickly appeared. Earl Grey boba tea. Milkless jasmine green tea or osmanthus versions. A lot of the time the tea was lost completely, most notably in the crystalline pop fruit flavors such as lychee or mulberry, although also in milkshake-like blends like lilac taro.

tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams have experienced losing to a male with not nearly as much notoriety as they have… in a blowout. In 1998, in a matchup against Karsten Braasch, the 203rd ranked male tennis player from Germany, Serena lost 6–1 and Venus lost 6–2. Keep in mind Serena is a 23-time Grand Champion and her sister a 7-time Grand Champion. Serena herself said, “I hit shots that would have been winners on the women’s Tour, and he got to them easily.” Is it a good time to mention at the time Braasch was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and smoked during changeovers the day of the match? He also admitted to playing a round of golf and drinking a few cocktails before facing the Williams sisters as well as performing like “a guy ranked 600th.” Thirteen years later, in an interview with David Letterman, Serena noted she would lose to Andy Murray 6–0 in just a matter of minutes. She went as far to say men and women’s tennis is a totally different sport. Serena told Letterman, “I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed.

Life is an adventure orchestrated by God, and our attempts to be in the driver’s seat will always result in mere frustration. Why? Because this is not the way of authentic love, which involves the total surrender of self. Authentic love calls for sacrifice. That is true of all of us. Whether it’s being up with a baby all night, caring for an aging parent, giving a hurting friend a landing place in your home for a while, or becoming a foster parent, we will be called on to sacrifice. That is the way of the Cross, and we are not offered anything else. It’s easy to think of parenthood as a season of sacrifice that ends so we can move on with our lives. But neither Christ nor the saints ever model living for ourselves. God never tells us, “Wow, thanks for your service. You’ve done your time and please enjoy the next four decades of your life living just for yourself. You’ve been serving others for awhile so grab your sunscreen and enjoy your remaining years drinking cocktails in Aruba.” Can you imagine that being the final chapter of a saint’s life? We are called to live out generous love in whatever opportunities present themselves to us.

Fleur listened thoughtfully with his flute in his lap, one hand stroking his German shepherd, when I think how you used to be, Fleur, I really got to wonder, but Mabel couldn’t divert the boy’s gaze from under that overhang of hair, and just as well he thought, so she doesn’t see the anger in his eyes, the rage shaking his body, furious with himself, and though it was a warm autumn and hot at noon, he was glad to retreat deep inside the hoodie that hid his chin but couldn’t stop the piercing words that went straight to the young musician’s heart, Mabel’s voice was like his own, what exactly have you done, Child Prodigy Fleur, not to be that flower crushed in the street, just a raggedy stuffed hoodie, what, what, geez you reek of alcohol, the cocktails your ma serves in the pub by the ocean when the illegal families come out to dance on the beach on Saturday nights and your ma gives them free drinks that knock them out right there, while ever since the divorce, your pa and grandpa stayed on the land, poor land back in Alabama, and haven’t they all just driven you backwards, shrunk you down to their own size, you could have gone to study in Vienna,

Before dinner each night the two leaders, Hopkins, and various other members of the president’s official family gathered for cocktails in the Red Room. Roosevelt sat by a tray of bottles and mixed the cocktails himself. This was a cherished part of the president’s daily routine, his “children’s hour,” as he sometimes called it, when he let the day’s tensions and stresses slip away. “He loved the ceremony of making the drinks,” said Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames; “it was rather like, ‘Look, I can do it.’ It was formidable. And you knew you were supposed to just hand him your glass, and not reach for anything else. It was a lovely performance.” Roosevelt did not take drink orders, but improvised new and eccentric concoctions, variations on the whiskey sour, Tom Collins, or old-fashioned. The drinks he identified as “martinis” were mixed with too much vermouth, and sometimes contaminated with foreign ingredients such as fruit juice or rum. Churchill, who preferred straight whiskey or brandy, accepted Roosevelt’s mysterious potions gracefully and usually drank them without complaint, though Alistair Cooke reported that the prime minister sometimes took them into the bathroom and poured them down the sink.

Stormy lived more life in one night than most people do their whole lives. She was a force of nature. She taught me that love--” My eyes well up and I start over. “Stormy taught me that love is about making brave choices every day. That’s what Stormy did. She always picked love; she always picked adventure. To her they were one and the same. And now she’s off on a new adventure, and we wish her well.” From his seat on the couch, John wipes his eyes with his sleeve. I give Janette a nod, and she gets up and presses play on the stereo, and “Stormy Weather” fills the room. “Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky…” After, John shoulders his way over to me, holding two plastic cups of fruit punch. Ruefully he says, “I’m sure she’d tell us to spike it, but…” He hands me a cup, and we clink. “To Edith Sinclair McClaren Sheehan, better known as Stormy.” “Stormy’s real name was Edith? It’s so serious. It sounds like someone who wears wool skirts and heavy stockings, and drinks chamomile tea at night. Stormy drank cocktails!” John laughs. “I know, right?” “So then where did the name Stormy come from? Why not Edie?” “Who knows?” John says, a wry smile on his lips. “She’d have loved your speech.” He gives me a warm, appreciative sort of look. “You’re such a nice girl, Lara Jean.

Tell me, M. Antoine,’ said Harriet, as their taxi rolled along the Esplanade. ‘You who are a person of great experience, is love, in your opinion, a matter of the first importance?’ ‘It is, alas! of a great importance, mademoiselle, but of the first importance, no!’ ‘What is of the first importance?’ ‘Mademoiselle, I tell you frankly that to have a healthy mind in a healthy body is the greatest gift of le bon Dieu, and when I see so many people who have clean blood and strong bodies spoiling themselves and distorting their brains with drugs and drink and foolishness, it makes me angry. They should leave that to the people who cannot help themselves because to them life is without hope.’ Harriet hardly knew what to reply; the words were spoken with such personal and tragic significance. Rather fortunately, Antoine did not wait. ‘L’amour! These ladies come and dance and excite themselves and want love and think it is happiness. And they tell me about their sorrows—me—and they have no sorrows at all, only that they are silly and selfish and lazy. Their husbands are unfaithful and their lovers run away and what do they say? Do they say, I have two hands, two feet, all my faculties, I will make a life for myself? No. They say, Give me cocaine, give me the cocktail, give me the thrill, give me my gigolo, give me l’amo-o-ur! Like a mouton bleating in a field. If they knew! Harriet laughed. ‘You’re right, M. Antoine. I don’t believe l’amour matters so terribly, after all.

Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word. This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves “so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.”15 The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God (Jn 17:21). The marvelous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us, are all patterns of stunning weather on the holy mountain of God. But we are not the weather. We are the mountain.

And yet, being surveilled with the intention of assault or rape is practically mundane, it happens so often. It’s such an ingrained part of the female experience that it doesn’t register as unusual. The danger of it, then, is in its routine, in how normalized it is for a woman to feel monitored, so much so that she might not know she’s in trouble until that invisible line is crossed from “typical patriarchy” to “you should run.” So now, when I drink, I’m far more cautious. I don’t like ordering draft beers from taps hidden from view. I don’t like pouring bottles into pint glasses. I don’t leave my drink with strangers, I don’t let people I don’t know order drinks for me without watching them do it, and I don’t drink excessively with people I don’t think I can trust with my sleepy body. I don’t turn my back on a cocktail, not just because I like drinking but because I can’t trust what happens to it when I’m not looking. The intersection of rape culture and surveillance culture means that being a guarded drinker is not only my responsibility, it is my sole responsibility. Any lapse in judgment could not only result in clear and present danger, but also set me up for a chorus of “Well, she should’ve known better.” The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn’t premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you’re drunk and you run into a girl who’s also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you’re being accused of something you’d never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn’t a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don’t notice when someone’s watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink.

Rather, I’m the kind of person who makes watercolors of sunsets in the summer while drinking cocktails on my roof, who reads a book a week and goes to French movies. My friends often cite my life as being an inspiration to them, and I have quite rigorously assembled something that looks really good from the outside. But that performance has always been a stark contrast to how I feel about myself.

When I was a teenager, we used to cross over to Juárez every weekend. J-Town always had a reputation as a good place to party. It still does. Hey, it's the birthplace of the famous margarita cocktail. Back then, Spanish rock was just starting up and they had some good live bands there on weekends. A carload of us would go drinking and carousing. The worst that would happen was the cops would stop us because we were kids and all hammered.

Every month she opened the alleys for a fete. Beer and beef, oysters, pints of ice cream, brandy, a cake riddled with cherries, pies of all sorts (pork, treacle, kidney), more beer. Each fete lasted the entire day, was serially every kind of gathering: in the morning, a party for children, then a ladies' lunch, then a tea, cocktails, then (as the day began to unravel) a light supper, a frolic, a soiree, a carousal, a blowout, a dance, and as people began to drink themselves sober, a conversation, an optimistic repentance, a vow for greatness, love.

He kept exaggerated tallies of Charles's cocktail consumption. He left questionnaires ("Do you sometimes feel like you need a drink to get through the day?") and pamphlets (freckle-faced child gazing plaintively at parent, asking, "Mommy, what's "drunk"?") anonymously in Charles's box, and once went so far as to give his name to the campus chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Soon we began to collect a little group of odd people who would drink with us every cocktail hour. Brigitte, who was a 22-year-old German, very beautiful, could have been on the cover of Stern magazine. Her boyfriend Volker was one of the most beautiful men I'd ever met - people said he looked like James Hunt, the English racecar driver. He was like Billy Budd. He was from Germany and had been a cowboy in Wyoming. Then there was Elford Elliot from England, who had something to do with producing garden gnomes. He was tripping on acid all the time and going out to Delos, this little island off Mykonos, chipping little pieces off the ancient ruins, which he then brought back in the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then there was Bryan, an IBM operator from Australia, who fancied himself as a kind of Oscar Wilde figure. I don't know why. The only story of his I remember was about some Australians who stole a garden gnome from the front lawn of a very elegant mansion and took it for a trip around the world. They would send postcards back to the owner saying things like, 'Having a lovely time in the Fiji Islands' and sign it, 'The Garden Gnome.' After six weeks, they brought the garden gnome back and left it on the lawn with little suitcases full of tiny clothing they'd knitted for it.

He’s wearing a denim jacket over his white V-neck, which makes him look like the type of douchebag who buys his girlfriend a new set of tits and drinks vodka cocktails while wearing a pinky ring—oh wait! That is him.

Regret is what happens the morning after the night before. I regret going out for drinks after work. I regret not saying no to the third, fourth or any of the subsequent cocktails I enjoyed. I regret forgetting to cancel my alarm and I regret that I’m unable to call in sick to work. Most of all, I regret that I’d taken the promotion six months ago

Like a proper addict, my entire body is now buzzing with adrenaline, the drink in my hand the only thing I can focus on. I haven’t allowed myself a drink all day, and every nerve in my body is screaming in revolt. Demanding a sip, like a petulant toddler. I lift the cocktail to my lips and take a small drink. In an instant, everything in me goes electric. My brain seems to whir to life. The room around me is brighter.

Gran handed me her now warm Coke, and I took a sip, almost gagging at the sweet taste. “I don’t know how you drink that stuff, considering that your cocktail of choice is a martini that’s been shown a picture of vermouth.

As the Brooklyn Eagle noted in 1873, speaking no doubt from experience, Milk Punch is “the surest thing in the world to get drunk on, and so fearfully drunk, that you won’t know whether you are a cow, yourself, or some other foolish thing.

That’s the essence of the Fizz—as the Japanese ambassador reportedly said upon trying one in the early 1890s, “it buzzes like a fly and stings like a wasp.

on the metro so far :P” 2. Her bio says, “sunrise > sunset.” Your first message: “So you’re either a party girl who stays up all night or a good girl who wakes up before the crack of dawn. I think I know which.” 3. Her bio says, “I’m a blue-eyed, beer-loving and cocktail-making gal.” Your first message: “So what kind of drink will you make us on the first date? (This may or may not be a deal-breaker)”. 4. She’s got a picture at a famous tourist attraction, like Machu Picchu. Your first message: “I dig your Machu Picchu photo. I hope the llamas went easy on you out there.” 5. She’s got a picture by the beach. Your first message: “I dig your beach photo. I’m guessing you’re the type of girl that likes to swim more than sit on the beach chair and tan.

He thought for a while before beginning. “I think it was October of 1990. I was walking on Wisconsin Avenue when I met him. I struck up a conversation and asked if he wanted to come home to my apartment for some cocktails. I also mentioned that I would pay him a hundred dollars if he let me take some nude pictures of him. He agreed, and we walked to my apartment, where we engaged in some light sex and I gave him the drink. Soon he was out, and I made love to him for about an hour or so. I decided that I would kill him, and used my hands to strangle him until he stopped breathing.” Murphy interrupted by placing the Polaroid picture found on the table in the apartment. It depicted the victim straddled on his back over the side of a bathtub. There was an incision made from the bottom of his chin to the top of his genitals. The viscera was pulled out of the body and lying, as if on display, on top of the torso. The colored Polaroid was shocking. The moist, red entrails glistened, revealing the intestines and internal organs. “What’s this all about?” Murphy said, pointing to the ghastly sight. Dahmer picked it up and shrugged. “I wanted a picture of his insides, so I placed him in the bathroom and cut him open. I pulled the viscera from his body with my hands. The look and feel of it gave me unbelievable pleasure, and I masturbated and made love to him by placing my penis in it, like having intercourse.” He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette without looking up as the rest of us sat in silence. We had identified our sixth victim: David Thomas. Murphy, serious as ever, finally broke the silence. “How did you dispose of this one? Did you keep any of his parts?” Dahmer answered that he became leery of placing the bones and flesh in the trash for fear of discovery. This is when he began to use the muriatic acid. He tried to save the skull by boiling it; however, he wanted to speed up the drying process and used a higher oven temperature. The increased heat popped the skull into smaller sections. Because it was ruined, he threw it into the acid. There were no remaining parts of this victim.

On that night in 1946 when the Count and Richard had first become acquainted over Audrius’s magenta concoction, the American had challenged the bartender to design a cocktail in each of the colors of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Thus were born the Goldenrod, the Robin’s Egg, the Brick Wall, and a dark green potion called the Christmas Tree. In addition, it had become generally known in the bar that anyone who could drink all four cocktails back to back earned the right to be called “The Patriarch of All Russia”—as soon as he regained consciousness.

Adults didn't like maraschino cherries; nobody ate them but me. "Never give Charlotte just one cherry in her Shirley Temple," everybody said. "Make it at least five or six." But I tired of cherries, just cherries. So after a time, lemon, lime, and orange twists snaked around the brims. Dollops of Chantilly cream floated like water lilies on top of mint leaves in the fizzy pink water. The bartenders dipped sugar swizzles in grenadine overnight so they would look like pink rhinestones, capped cocktail straws with berries they had rolled in honey, and looped lemon peels around the stems of martini glasses. Everyone on the staff called those ones "Bondage Shirley Temples," and then they would wink at one another.

Houn’ Dog” cocktails (bourbon, ginger, lemon, peach, and mint) were the signature drink to start the evening at the Engineers’ Club of St. Louis. Busch spared no expense for the banquet in honor of his friend’s visit. Mushrooms sous cloche followed by broiled squab guinea hens au cresson provided a

Yet another genius decided to soak the room with the shower and there was the usual surfeit of girls, booze, and drugs. Somehow we got bored with this and the notion of a puking contest was suggested. This apparently, was an entertaining idea and a bunch of us sat around the waste paper basket. After a couple of rounds of retching and gagging (I think there were some rules but they were never written down!), all that had slopped into the bin was about an inch of bile. To make things more interesting it was proposed that, for a sum of money, someone should drink the colon cocktail we had regurgitated. We all dug deep in our pockets and began to throw pfennigs and marks on the table. On seeing the pile of cash, our ‘Bastard Roadie Number One’ took up the challenge. We all moved close to the broken sink and he lifted the bin to his lips. He put it down again. “Several times he raised it to his lips and balked. Finally he got the rim on his bottom lip and began to tip the bin. As the slime slid towards his mouth someone – it might have been me – said, ‘And you have to gargle’. He didn’t stop; he opened up, threw back his head and gargled the stomach contents of about half a dozen punks. He didn’t throw up, but he might have screamed and jumped around a lot. Victorious, he grabbed the money… which when converted back to sterling came to about two quid. It wasn’t a very successful tour!

There was not a single bit of pretense or bullshit in any action that he took, except that promise that he would pay for the drinks.

jitterbug Few ingredients combine to create as much comfort as do coffee and chocolate. The Jitterbug includes this star duo while also tossing in some coconut, vanilla, and, of course, alcohol, in the form of rum. It’s essentially a vacation in a glass, but one so filled with activities that you need a little pick-me-up in order to make it through cocktail hour. Teetotalers can use rum extract mixed with water to simulate the liquor content in this drink. TIME: 5 MINUTES SERVES: 1 2 tablespoons coconut sugar 1½ teaspoons unsweetened cacao powder 1 ounce Vanilla Syrup 1½ ounces dark rum 2 ounces coconut cream 3 ounces cold-brew coffee 3 coffee beans, for garnish Mix the coconut sugar and cacao powder on a small round plate until fully combined. Fill a large coupe (10 to 12 ounces) with ice and water to chill the glass, then discard them when the glass is sufficiently cold. Using a sponge or paper towel, moisten the rim of the chilled glass with a bit of vanilla syrup. Turn the glass upside down and dip it into the chocolate coconut sugar, without twisting. Make sure the rim is thoroughly coated. Combine the rum, coconut cream, vanilla syrup, and coffee in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake vigorously. Strain into the sugared-rim coupe. Garnish with the coffee beans to make a triangle shape. Serve and enjoy.

matcha do about nothing A matcha-and-prosecco mix seems to me to be the stuff Instagram dreams are made of (hint, hint #LittlePine #shamelesspromotion #helpussavetheanimals). This drink may not know if it’s up or down, but either way, it’s packed with antioxidants which, while it may not be the most important consideration of happy hour, I’d imagine is a welcome perk nonetheless. For a virgin version of this drink, simply replace prosecco with sparkling water. TIME: 3 MINUTES SERVES: 1 1 tablespoon sugar ½ teaspoon matcha powder ¼ teaspoon matcha powder ½ ounce hot water 1½ ounces Simple Syrup 1½ ounces fresh lemon juice Prosecco (roughly 2 ounces) Lemon wheel, for garnish Mix the sugar and ¼ teaspoon of the matcha powder in a small bowl with a dry barspoon until you’ve made a pale green sugar. Pour the matcha sugar onto a small plate and set aside. Combine the remaining ¼ teaspoon matcha powder and hot water directly in a highball glass. Use an electric frother to whisk the matcha until a smooth, creamy texture is achieved. Add ice to the matcha mixture, filling the glass to the rim. Add the simple syrup and lemon juice. Top off the glass with prosecco. Stir the cocktail with a barspoon, briefly and lightly. Cut a small notch in the lemon wheel. Following the line of the notch, coat half the wheel in matcha sugar by carefully and evenly pressing that half into the matcha sugar. Position the coated lemon wheel on the edge of the glass. Serve and enjoy.

love potion The cherry-vanilla combination in this cocktail is somewhat reminiscent of childhood, but given that those flavors are mixed with sake and prosecco here, this drink is very grown-up. Finishing off the cocktail’s highball with chocolate sugar is a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself; the pitch-perfect end result is practically dessert. TIME: 5 MINUTES SERVES: 1 2 tablespoons coconut sugar 1½ teaspoons unsweetened cacao powder ½ ounce Vanilla Syrup 1½ ounces sake 3 ounces cherry juice Prosecco On a small round plate, mix the coconut sugar and cacao powder until fully combined. Using a sponge or paper towel, moisten the highball glass rim with a bit of vanilla syrup. Dip the rim in the chocolate coconut sugar, without twisting. Make sure the rim is thoroughly coated. Fill the rimmed glass three-quarters full with ice. Add the sake, cherry juice, and vanilla syrup. Top with prosecco. Stir briefly with a barspoon. Serve and enjoy.

blueberry margarita It’s a stretch, but I like to think of this drink as the boozy almost-equivalent of an açai bowl, since it’s made with pomegranate juice and fresh blueberries. You can take it all the way healthy by omitting tequila, if you like your drinks dry, and subbing in ginger ale, club soda, or a nonalcoholic spirit. Either way, it’s perfect for a summer (or, if you live in Los Angeles, spring/summer/fall/winter) day. TIME: 3 MINUTES SERVES: 1 2 tablespoons Himalayan pink salt 1 lime wedge 4 fresh mint leaves ¼ cup rinsed fresh blueberries, plus 4 blueberries for garnish 2 ounces tequila ½ ounce fresh lime juice 1 ounce pomegranate juice ½ ounce Ginger Syrup Pour the Himalayan salt into a small dish. Run the wedge of lime around the rim of a highball glass, then twist the rim in the salt until fully coated. Fill the salt-rimmed glass with ice and set aside. Clap the mint to bring out its flavor, then put it and the blueberries into a shaker. Muddle them until pulverized. Add a handful of ice, the tequila, lime juice, pomegranate juice, and ginger syrup. Shake vigorously until chilled; strain into the prepared glass. Skewer 4 blueberries onto a cocktail pick and use to garnish the drink. Serve and enjoy.

cucumber mule This cocktail is essentially the equivalent of spiked “spa water,” which means it’s at least almost virtuous. The most obvious nonalcoholic version of this cocktail would be, um, that aforementioned spa water, but you could simply omit the sake or play with nonalcoholic spirits here, too. Either way, the drink’s pretty much a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. TIME: 3 MINUTES (PLUS TIME FOR SAKE INFUSION) SERVES: 1 1 English (hothouse) cucumber 3 ounces Cucumber-Infused Sake (recipe follows) ½ ounce fresh lime juice About 4 ounces ginger beer Use a vegetable peeler to carefully slice the cucumber lengthwise to make a long, thin ribbon (reserve the remaining cucumber for another use). Wrap the cucumber around the inside the inside of a highball glass. Fill the glass to the top with ice. Add the infused sake, lime juice, and ginger beer; stir well with a barspoon. Serve and enjoy.

cozy campfire Mezcal’s smokiness partners perfectly in this creamy concoction with cardamom and chocolate bitters, orange juice, and a touch of vanilla. Finally, a winter drink, for all those LA days when it dips below 70 degrees. TIME: 5 MINUTES SERVES: 1 1½ ounces mezcal 1 ounce Cashew Cream ½ ounce fresh orange juice 1 ounce Vanilla Syrup 8 shakes chocolate bitters 3 shakes cardamom bitters Wide strip of orange peel, for garnish Dark chocolate stick, for garnish Fill a small coupe with ice and water to chill the glass. Set aside. Combine the mezcal, cashew cream, orange juice, and vanilla syrup with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake vigorously. Discard the ice and water from the coupe and strain the cocktail into the chilled glass. Top with the bitters. Fold the orange peel in two and squeeze the essence over the top of the drink. Position the peel and the chocolate stick horizontally atop the coupe. Serve and enjoy.

tiny piney This one’s named after the restaurant because it’s made with fresh rosemary, which gives it a bit of a piney taste . . . in a good way. Cocchi Americano is an Italian apéritif, which means its sweetness offsets the earthiness of the rosemary beautifully. Overall, the mix makes for a potentially too-drinkable drink, so bartender, beware. TIME: 5 MINUTES SERVES: 1 1 sprig rosemary, plus a short sprig for garnish 1½ ounces gin ½ ounce Cocchi Americano 1 ounce fresh lemon juice ¾ ounce Simple Syrup 1 ounce soda water 4 shakes cardamom bitters Strip of lemon peel, for garnish Fill an old-fashioned glass with ice and set aside. Combine the rosemary sprig, gin, Cocchi Americano, lemon juice, and simple syrup with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake vigorously. Strain into the ice-filled glass. Top with the soda water and add the bitters. Position the rosemary sprig and lemon peel vertically in the glass. Serve and enjoy.

trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye. Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing a more exotic side-hustle. “Why not?” I told my wife. And so we volunteered in her friend’s experiment. IN THE RECEPTION AREA OF CURRIER’S LAB, Aly and I chuckled over the entrance questionnaire. We would be among the second wave of target subjects, but first we had to pass the screening. The questions disguised furtive motives. HOW OFTEN DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PAST? WOULD YOU RATHER BE ON A CROWDED BEACH OR IN AN EMPTY MUSEUM? My wife shook her head at these crude inquiries and touched a hand to her smile. I read the expression as clearly as if we were wired up together: The investigators were welcome to anything they discovered inside her, so long as it didn’t lead to jail time. I’d given up on understanding my own hidden temperament a long time ago. Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths, but most of them were nonlethal. I did badly want to see my wife’s answers, but a lab tech prevented us from comparing questionnaires. DO YOU USE TOBACCO? Not for years. I didn’t mention that all my pencils were covered with bite marks. HOW MUCH ALCOHOL DO YOU DRINK A WEEK? Nothing for me, but my wife confessed to her nightly Happy Hour, while plying the dog with poetry. DO YOU SUFFER FROM ANY ALLERGIES? Not unless you counted cocktail parties. HAVE YOU EVER EXPERIENCED DEPRESSION? I didn’t know how to answer that one. DO YOU PLAY A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT? Science. I said I might be able to find middle C on a piano, if they needed it. Two postdocs took us into the fMRI room. These people had way more cash to throw around than any astrobiology team anywhere. Aly was having the same thoughts

Extended study of medieval verse, thought Phryne at breakfast, produces a hangover almost as bad as that obtained by drinking absinthe cocktails.

Sure, you could grab a drink during Prohibition in plenty of cities, but Kansas City stood out for its blatant disregard of federal law. Most of the bars weren’t even speakeasies. At the Chesterfield Club in downtown, naked waitresses—with their pubic hair shaved to represent diamonds, hearts, clubs, or spades—served cocktails to distinguished businessmen.

Molly. If people could choose and control their dreams, why would anyone ever be awake? We’d all be on a Greek island drinking free cocktails and having sex with Aidan Turner.

1½ ounces mezcal ½ ounce crème de cacao, preferably Tempus Fugit ½ ounce ancho chile liqueur 3 dashes chocolate bitters Orange twist for garnish

Joshua took another small sip from his wine glass as his gaze and his thoughts drifted away from the flat-screen television mounted above the marbled fireplace to ponder a roomful of sports jackets and pantsuits and in some cases cocktail dresses but only of neutral tones and minimal detailing if for no other reason than to avoid becoming the subject of the next petty scandal that would nevertheless send shockwaves through their haughty and insular world. The way they stood in their intimate clusters. Their drink glasses held in various poses of sophistication. And whenever they did bring glass to mouth in accordance with judiciously preset intervals it was also for show, as he believed was true of their subdued conversations, which, from where he was sitting, appeared to be nothing more than the unintelligible murmurings of barely moving lips. A whole list of observations came to mind. Not one of them flattering in any way. The atmosphere thick with that certain stuffiness and elitist redolence of an ivy league alumni fundraising gala. Of course, he readily admitted to himself that out of everyone in the room he was very likely the most materially bereft and least credentialed and that this stinging truth undoubtedly inflamed his plebeian impulse. But that’s not what was bugging him.

rewards they get from alcohol. What cravings, the program asks, are driving your habit loop? Often, intoxication itself doesn’t make the list. Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release. They might crave a cocktail to forget their worries. But they don’t necessarily crave feeling drunk. The physical effects of alcohol are often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking for addicts.

I used to feel sorry for myself, then I discovered cocktails. If life has taught me anything, it’s that there’s nothing a stiff drink can’t fix.

Kokomo Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I want to take ya Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama Key Largo, Montego, baby why don't we go, Jamaica Off the Florida Keys, there's a place called Kokomo That's where you want to go to get away from it all Bodies in the sand, tropical drink melting in your hand We'll be falling in love to the rhythm of a steel drum band Down in Kokomo [Chorus] Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I want to take you to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama Key Largo, Montego, baby why don't we go Ooh I want to take you down to Kokomo, we'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow That's where we want to go, way down in Kokomo. Martinique, that Montserrat mystique We'll put out to sea and we'll perfect our chemistry And by and by we'll defy a little bit of gravity Afternoon delight, cocktails and moonlit nights That dreamy look in your eye, give me a tropical contact high Way down in Kokomo [Chorus] Port au Prince, I want to catch a glimpse Everybody knows a little place like Kokomo Now if you want to go and get away from it all Go down to Kokomo [Chorus] Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I want to take you to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama Key Largo, Montego, baby why don't we go Ooh I want to take you down to

Jock’s drinking didn’t help matters. At four o’clock every afternoon when we were in Bombay, we met the rest of the family on the veranda for cocktails. There was a ritual to it,

Jock’s drinking didn’t help matters. At four o’clock every afternoon when we were in Bombay, we met the rest of the family on the veranda for cocktails. There was a ritual to it, I learned very quickly, every feature played out to the letter, how much ice went in, how much lime, the air filling with a tangy zest that I felt at the back of my throat.

This drink is an Elixandria. It's named after our sun, that's why it's this nice orange color. The brown liquid on top is dark rum, and we pour it over to represent a setting sun. Little bit of rum? 'Dawn'. Little more rum? 'Dusk'. You looking to get drunk? 'Dark'.

As Sofia returns to the table from the bathroom, her sleek brown eyebrows knit together. “What do you mean?” She looks down at the empty cocktail glasses between us. “And what happened to my drink?” “I drank it. This was an emergency.” I hold up my phone. “I basically told him I think about him naked.” Sofia’s blue eyes widen as she stares at me. “I thought you said no drunk texting?” I shrug and peer down into the empty glass. “You left me without adult supervision.

loopholes in some United States liquor laws allow it to be served in restaurants with only a beer and wine license. This has led to shochu’s use as a mixer in Asian-inspired cocktails—think lemongrass martinis—

out which cocktail to drink next.

DYING BREATH COCKTAIL ½ ounce Jack Daniel’s Whiskey ½ ounce Jägermeister Digestif ½ ounce Bacardi Black Rum ½ ounce Don Julio Reposado Tequila ½ ounce Cointreau Orange Spirit 2 ounces orange flavor 5 Hour Energy Drink

Like any normal people, we suffered from fatigue, especially on Mondays, but that was until we decided to adopt a new simple habit that revolutionized our mornings. We now start every morning with a refreshing cocktail with our breakfast, and this gives us strength and energy to start the day.

There you might celebrate that fact by consuming a Three Mile Limit, a drink that literally commemorated the end of U.S. territorial waters and the beginning of boozing. When

Aggressively whisk the egg mix until it's well integrated with the ale. Once the two of them are over their differences and appear to be getting along well, introduce the gin. Your aggressive whisking will make the ale, eggs and gin forget their differences as they vow to team up against you.

These guys had names for every conceivable drinking situation. They liked to have a little eye-opener to get themselves going in the morning, a midmorning bracer before attempting anything serious, a few modest cocktails at lunch, followed by the obligatory afternoon pick-me-up, which segued neatly right into happy hour and ended with a little one just to help them sleep. For purely medicinal purposes, of course.

Sean deliberately loitered on the patio with his grandmother and the other septuagenarians before going to the kitchen to pour May Ellen and Lily’s drinks. He wanted to give them a bit of privacy. As for me, Sean thought—drawing deep drafts of the scented, heavy Florida night air into his lungs--I need to pull myself together. Because it was happening already: the Lily Effect was at work on his brain. Why in God’s name had he told her he’d be accompanying her and the team on some dives, when that was the last thing he wanted to do . . . especially if he intended to maintain his sanity? Unfortunately, as dumb as he was feeling, Sean had the answer to that one. It pained him to realize that he was still as hung up on Lily as ever—and just as susceptible to her disdain. It had taken her, what, two hours since she waltzed back into Coral Beach to accuse him of crooked politics? Did Lily have any idea of the high-wire act he was attempting by trying to get the reef accurately documented and assessed before he took a public stance on the marina development? No, of course not. Sean might have filled her in, if she hadn’t made it clear she assumed his sole motivation was political gain. Stung, he’d retaliated in kind, implying that Lily might stoop so low as to manipulate the reef study—even though Sean knew the sun would set in the east before Lily Banyon committed an act of professional dishonesty. Her integrity had always been one of the things he admired most about her. That Lily actually fell for his bogus threat merely showed how profound her distrust, her dislike of him was. At the Rusted Keel, Dave had urged him to seize the opportunity to go on the research boat and work on charming Lily. Yeah, Sean thought acidly, as he carried the cocktails toward the living room. He and Lily were off to their usual great start.

June 2: Filming of Niagara begins in Buffalo, with Marilyn playing Rose Loomis, the femme fatale murdered by her co-star, Joseph Cotten. Marilyn stays at the General Brock Hotel in Niagara Falls. Joseph Cotten arranges a cocktail party for cast and crew in his hotel room. Marilyn arrives in a terry cloth robe and drinks orange juice. When a guest observes that “Sherry Netherlands Hotel, New York” is embroidered on the robe, Marilyn replies, “Oh, that. I thought I had stolen this robe, until I paid my bill.” Cotten is amused with her and calls her a “pretty clown, beguiling and theatrically disarming.” On this occasion she is charming. On weekends Marilyn goes to New York City to be with DiMaggio.

I looked back … and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, “Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,” or “Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!” But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality.… We’re drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true. It’s the Oprah god. Phil Vischer, in an interview with World Magazine

The term honeymoon was coined to refer to the sweetness of a new marriage. But according to Norse legend, a man abducted his bride from a neighboring village. He was then required to take her into hiding until the bride’s family abandoned their search. His whereabouts were known only to his best man. While in seclusion, the couple drank mead, a honeyed wine. 1 ½ oz. good quality bourbon 1 oz. apple cider ½ oz. Calvados ½ oz. honey syrup* A dash of bitters 1 wide slice of orange peel *To make honey syrup, boil ½ cup of water together with a cup of honey until the honey dissolves. Store in a sealed jar. Measure everything into a cocktail shaker and add a good handful of ice. Shake vigorously and then strain the drink into a clear lowball glass with one large piece of ice. Rub the orange peel around the rim of the glass. Garnish with an apple slice. [Source: Original]

The proper drinking of Scotch Whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man’s determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.” David Daiches

Girls’ Night Out Two female friends had gone out drinking, just the girls, and had made excessively close friends with a large but uncertain number of cocktails. Walking home feeling no pain at all, they suddenly both realized they needed to pee. There was no toilet in sight and no open restaurants or anything, but they were passing by a graveyard and one of them suggested they flush their systems there, so they did, fertilizing some unknown person’s final resting place. Of course they had no toilet paper, this fact having slipped their minds in their inebriation. The first woman took off her panties, used them to wipe herself, and tossed them aside. Her friend didn’t want to do the same because she was wearing some fancy underwear and didn’t want to ruin it, but she was lucky enough to find a wreath on a grave with a big ribbon attached and wiped herself with that (after all, the intended recipient had no use for it, or for anything else). After finishing, they made their unsteady way home. The next day one woman’s husband phoned the other husband and said, “You know, we have to talk to our wives about these damned girls’ nights out. When my wife came home last night her panties were missing. I have no idea what she was up to, but it can’t be anything good!” “You think that’s bad,” said the other husband. “My wife came back with a card stuck between the cheeks of her butt that said, ‘From all of the firemen at the fire station, in heartfelt appreciation.

it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release. They might crave a cocktail to forget their worries. But they don’t necessarily crave feeling drunk. The physical effects of alcohol are often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking for addicts.

Drink warm lemon water 20 minutes before your meals to increase fat burning enzymes. Artichokes & beets increase your bile flow so your body metabolizes more fat. Healthy fats like avocado help correct hormone imbalances so you burn body fat instead of store it. Green Apples are rich in malloric acid that can breakup liver and gallbladder sludge. Sound gross right? That’s why I am teaching you about the importance of cleansing. Have an after work smoothie instead of your cocktail. This will fill you up so you don’t graze while making dinner. Also you won’t give into cravings. Don’t worry you’ll enjoy delicious easy to make foods such as Zucchini Lasagna, Fresh Berries, Caprese Salad, and plenty of lean proteins like shrimp kebabs.  These are some of the delicious satisfying foods you can eat during a 21 day cleanse.  During your 21 day cleanse you also get to eat plenty of satiating

It was a memorable night of riotous jollity. Princess Margaret attached a balloon to her tiara, Prince Andrew tied another to the tails of his dinner jacket while royal bar staff dispensed a cocktail called “A Long Slow Comfortable Screw up against the Throne.” Rory Scott recalls dancing with Diana in front of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and embarrassing himself by continually standing on Diana’s toes. The comedian Spike Milligan held forth about God, Diana gave a priceless diamond and pearl necklace to a friend to look after while she danced; while the Queen was observed looking through the programme and saying in bemused tones: “It says here they have live music”, as though it had just been invented. Diana’s brother, Charles, just down from Eton, vividly remembers bowing to one of the waiters. “He was absolutely weighed down with medals,” he recalls, “and by that stage, with so many royal people there, I was in automatic bowing mode. I bowed and he looked surprised. Then he asked me if I wanted a drink.” For most of the guests the evening passed in a haze of euphoria. “It was an intoxicatingly happy atmosphere,” recalls Adam Russell. “Everyone horribly drunk and then catching taxis in the early hours, it was a blur, a glorious, happy blur.

The old Janey only drank cheap wine and light beer. The new Janey is classy, prefers cocktails, and even drinks alone.

COSMOPOLITANS AT THE PARADISE Cosmopolitans at the Paradise. Heavenly Kelly's cosmopolitans make the sun rise. They make the sun rise in my blood. Under the stars in my brow. Tonight a perfect cosmopolitan sets sail for paradise. Johnny's cosmopolitans start the countdown on the launch pad. My Paradise is a diner. Nothing could be finer. There was a lovely man in this town named Harry Diner. Lighter than zero Gravity, a rinse of lift, the cosmopolitan cocktail They mix here at the Paradise is the best In the United States - pink as a flamingo and life-announcing As a leaping salmon. The space suit I will squeeze into arrives In a martini glass. Poured from a chilled silver shaker beaded with frost sweat. Finally I go Back to where the only place to go is far. Ahab on the launch pad - I'm the roar Wearing a wild blazer, black stripes and red, And a yarmulke with a propeller on my missile head. There she blows! Row harder, my hearties! - My United Nations of liftoff! I targeted the great white whale black hole. On impact I burst into stars. I am the caliph of paradise, Hip-deep in a waterbed of wives. I am the Ducati of desire, 144.1 horsepower at the rear wheel. Nights and days, black stripes and red, I orbit Sag Harbor and the big blue ball. I pursue Moby-Dick to the end of the book. I raise the pink flamingos to my lips and drink.

If traveling with cold-weather cohorts, before you begin packing, start a shared online spreadsheet for menu planning and cooking assignments. Determine who’s in charge of each fireside feast (and the resulting dish duty), what ingredients and equipment are needed, and, perhaps paramount, who has bar duty, because those calvados cocktails aren’t going to mix themselves. Keep a tally of expenses, and settle up via Venmo.

Hundreds of cocktails would be transmuted into ether-scented sweat ascending on cigarette smoke spirals to hang above us in a heady fug.

Women’s Cocktail Collective

Mixed drinks of all kinds should glide down the throat easily, and since most cocktails have a spirit base, the addition of ingredients containing less or no alcohol is needed to cut the strength of the drink and make it more palatable. In most cases, the base spirit, be it gin, vodka, whiskey, or any other relatively high-proof distillate, makes up over 50 percent of the cocktail, and its soul must be soothed if the bartender wants to achieve balance.

[T]he vast majority of drinks called for in any bar are simple Highballs such as Scotch and Soda, as well as Martinis, Manhattans, Margaritas, and other perennial favorites that are quite easy to master. Every bar also has its idiosyncratic cocktails, such as house specialties or weird potions peculiar to that one particular joint. Most bartenders will tell you that it’s seldom necessary to know how to make more than a couple dozen drinks in any one bar.

The second most important cocktail bitters, Peychaud’s is an integral ingredient in the Sazerac cocktail and can be used as a substitute for Angostura in many drinks, especially such cocktails as the Manhattan. The resultant cocktail will not duplicate the same drink made with Angostura, but Peychaud’s will add its own nuances and complexities.

Bitters often come into play in French-Italian drinks, especially when whiskey or brandy is called for as a base, and the creative bartender should always bear that in mind when composing new formulas. By experimenting with Angostura, Peychaud’s, orange, or any other flavor of bitters, you can change the character of the resultant cocktail quite dramatically.

My belief is that it didn’t take too very long for the marketing mavens in the big drinks companies to recognize that bartenders are their best brand ambassadors, and since these companies tend to have deep pockets, they quickly started putting their money where it worked best for everyone concerned. They launched competitions with fabulous prizes, flew bartenders around the world to strut their stuff in all manner of exotic locations, and hired bartenders as educators and as marketers. In my opinion, without the support of the liquor industry, the craft cocktail revolution might well have died early.

The serious bartenders of the 1800s gave us the mixed-drink bases with which cocktailians still work today. The masters of the craft during the first century of cocktails formulated sours and the majority of other categorized drinks, and they learned to use liqueurs and other sweetening agents as substitutes for simple syrup. These barkeeps understood the importance of bitters, and they knew that balance was the key to any well-constructed drink.

Sidney E. Klein, a union organizer in Manhattan during the twenties, says that cocktails just weren’t the point when bibbers of the time went out on the town, and that most people just wanted the “straight stuff.” Although this doesn’t mean that Martinis weren’t made and Manhattans left the face of the earth, it certainly wasn’t a period when bartenders could be very creative. The new drinks that did appear during this era were mostly fashioned in Europe, where at least a few American bartenders fled to pursue their careers. Harry Craddock was one such man. He started work as a bartender at the Savoy Hotel, London, in 1925, and compiled The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), in which he admonished bartenders, “Shake the shaker as hard as you can: don’t just rock it: you are trying to wake it up, not send it to sleep!” Craddock is also credited with saying that the best way to drink a cocktail is “quickly, while it’s laughing at you!

The Drunk’s Blue Book, written by Norman Anthony and O. Soglow in 1933, for instance, details what the authors call the Drunk’s Code: Free lunch. Free speech. Free cheers. Five-day week. Every third drink on the house. Lower curbstones. Overstuffed gutters. More lampposts. Rubber nightsticks and rolling pins. More keyholes for every door. More farmers’ daughters. Colder ice. Two cocktails for a quarter. Bigger and better beers.

Ten cocktails are contained in the recipe section of Thomas’s 1862 book, and all of them contain bitters. Indeed, it would be decades before anyone dared give the name cocktail to a drink made without this ingredient.

Embury was the first true cocktailian of the modern age, and he took time to analyze the components of a cocktail, breaking them down into a base (usually a spirit, it must be at least 50 percent of the drink); a modifying, smoothing, or aromatizing agent, such as vermouth, bitters, fruit juice, sugar, cream, or eggs; and “additional special flavoring and coloring ingredients,” which he defined as liqueurs and nonalcoholic fruit syrups. Embury taught us that the Ramos Gin Fizz must be shaken for at least five minutes in order to achieve the proper silky consistency, suggested that Peychaud’s bitters be used in the Rob Roy, and noted that “for cocktails, such as the Side Car, a three-star cognac is entirely adequate, although a ten-year-old cognac will produce a better drink.” In the second edition of his book, Embury mentioned that he had been criticized for omitting two drinks from his original work: the Bloody Mary, which he described as “strictly vile,” and the Moscow Mule, as “merely mediocre.” On the subject of Martinis, he explained that although most cocktail books call for the drink to be made with one-third to one-half vermouth, “quite recently, in violent protest of this wishy-washy type of cocktail, there has sprung up the vermouth-rinse method of making Martinis.” He describes a drink made from chilled gin in a cocktail glass coated in vermouth. Embury didn’t approve of either version, and went on to say that a ratio of seven parts gin to one part vermouth was his personal favorite. While Embury was taking his drinking seriously, many Americans were quaffing Martinis by the pitcher, and Playboy magazine commissioned cocktail maven Thomas Mario and, later, Emanuel Greenberg to deliver cocktail news to a nation of people who drank for fun, and did it on a regular basis. Esquire magazine issued its Handbook for Hosts as early as 1949, detailing drinks such as the Sloe Gin Fizz, the Pan American, the “I Died Game, Boys” Mixture, and the Ginsicle—gin with fruit juice or simple syrup poured over chipped ice in a champagne glass. A cartoon in the book depicts a frustrated bartender mopping his fevered brow and exclaiming, “She ordered it because it had a cute name.” The world of cocktails was tilting slightly on its axis, and liquor companies lobbied long and hard to get into the act. In the fifties, Southern Comfort convinced us to make Comfort Manhattans and Comfort Old-Fashioneds by issuing a booklet: How to Make the 32 Most Popular Drinks. By the seventies, when the Comfort Manhattan had become the Improved Manhattan, they were bringing us Happy Hour Mixology Plus a Primer of Happy Hour Astrology, presumably so we would have something to talk about at bars: “Oh, you’re a Virgo—discriminating, keenly analytical, exacting, and often a perfectionist. Wanna drink?

There can be no doubt that vermouth changed the face of mixed drinks in the twentieth century. The Manhattan, the Martini, and the Rob Roy might be considered to be the Triple Crown of cocktails, and you can’t make one of them without vermouth.

Craddock is also credited with saying that the best way to drink a cocktail is “quickly, while it’s laughing at you!

In the United States, the demand for well-constructed mixed drinks grew steadily during the latter half of the nineteenth century until, in the 1890s, the Golden Age of Cocktails arrived. It would last right up to the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, but don’t think for a moment that every bar in America was serving masterfully mixed drinks.

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

The majority of the drinks popular at the turn of the nineteenth century were, by and large, sweeter than they would become over the next twenty years. Something else happened, though, in the last decades of the 1800s. Something momentous. Something that left us with a range of drinks that must now be considered the capos of the cocktail family: Vermouth became popular among the cocktailian bartenders of America.

Are you always such an asshole? It wasn’t my idea to be out in the wild in nothing but a cocktail dress, you know. When I put this dress on, I was planning on going to a hotel bar for a few drinks and then back up to my room. I didn’t know I was about to be fucking kidnapped.” “You’re awfully mouthy.

Time to savor a predinner cocktail or three while noshing on the relish tray, an assortment of raw vegetables, pickles, olives, cheese spread, and crackers, all against the din of clinking silverware and guest conversation. Then came a leisurely meal of grilled steaks with herbed butter served on sizzling metal plates, buttered shrimp sprinkled with parsley, and crispy tender potatoes, probably topped with melting cheese. Then to the bar for an after-dinner drink to end the evening on a sweet note.

The middle class of 1920s America loved a cocktail party. Stores began selling tools and accessories for home mixology, like shakers, serving trays and cocktail glasses. Since middle-class Americans didn’t have the money for a bottle of champagne, they usually drank lower-quality bootleg liquor. These spirits really needed to be mixed into a cocktail to be palatable, a cocktail being the best way to mask the harsh flavor.

Sort of on this topic…I know this is a loaded question coming from me, but what would you say is your relationship with drinking and alcohol? You mentioned having “grapefruit seltzer water on the rocks” when your stepdad has a cocktail,

We are dropped down into a broken world, where humans hurt one another. To love the world, we need oases where we can retreat and be renewed. Those oases include art and music and poetry and dinner tables and cocktail parties and perhaps, most importantly, friendship. That’s why friendship is everything to Arendt. It’s the strongest of the oases, the one that keeps us from turning inward on ourselves and away from the horrors of the world. It is where we learn to appreciate others, not for the way they are the same as us, but for how they are different from us. It is where we overcome the horror of isolation but also avoid becoming just another face in the crowd, lost in the collective. Friendship is the connective tissue that builds us into a true society and saves us from being taken by totalitarianism.

Two glass of Exile, formed in a brownish color, A sip to get lost and no where, to be found, brandy it's. The taste of it under the tongue, for the weekend, remain blessed, and intoxicated to dark rum, Dark till it grows glommy. drinking and sipping with purpose, With the rose of lousy laughter's, A moment to forget your worries, And live again the next day.

The very millisecond the Eastern night sky shows even the tiniest twinge of morning light (let’s call it dawn), the muttering starts.

A little-known side effect of chicken keeping is that you inexplicably wind up spending a lot of time just sitting in your yard, staring at your birds. Like a total creep.

you can substitute a lovely little thing called aquafaba (the liquid from a can of garbanzo beans… Yup, you read that right) in a recipe that calls for egg white. One tablespoon of aquafaba equals 1 large egg yolk, 2 tablespoons of it equal roughly 1 large egg white, and, you guessed it with your nimble mathematical acuity: 3 tablespoons equals 1 whole egg.

Life is sweet when the whisky's sour.

what the Kansas City Star said in 1890: “When a Kansas man orders a ‘Joe Rickey’ he instructs the barkeeper to leave out the ice, the lime juice and the soda.

Carson wakes up every day around noon, brushes her teeth, then pours Kahlua into her coffee or drinks a screwdriver. For lunch, she smokes some weed or eats a magic cookie. Before work, she drinks three shots of espresso and snorts some cocaine. Sometimes that’s too much, she can feel her heartbeat in her throat and her temples and her ass cheeks, so she tempers the high with a Valium. Some days—most days—she hits productive equilibrium. She comes to work and knocks down the crowd like she’s John Dillinger with a machine gun. During work, there’s more espresso and a bump or two in the ladies’ room. After work, the serious drinking begins—a couple of cocktails first, shots, then beer. Then weed and an Ativan or a Valium to fall asleep.

We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor's and drank gimlets. "They don't know how to make them here," he said. "What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.

And with symbolism we can create meaningless metaphysics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on "medicating" us. With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable.

We ended up at the bar of a little steak house I had never noticed before. It was one of those places that seemed to have slipped through time unscathed and walking into it was like walking into a different decade. Dark walls, leather booths, thick slabs of beef, ashtrays on every table. The man behind the bar in a red plaid vest had the open, sad face of an old-time baseball player. “Mrs. S.,” he said in a thick nasally voice when we sat on the red-leather stools. “Terrific as always to see you.” “Rocco, this is Victor,” she said. “Victor and I are in desperate need of a drink. I’ll have the usual. What will it be for you, Victor?” “Do you make a sea breeze?” I said. Rocco looked at me like I had spit on the bar. I got the message. This was a serious place for serious drinking, a leftover from an era when the cocktail hour was a sacred thing, when a man was defined by his drink and no man wanted to be defined by something as sweet and inconsequential as a sea breeze. Kids in short pants with ball gloves sticking out of their pockets drank soda pop, men drank like men. “What’s she having?” I said, nodding at my companion. “A manhattan.” “What’s that?” “Whiskey, bitters, sweet vermouth.” “And a cherry,” said Alura Straczynski. “Mustn’t forget the cherry.” “No, Mrs. S.,” said Rocco. “I wouldn’t forget your cherry.

In fact, tequila and mezcal both work beautifully in any cocktail that calls for whiskey, rye, or bourbon.

Indeed, a desire to experiment and experience new tastes is part of the foodie code.

Work in the kitchen and in the home has been systemically devalued and outright dismissed for thousands of years. It's impossible to confine alcohol or cocktail history to the bar because so many types of people were not allowed to work or drink there until very recently in modern history. Alcohol was a deeply important part of the private home lives of people all over the world in the nineteenth century, not just the goings-on in the public taverns, hotels, saloons or pubs. Many of women's recipes and innovations are what various alcohol industries and companies are built on.

It wasn't a group of hard drinkers, bootleggers, smugglers or cocktail enthusiasts that had suddenly become Prohibition's most powerful opponents, it was a legion of mothers. Alcohol's greatest ally was a now formidable and elegantly coiffed host of mostly middle- and upper-class housewives.

Jimmy gave a startled yelp. She had put cute little candy cane striped glass cocktail stirrers in everyone's drinks and Jimmy had thought they were real candy canes and bitten his in half. "Goodness. I feel dreadful", Jane said to everyone while Jimmy was in the bathroom, spitting out blood and shards of glass. "Should we take him to the ER?" "Oh, he'll be fine," Duncan assured her. "He didn't go to the ER that time he accidentally locked himself into the finishing room and inhaled fumes all night." That didn't seem like the soundest piece of logic to Jane, but Jimmy came back into the room at that moment and said, "I'm OK, really Jane. I'll just keep this napkin in there to stop the bleeding." So Jimmy spent spent the rest of the evening with a white cloth napkin poking out of his mouth and looked vaguely like a trout.

Peter is at the bar. I watch him pour two inches of gin and a small splash of tonic water into a glass. Only then does he add three sad little cubes of ice. They float around like turds on the sea. Brits love to drink, but they make tepid, vacuous cocktails.

Yes, the dish was flawless, and the wine pairing was supernatural, but these people were out of control. Were they trying to emotionally justify the meal’s price tag? Did they have too many cocktails in the drinks tent? It was a breathtaking meal, one of the best that Cindy had ever had, but the hysteria around her was making her brain red.

Are you Russian?” “To the core.” “Well then, let me say at the outset that I am positively enamored with your country. I love your funny alphabet and those little pastries stuffed with meat. But your nation’s notion of a cocktail is rather unnerving. . . .” “How so?” The captain pointed discreetly down the bar to where a bushy-eyebrowed apparatchik was chatting with a young brunette. Both of them were holding drinks in a striking shade of magenta. “I gather from Audrius that that concoction contains ten different ingredients. In addition to vodka, rum, brandy, and grenadine, it boasts an extraction of rose, a dash of bitters, and a melted lollipop. But a cocktail is not meant to be a mélange. It is not a potpourri or an Easter parade. At its best, a cocktail should be crisp, elegant, sincere—and limited to two ingredients.” “Just two?” “Yes. But they must be two ingredients that complement each other; that laugh at each other’s jokes and make allowances for each other’s faults; and that never shout over each other in conversation. Like gin and tonic,” he said, pointing to his drink. “Or bourbon and water . . . Or whiskey and soda . . .” Shaking his head, he raised his glass and drank from it. “Excuse me for expounding.” “That’s quite all right.” The

I can’t explain why, but a whiskey sour is a drink for a man whose mother made him practice piano a lot when he was a kid. A man who drinks whiskey sours also probably throws a baseball like a girl—limp wristed. A man who drinks whiskey sours and then eats that silly little cherry they put in the bottom probably has a cat or a poodle for a pet. In other words, I wouldn’t go on a camping trip with a man who drinks whiskey sours. Scotch drinkers are aggressive. They order like they’re Charles Bronson trying to have a quick shot before returning to the subway to kill a few punks and thugs. “What’ll you have, sir?” asks the bartender. “Cutty. Water. Rocks. Twist,” growls the Scotch drinker. I think maybe Scotch drinkers wear their underwear too tight. You have to watch people who drink vodka or gin. “Anybody who drinks see-through whiskey,” an old philosopher once said, “will get crazy.” Indeed. Vodka and gin drinkers are the type who leave the house to get a loaf of bread, drop by the bar for just one, and return home six weeks later. With the bread. I wouldn’t go on a camping trip with anyone who drinks vodka or gin, either. They’re the types who would invite snakes, raccoons and bears over for cocktails and then wind up getting into an argument about tree frogs. Bourbon drinkers never grow up. Eight out of ten started drinking bourbon with Coke in school and still have a pair of saddle oxfords in the closet. Bourbon drinkers don’t think they’ve had a good time unless they get sick and pass out under a coffee table. Then there are the white wine drinkers. Never get involved in any way with them. They either want to get married, sell you a piece of real estate or redecorate your house.

I knew from previous research that there is only one way to build up a tolerance to spicy food: eat more spicy food. What if sensitivity to alcohol works in a similar fashion? The anecdotal evidence from dozens of bartenders confirms that people who drink a lot develop a taste tolerance to alcohol—it takes stronger and stronger drinks over time to generate the same amount of tingle.

Cocktail soju, a mixture of the spirit with fruit juice or yoghurt drinks to give it a more pleasant taste, is the ultimate in deceptive drinking experiences. It tastes completely unalcoholic and convinces the drinker that he is not even tipsy—until he stands up and finds his legs unwilling to comply with his brain’s wishes.

I never had to hide my pot smoking from my mom. I’d say, “Mom, you’re drinking! Why don’t you smoke pot instead?” I’d twist one up and say, “Ma, see what it smells like?” She never said, “Put that out!” mainly because Mom loved her five o’clock cocktail

The trembly fellow sighed and said, “I’m all out of whack. I’m going uptown and see my doctor.” Mr. Flood snorted again. “Oh, shut up,” he said. “Damn your doctor! I tell you what you do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby’s oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters. Don’t sit down. Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he’ll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won’t spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you’ll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don’t know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don’t put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you’d smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it’ll make your blood run faster. And don’t just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn’t it blue? And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren’t they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You’re apt to feel so bucked-up you’ll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.

She pulled the classic lie that every pregnant woman tells: 'I'm not going to have a cocktail with dinner because I'm on antibiotics. I have a cold.' You have a cold? Really? Why aren't you sneezing? Why didn't you cancel our date to go out for drinks if you had a cold? Why did you go to work today? No woman I know would ever listen to her doctor's warnings about alcohol - unless she was pregnant. If a doctor said to any of my girlfriends, 'Even one glass of wine tonight could bring about Armageddon,' they'd be like, 'Well, we've had fun here while it lasted. Can I get a pinot grigio?

Rum makes a fine hot drink, a fine cold drink, and is not so bad from the neck of a bottle. —FORTUNE MAGAZINE, 1933

I made a beeline for a roulette table, where my lack of gambling skills wouldn’t be so evident. As soon as we had ourselves settled at the table, a cocktail waitress came straight over to take our drinks order. I watched Leon out of the corner of my eye as he asked the waitress about the cocktail menu. God, he was really something. I could feel his presence from several feet away. He was the kind of person that made a solid wall of people part as he approached. Would you think I was rude if I said I couldn’t help thinking that it probably wasn’t the only thing he would part easily? Believe me, you’d have thought that too if you’d seen him

Mr. Butler’s Refreshing Cocktail one measure of cherry brandy one measure of gin squeeze of lemon juice splash of Cointreau sugar syrup to taste Shake all the ingredients together. To make a long drink, add soda water or bar quality lemonade. Garnish with a cherry.

for no less than thirty seconds and then immediately pour it, ice and all, into a mason jar with a salted rim, garnished with a wedge of key lime or meyer lemon or both. You can specify how hot you like it. For example, if you ask for “pleasantly spicy,” they’ll drop the pepper in a cocktail shaker, pour in the tequila, and then remove the pepper immediately. If you ask for “taste-bud abusive,” they’ll let the pepper sit with the tequila for a couple of minutes. Ask for “medical supervision advised,” and they’ll use a safely guarded reserve that’s been steeping for who knows how long. And here’s how you drink a spicy grapefruit margarita at Colonel Teddy’s Tiki Bar on Siesta Key: as slowly as possible.

The sins we confess are not just drinking too much beer but also getting drunk on the cocktails of culture. We are not just laying our lives at the altar with nothing to pick up but we are also picking up an irresistible revolution that the world is waiting for.

The waitress comes over with a tray of the official cocktail of the evening, the ELT French 40. It's a riff on a French 75, adjusted to suit us, with bourbon instead of gin, champagne, lemon juice, and simple syrup, with a Luxardo cherry instead of a lemon twist. "Here you go, ladies. As soon as your guests are here we will start passing hors d'oeuvres, but I thought you might want a little sampler plate before they arrive." "That is great, thanks so much!" I say, knowing that in a half hour when people start to come in, we'll have a hard time eating and mingling. We accept the flutes and toast each other. The drink is warming and refreshing at the same time. The platter she has brought us contains three each of all the passed appetizers we chose: little lettuce cups with spicy beef, mini fish tacos, little pork-meatball crostini, fried calamari, and spoons with creamy burrata topped with grapes and a swirl of fig balsamic. There will also eventually be a few of their signature pizzas set up on the buffet, and then, for dinner, everyone has their choice of flat-iron steak, roasted chicken, or grilled vegetables, served with roasted fingerlings. For dessert, there is either a chocolate chunk or apple oatmeal cookie, served toasty warm with vanilla ice cream and either hot fudge or caramel on top, plus there will be their famous Rice Krispies Treats on the tables to share.