ALCOHOL
Spirited Away
I can’t write about drinking. It’s a trap. The minute I say I love drinking, someone will immediately think, ‘She has a problem.’
When I was a baby my father used to put a drop of Irish whiskey in my bottle to ensure I slept through the night. I can hear the hue and cry. “Oh my god, you should have been snatched up by child services!”
Sauvignon Blank
My first drink was a disaster. Our family had gone to a wedding at a country club in the Southern city where we lived. Thanks to my grandparents, I knew my around country clubs, but this one was more gaudily opulent than any I’d ever seen. The faucets on the sinks were gilded swans. When you turned the head, water came spurting out. I would have liked to stay and gawp but a lady in a uniform was waiting to hand me a starched linen washcloth.
Elixirs
What’s Your Poison?
I first encountered “booze” the summer of 1972, when I was six, and my best friend Jess and I got busy enacting our plan to do in Ms. Blanken — the sourpuss, spiteful recess supervisor at our town summer camp — with a poisoned apple.
We’d recently seen Disney’s Snow White. Death by poison apple was a means fresh in our minds. In school, we were good students, give-the-teacher-an-apple-at-the-end-of-the-year types. Our cover was tight as a drum.
Let The Good Times Roll
Playground of the World
My earliest experience with alcohol was tending bar at a cocktail party when I was seven years old. My mother’s boyfriend, Charlie, threw the event in his palatial ocean front apartment in Atlantic City. It was 1961, before casinos, when the city was still pretty. They called it “The Playground of the World.” Under Charlie’s tutelage, I made a mean martini-- a jigger of gin with a splash of dry vermouth, strained over cracked ice, shaken.
The party guests, three other couples, were serious drinkers. My mother, who barely drank at all, called them “fish.” They were mostly his friends. One was a dentist, another was a doctor. Their wives, college-educated women who never worked outside the home, kept their figures and weekly salon appointments. While their husbands were busy with their jobs and their affairs, the wives spent their mornings golfing and playing tennis. Afternoons were spent at the country club. Their arrival en masse in Atlantic City for a cocktail party was a bit of a novelty. I was part of the show, the seven year old mixologist.
Magic Land
I had no business owning a bar.
The plan was high tea with tidy Scandinavian sandwiches, a cafe spot for contemplation, romance and conversation. If I got lucky, I could ditch my low-paying journalism gig, and maybe for once in my life support myself.
My tea house experiment quickly morphed. Poets asked to read their poetry. A steady stream of musicians popped in asking for gigs. “No pay,” they insisted. Guitar cases, violins and cellos set up shop in the corners of my cafe. Guiding this runaway production seemed natural. Twenty years later, it’s an enduring late-night scene. Musicians from Taj Mahal to Mose Allison have called my place their favorite spot. Alcohol flows like water.