I'm a emotional Cripple (pt 1)
It's not really that bad, but it goes a-ways to explaining the funerial stillness in this patch of Blogi-slavia.
I should have come back and written post-after-post like the rest
of the Blog-sheviks that headed down south to the Big Easy
for a week of good-old-fashioned gemutlichkeit during that big
annual Cocktail Round-up we like to call Tales
of the Cocktail .
The others, stout and true, have done a right
tidy job of summing up the events, even providing pictorial evidence of
the grand camaraderie that is Tales. As
someone who's been attending for 3 or-so years, all I can say is this:
While it has vastly grown in scope, the same intimacy of the early years
still exists as the event gets bigger and larger. Five days of
enlightened ossifying, sozzling and jellicating without a single voice
raised (in anger), nor one fist cocked (let alone loosed) proves to me
that cocktail people are the coolest and easiest people in all of
Christendom. Friendships were made, not ended that week.
But I
couldn't post. I was wracked and paralyzed. So I didn't.
See, the thing was, was that while down in Crescent City I fell
in love with Her all over again--you know her, some
of you have even met her. She's maybe the greatest un-requited
love of my life and this time we were as close to consumating something
as we've ever been, and still, I let her slip away.
To
paraphrase:
I'm not dumb, but I can understand
Why she talked like a madame but she drank like a man......
Oh my NOLA!....
I ask you--Where else would you rather be in a mixed-up,
muddled-up, shook-up world than in New Orleans
LouisianA?
Me Neither!
So it was with heavy heart that I returned to Portland, the city what
spawned the Great Longfellow, now in the bi-centennial year of his
birth, who wrote his famed poem about a girl from Acadia (not far from
here) who longed for her beloved, exiled during the Cajun Diaspora to
the soggy spots not far from my--our-- New Orleans.
(Say
it with me): Evangeline!
Oh, How Cruel the Irony.
So I lay there for a week--sometimes on my bed, mostly on my couch and a
few times I sat upright on the fire escape doing the heady mathematics
of an unemployed man trying to skip town: If I leave now, I won't
have to pay rent, but I'd have to leave alot behind; If I pay rent and
leave next month, I'll spend more money than I'm liable to make from
eBay or Craigs List and than I'm stuck here AND homeless too.But if I Say
I'm gonna pay rent, but don't..........
Whiskey helped ease
some of the bigger questions out of the way-- to a point; I recognized
its false courage when the notion of hopping a freight train seemed like
a reasonable strategy and the entirety of my farewell speech was little
more than "Fuck 'em!"
In no time, another tantalizing
option did appear before me--this time New York! I resigned to lay down
again for a spell and try to think things out. But before I could even
summon up a thirst for a gin drink (New York and Gin just go together) I
realized I would be going "All-in" with a 4-7 off suit. I mucked my
cards before the flop(house) and turned back on the TV.
Cripple, Emotional, 1 ea (Pt II)
I made a stunningly bad calculation; my curiosity had left me vulnerable to any fool idea that might strike my fancy, and since my fancy hadn't been struck in a while, I was, as they say, a "target rich environment".
I opened up a conversation with a friend of a friend who was in his own personal shithouse: he was about to open his 2nd restaurant.
It was all so very, you know, casual and stuff....
"Do you need a bartender?" I heard myself asking, even before I thought my mouth had formed the words.
In my brain, I could have heard a pin drop, but out in the world...
I said I'd do it.
My Foot Loose and Fancy Free summer had come to a crashing end and I would have to start a-tending to stuff.
But, at the same time, a large weight --something along the lines of a now-grown Luc and his Lemon--fell off of my shoulders and I fell into the happy and familiar life of a "Job-bo" (a dirisive term that habitually unemployed denizens of my favorite DC bar used to describe people with, y'know, jobs).
So the last 2 weeks have been spent in that weird netherworld of the restaurant bizness-- The "New Restaurant Boot Camp".
It's a place in which restaurant lifers either thrive or die --The shifts start early, they end late and in between you bang your body into your new co-workers or pieces of equipment or both. And just when you feel like you're making headway, the ground shifts beneath you--the unfamiliar menu gets edited or the Wines By The Glass change or the placement of all of your tools or how you write (or enter) checks is suddenly different. Or some combination thereof.
Thrive or Die, my Friends, Thrive or Die....
There's also a ton of names to remember, co-workers as well as customers--a good number of which are an exercise in futility since they simply won't be back.
Until we get our rhythm down--our moves--there's lots of twisting, twirling, gyrations and contact.
Sure, I saw the dishmachine in the corner, I've seen it a zillian times this week, but I didn't expect the door to be left open, so....OUCH! Bruised shin.
Was that my elbow against your, you know?....I promise I'll try to be more careful......
There are drinks, of course, alcoholic beverages, and they cut into the sleep we've been putting off until later.
I'll sleep when I'm dead, we say, snidely quoting Zevon, till one of us points out the long dirt nap he's still taking.
Then again, drinks are a priority in the "New Restaurant Boot Camp" simply because that's what's to be got from such hard (and unrewarding in these early days) work.
In a nutshell, I'd like to think that the challenges and rewards of opening a new joint are somehow similar to an old Italian mason's satisfaction: Sure, it's one brick at a time, and each one matters, but in the end, it's the wall that counts.
I'ts been a long week (or three or four)
There's nothing like a little turmoil and upheaval to throw a guy off
his game. Some out-of-town clownishness, some going-away parties and the
abrupt and unceremonious closing of my place of employ have all
conspired to keep me from my blog. My apologies to all and sundry,
especially the legions that popped over here after Paul's too kind post
last month.
Sudden unemployment is an occuptional hazard for the
career bartender and we all deal with it in different ways. My
traditional regimen consists of a mixture of road trips, boozily
acting-out, wrecking the apartment and laying on the couch to watch the
cavalcade of court shows. Thumb-sucking is optional. (I removed that
from my repertoire only because I'm never quite certain where those
thumbs have been)
It's Phase II now, and time to Dust My Broom and
start putting things back in place. I'm gonna start here--the apartment
can wait.
First of all, thanks to Paul Clarke over at The
Cocktail Chronicles for the tip of the hat. A lot of eyes were
driven over here by that post (most of them at lunchtime, it seems) and
I owe many of them an apology-- to all the readers using IE or Safari I
had an errant "Object tag" (whatever that is) and it screwed up my page
something fierce. Everything is fixed and stable now--until the next
time I break it.
Other reader inquiries:
Regarding an RSS feed
(whatever that is): I don't have an automatic subscription widgety thing
(yet) but you can manually subscribe by putting http://TheThistinHowl.com/rss.xml
somewhere in your aggregator. I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but
it sounds like an insult you might hear in a bar near Redmond.
The
Gibberish: No, I'm not trying to sound "cool" or "stoned" or
anything like that. The text that I've used as subheadings etc are
quotes from Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, HOWL. It's
probably fair to call it gibberish but it's also a personell roster and
memoir of the nascent Beats. A lot of it can be
impenetrable and there are more than a few "decoded" annotated versions
on line. Here's an un-decoded version of Ginsburg's
Howl .
Thirstin Howl the III: Yes, there is a Puerto
Rican rapper in Brooklyn with this name. I discovered him and the gang
from Skilligan's Island when I tried to register my blog with his
handle. I quickly adjusted by adding "The" to my blog's name. I thought
it was simply a URL fix, but it made a subtle yet tremendous shift in
the way I approached my blog. Initially Thirstin Howl would have been a
boozy character driven blog, but with the name change, it became more
about the Howl,
and
Thurston, the man, disappeared completely. Hence the gibberish.
Jim Backus still appears on my cards, sipping something Tiki in his
Howell Hut. It's too precious not to use.
The Thirsty Howl,
now that I think of it, would have worked just fine too. 
It's the 4th of
July
and besides the National Commemoration that we all know about,
there's another fellow that we should hoist a drink to tonight.
Hiram
Walker
"was born in Douglas, Massachusetts, forty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed; born without the handicap of any special advantages. We pay this tribute to his memory not so much becasue he was a world-famous figure at eighty-three but because he was a failure at forty-one. For, like a true American, he never accepted defeat"
He gets the full wikipedia treatment here: Hiram Walker
Hoist one for John Robbins tonight
If you're anything like me, you'll be obeying your unslakeable thirst
tonight and that's about all the reason you need. But if you want to
lend a little solemnity to the occassion or feel the need to commemorate
something or other, look no further.
Drink a toast to John Robbins,
the first martyr sacrificed at the Altar of Temperance.
Once again, our old pal Neal Dow was in the thick of things, and the thing he was in the thick of was the Portland Rum Riot of 1855 and it went down pretty much like this:
As you'll recall, Neal Dow became the Mayor of Portland in 1851 and pushed the Maine Law that outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the state. By 1855, and with an eye on a berth on the Republican Party ticket as a possible Vice Presidential candidate, Dow created the "Intensified Maine Law" which allowed for, among other things, the interception of liquor in transit, as well as huge fines and prison for 1st offenders. The requirements to execute a warrant were also relaxed which allowed the authorities to pretty much poke its collective nose into anyplace that a little suspicion might lead it. In the words of an anonymous Portland poet (and many suspect Dow's own cousin):
"Mighty reformer! Oft the trump of Fame,
Blown by thyself, has sent abroad thy name!
Sublime Fanatic! Who to aid thy cause,
Slights trifles such as Constitutions, Laws!
O Pimp Majestic! Whose sharp gimlet eye,
All jugs concealed and demijohns can spy!
Astute Smell-fungus! Striving as a goal,
To poke thy nose in every dirty hole!
Pimp, Spy, Fanatic! Arrogant at heart!
Language would fail to draw thee as thou art!"
The words alone point to a growing animosity to Dow and his prohibitioning, but with all those exclamation marks, revolt must have been near at hand(!) And it was.
There was an exception to the Maine Law for alcohol used medicinally or in manufacturing, but the Intensified Maine Law specified that said liquor had to be sold by an authorized agent of the municipality. In May of 1855, Dow was the chairman of the committe to set up the agency store in City Hall and for some inexplicable reason, ordered $1600 worth of booze for the agency under his own name. The ramification was this: Once the agency was duly appointed, Dow would then transfer title from himself to the agent--an illegal transfer under the Intensified Maine Law, and thus subject to seizure and destruction. While Dow's personal peril was only a $20 fine and 30 days in jail, the political damage resulting in $1600 worth of booze getting flushed down the city's gutters could seriously hobble his future plans.
Boozers we may be, but these are the kinds of inconsistencies that our jellicated minds latch on to, and our bretheren in 1855 were no different. So on Saturday June 2nd, Portland's last distiller and two other anti-Dowists swore out a writ claiming that Dow posessed liquor for the purposes of an illegal sale. The judge issued the search and seizure warrant (the Intensified Maine Law having eliminated judicial discretion) and a deputy marshall was dispatched.
Dow's nose was in the wind and he quickly realized that something was
afoot.
He frantically patched up some of his bureaucratic
snafus--setting up the agency, signing over the alcohol to the
city,etc--while a restless crowd gathered near City Hall hoping to
witness the seizure and destruction of His booze. They may
have been on the rambunctious side, even a little mischievous, and in
the beginning, they probably meant no harm.
By 8:00 pm, some of the
rowdier denizens of Portland joined the restless crowd and headed to
where the liquor was stored, shouting and cursing Dow's name, and
pelting the building with rocks and ignoring the Sherrif's reading of
the Riot Act.
By 10:00 pm upwards of a thousand spectatators had
joined the 50 or so active beligerents.
Dow had now fortified the few
policemen with a couple of dozen Light Guard and was expecting a
reinforcement from the Rifle Guard at any minute.
"Brandishing a watchman's hook, Dow loudly commanded the crowd to disperse. From out of the darkness, the hated mayor received in reply a shower of oaths, hisses and stones. As missiles injured two militiamen, Dow flew into a frenzy. Without seeking the legally-required concurrence of the sheriff or an alderman, he shouted a comand to fire into the dense mass of rioters and spectators. The militiamen, however, waited for their captain to repeat the order. Turning to Dow, Captain Green asked, "must I fire, for its [sic] hard to shoot our own citizens." The mayor replied, "wait a minute". He later claimed that he intended only to frighten the crowd. At Green's insistence, Dow then led away the Light Guards to seek reinforcements"
Prophet of Prohibition: Neal Dow and His Crusade--Frank L Byrne
Buttressed by the addition of 30 Rifle Guards, the reformed Quaker rallied his troops: "I want every man of you to mark your man. We'll see whether mob law shall rule here, or whether your Chief Magistrate shall!" and they made for the liquor store where the mob was about to breach the doors.
The mayor and the Rifle Guards clattered down the stairs to the rescue....Leading them into the Agency's Middle Street entrance, he halted the militiamen within the darkened store. Several rock-throwers were visible through the opposite door. Dow shrieked an order to fire and three ragged volleys ripped along the length of the store into nearly-empty Congress Street. During the shooting, Dow took three Rifle Guards into the cellar to fire up through the window gratings but found no targets. He then withdrew his men through the Middle Street door, helped them to reload their muskets and finally ordered Captain Roberts to clear stragglers from the neighborhood with the bayonet. The prohiibitionist mayor had won his battle to protect the legal liquor-store.
Prophet of Prohibition: Neal Dow and His Crusade--Frank L Byrne
After the skirmish, snacking on cheese and crackers in the liquor
Agency, Dow is told that seven people were wounded and one had died. He
is famously cited for casually asking, "Was the body (at least) Irish?"
No,
is the reply, the deceased was "American".
So join me in toasting John Robbins tonight. Just 22, a mate on a fishing boat, born and raised on Maine's Deer Isle, and Martyred to the cause of Intemperance.
Here's Champagne to our real friends
And Real Pain to our Sham friends!
Hear! Hear!
More Movie Fun
A couple of vids caught my eye today that I thought were worth sharing.
Enjoy.
There's nothing that'll make me laugh more than an instance of schadenfreude
And for my money, the best of the genre features a little self
inflicted pain misfortune at the heart of it. I
mean, be honest--would you rather watch 10 "guy-gets-hit-in-the-nuts"
videos or a single "guy-hits-himself-in-the-nuts" clip?
I
Thought so.
Or as Mel Brooks put it: "Tragedy is if I cut my
finger....Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die."
Baby
+ Self Inflicted Pain = Comedic Gold!
So here's a little clip of a
baby discovering a lemon.
After I wiped the tears from my eyes, somewhere around the 4th or 5th
viewing, I started seeing something deeper, like I was peering into the primordial
ooze itself and I thought I caught a glimpse of something hardwired
into our collective DNA. (Or I could have just been high on huge bursts
of serotonin from watching this over and over.) There's something innate
that is tantalized by citrus, that draws us to it, and yet repels;
something in our firmware that makes us desire that razor ride between
pleasure and pain. Even as little tabula rasas covered in meaty
pudge, the Citrus Grove sings to us her Siren's Song.....
So is it
any wonder that lemons and limes feature so prominently in so many of
our cocktails? Whether as the lead voice in Daiquiris, Margaritas and
Sours of all kinds, or in a supporting role in Cosmopolitans, Cuba
Libres or simple Gin and Tonics, the welcome bite of citrus distracts us
while Mr. Alcohol's blunt cudgel works its magic.
So Thank You, Luc,
for giving us a window into our nature, you little tow-headed,
cow-licked dickens, you.
Or maybe it's just a video of a big dumb baby.
Our second film is an SNL sketch about buying beer when your
under 21. In light of the Portland PD's recent and much publicized sting
operations, this was even funnier for me. Chris Busby at The
Bollard has been following the ongoing shenanigans with a jaundiced
eye and my favorite detail of the whole nightmare ordeal
was when the cops asked the City Council to raise the rates for liquor
licenses. The proceeds, of course, would be used to finance sting
operations against liquor sellers.
Rich.
The Howl Jones Price Index
As a collector of old books relating to the application of alcoholic spirits upon the human spirit, I spend a fair amount of time scouring eBay, ABE and Alibris, as well as some of the darker corners of the web. For instance, I recently found a cache of Soule Smith's The Mint Julep, (4th edition) for sale but I'm gonna keep the details to myself, for now. Not only are these sites target rich environments for acquiring things, but they're invaluable for assessing the current values of things already got. EBay is a particularly good resource for valuation-- it's literally the New York Stock Exchange of America's junk.
Here are some recent eBay sales that have caught my eye.
Jerry
Thomas 1887 $307.00
This caught my eye for 2 reasons:
The price (!) of course and it was mis-identified as "Terry" Thomas in
the listing. I'm curious if the price would have been higher without the
typo.
George
Kappeler "Modern American Drinks" $161.00
In
my 10 or more years on eBay I don't recall ever seeing this book, nor
have I seen it on ABE or Alibris. Another pretty bad listing from a
seller who most likely had no idea what she had. There were only 60 or
so page views for this item, and I know I can account for about 15 of
them. Yes, I won it.
Oscar
Haimo "Cocktail Digest" 1943 $51.00
I've
got a small selection of Haimo's books and this one somehow slipped past
me. I thought I had the cat by the whiskers when I scored a Cocktail
Digest from 1944, (it would become the Cocktail and Wine
Digest in '45) but this is something else altogether. Haimo was
one interesting cat, if his autobiography Nothing Lasts Forever
is to be believed. After getting rejected by numerous publishers, Haimo
self-published the Digest with the proceeds from a cocktail
competition. He did all the artwork himself and his is one of the first
published recipes for the Moscow Mule that I'm aware.
Bartender's
Guide and Song Book $80.00
This is one of those
Prohibition era books that jauntily eulogizes the good ol' saloon. It's
replete with the recipes found in the demised saloon and the songs that
accompanied them. You may have recognized the fellow on the cover: he
got "Doctored" up by Ted "Doctor Cocktail" Haigh and was trotted out to
help promote a lot of MoTAC 's
events and announcements.
The dedication still resonates:
Published
in sacred memory of those good old days when bartending was an exact
science, and you could forget your troubles on any corner.
Bottoms
Up $81.00
This just caught me flat footed.
Ted
Saucier's "Bottoms Up" $4.99
Flat footed
again. Here's an instance where a book listed in a less than optimum
category fell into the hands of a very (very) lucky person. The book
isn't valuable, nor is it particularly rare but this copy looks
absolutely mint-y and it comes with an equally pristine slip cover.
Probably worth $50-$75 but an absolute steal at $5.00!
The
Savoy Cocktail Book $405.00
The Savoy Cocktail
Book is one of the most collectible cocktail books out there and
for a number of good reasons. It's a great resource for the cocktail
historian but it's also just a beautiful thing to look at and hold--a
true object of the cocktailian arts. This is simply an amazing
specimen for a collector. Here we have a 1st edition, in really good
condition and it's inscribed by Himself. The famous "Bacardi
Cocktail" addendum is intact, and did I mention already that Harry
Craddock signed it?
Holy Hanna, it's been awhile
Hello All,
Sorry so few (alright, no) posts in a while, but I warned you at the outset that I was a lazy procrastinator And while that's still true, this latest bit of silence is brought to you courtesy of an opposite impulse. I was feeling ambitious and started doing a little Spring cleaning on the ol' HardDrive when I apparently moved or renamed (or more likely, deleted) a little tiny 2Kb file that must have been fairly important to the upkeep and maintainance of this here patch of Blogistan. In the future, I will not touch files with inscrutable names like XC00BF197.dll, so help me God. Hopefully everything is working again, and if you're reading this, than it is. So you can expect a veritable spray of new material in the next few days, but don't get used to it-- you can count on me to get lazy as sure as you can count on the Red Sox to go into a slump after the All Star Break.
I'd all but finished a big and long post for last Saturday about the
Mint Julep, replete with themes of heritages lost, traditions stolen and
the rise of The Kentucky Mint Julep Hegemony. But that ship, as
we say, has sailed. So I'll spare you the details. There is a story
about Mint Juleps that surrounds our spiritual mascot, General
Neal Dow, however.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Dow, a
reformed Quaker, financed formed a regiment of
Tee-Totaling Mainers, who found their way into the campaign to secure
New Orleans. Upon his arrival in the Crescent City, Dow checked into the
City Hotel, where he paints this vignette in one of his letters home.
"The head waiter, a darkey, is a character, and is very deferential to the 'General', and hopes he is 'comfortable.' This afternoon he brought me a pitcher of ice water, and, with Landlord Woodward's compliments, a tumbler of mint julep, iced, minted and dusted with pulverized sugar and with a glass tube, 'all ready.' He waited as if to see me take it, but I told him to set it down, which he did. Just before dinner, he came up to notify me that dinner was almost ready, and, seeing the julep said: 'Oh, dat's all dead now!'
'Well,' I said, 'I never drink at all.'
'Ah, I tought you was one o' dem dat indulged.'
'No, I never do.'
'Oh, all right.'
'Yes, I mean to keep all right' Exit waiter with the 'dead' julep, to appear probably at the bar with an empty glass."
The insinuation here, of course, is that the waiter surreptitiously downed the 'dead' julep on his way to the bar. Unbeknownst to the general, however, a New York City journalist was sitting in the lobby and recognized Dow, the most famous Tee-Totaler of the day. His account goes something like this:
"A day or two ago my eyes were attracted by a diminutive little man, carrying the significant shoulder-strap of a brigadier-general. I had great confidence in his skill and courage and in his military knowledge...... The general came to my hotel and proceeded upstairs. In a few moments, the attentive landlord, hearing that he had a live brigadier-general in the house, without asking the clerk for his name, only asked for his number, which obtaining, said landlord rushed into the bar-room, and had a julep mixed, of standard strength, and ornamented with an immense amount of 'greens', which ostentatiously stuck up, making the 'institution' look more like a flower-pot than a genial beverage. This chemical and vegetable combination, sustained by a waiter of unusual politeness, was handed in at '21' with the landlord's compliments.
In due course of time, the tumbler returned as dry as a gourd, the mint all wilted; in fine, it seemed as if a sirocco had passed over it. And what of that? Only, gentle reader, that the general was General Neal Dow, the author of the Maine Liquor Law, the commander at Fort Jackson, whose orderly, no doubt, appropriated to himself the landlord's hospitality."
Thus from little acorns, minor scandals are born. As one wag put it:
"This is frightful. Neal Dow, who but a few years ago was not contented unless all mankind foreswore eternal enmity to mint juleps and all other peculiar 'vanities' compounded by liquor sellers; Neal Dow, who called out the police of Portland to shut up the liquor-shops; Neal Dow, who was never weary of poking his nose into other people's business, like a true New Englander; Neal Dow, succumbing before the seductive influence of a mint julep. Oh, tell it not in Gath, and proclaim it not in New England!"
When the Lord gives you Lemons...
My Great-Aunt Pollyanna used to say: If all you have is lemons, make
lemonade.
My Uncle, Col. 'Catheter' Jack, would counter: If all you
have is a Hammer, the whole World looks like a nail.
Which is the
brand of family wisdom that I was relying on when I came to
woke up on Thursday to find the sky spitting out yet more April snow at
me. I was in such a lousy humor that I could have spit nails at whoever
walked by, hoping at the very least to knock a few hats off.
Call me
Despondent
And right about then, Joe Walsh came over the radio:
And
we don't need the ladies
Crying 'cuz the story's sad
'Cuz the Rocky
Mountain Way
Is better than the way we had
And that's when I told that impish bastard upstairs (I may be an Atheist,
but I know He's up there) that He should send me all the snow He
wanted to.
I wanted it to snow all day.
I wanted to leave work
empty handed with nary a ducat in hand.
I wanted to laugh in the face
of Global Warming with a quiver full of "Maine has 8 months of Winter
and 4 months of bad sledding" jokes.
I was gonna drink Rocky
Mountain Sneezers!
In April, Godammit!
The Rocky Mountain Sneezer is truly an obscure drink. It's a "one
off", and I only came across it the other day while rooting around
looking for shrubs. [If you're wondering if spring in Maine is
parsimonious to the point that one must actually go a-hunting
vegetation, you'd be just wide of the mark. It is, and you must,
but I was up to something else. Shrub is simply an old
colonial-era drink, sweetened with all sorts of things and then soured
up with (usually) vinegar.] I was flipping through Cedric Dickens'
(Charles Dickens' great-great-grandson), Drinking with Dickens
whence I happened upon the aforementioned tipple. It seems that while
Old Man Dickens was here in the States, he couldn't shake a rather
stubborn cold and cough combination. It became one of those intransigent
maladies that we all get from time-to-time, the ones that become so
familiar and a part of ourselves that the impulse to at least give it a
nickname is overwhelming. He dubbed his "The American Catarrh" and his
landlord often suggested a mixture he called the Rocky Mountain
Sneezer in the hopes of alleviating some of Dickens' suffering, and
we presume, some of his own. It's a simple little decoction, built along
the lines of the earliest of cocktail templates--spirits, sugar, water,
bitters--with a little bit of the Cobbler tossed in for good
measure.
And, of course, snow.
Shake together 2 oz. each
of Brandy and Rum with sugar and the juice of 1 lemon and a handful of
snow--preferably from the Rocky Mountains.
Add 2 dashes
Angostura.
It's a tasty pile of drink, I must say, particularly the 3rd when taken
in succession. But is it efficacious? Does it do the trick? Here's
Dickens:
"My cold refuses to stir an inch. It distresses me greatly at times, though it is always good enough to leave me for the needful two hours [during his scheduled public readings]. I have tried allopathy, homeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result."
My results weren't much different, and I mostly concur with Dickens: while my catarrh is about the same, my Bahrain couldn't be more at ease.
When the Lord closes a door, he opens a little window
Yep, you're right. I'm a Bad Blogger! Lazy, even. And you know
it's bad when Miss
Bumptious says so.
G'won, sue me.
No takers? Then I'll get on
with it.
Well, it looks like the Hoary Hand of Time finally dragged Progress's
lazy bones outta bed to begin the ugly work of turning the neighborhood
down the street into Condo-World. The first victim? That venerable old
haven for the lonely toper, The Breakaway Tavern. Now truth be told, I
rarely went to "the Break", but spiritually it was one of my favorite
watering holes. When the Nico-Nazis finally got their way, myself and a
fellow investigator poked our collective head into a couple of saloons
where we hoped would-be rebels could still take the "pause that
refreshes". A week into the ban, we found the Breakaway's bar still
equipped with ashtrays and the smell of a freshly stabbed out butt still
lingering in the air. None of the three old guys sitting around the bar
would cop to being the smoker, but they insisted that we light up, so we
did. Nothing happened and "the Break" became one of my favorite Portland
places, even if I never went there.
She's been closed since sometime
late last year and the boys over at The
Bollard wrote her a great, if premature, eulogy.
(scroll down to The Breakaway Tavern, July 4th, 2006)
I
happened to be walking by as the wrecking ball took it's first bites.
But
when the Lord closes a door, He sometimes opens a little window. And
this particular window opened just to the left and down the street from
the Breakaway's gaping maw, over on Middle Street and right next door to
Hugo's.
Rabelais Books opened
for business today, specializing in new, used, rare and antiquarian
books focusing on the prandial arts. That's right: cooking books, eating
books, drinking books, feasting books, fasting books and
everything-in-between books. Metro racks and stainless steel prep tables
are a tip-off that we're in the comestibles department and the place has
a light and airy feel for a book shop. This might be partially due to
the many as yet unpacked boxes (and the promise of still more stock to
come). Or maybe it's just the big store-front windows.
Proprietors Don
and Samantha, currently living in far away Alfred, couldn't have
been nicer. They even flagged me down an hour later as I walked passed
to return one of my errant cufflinks.
So what's in store for the
reader that heads into the store? If you're a foodie, give yourself some
time for a nice long browse. You'll find some newly published stuff you
didn't know you wanted, some recently published things you meant to buy
a while ago, and some well maintained old favorites that you'd all but
forgotten about. And happily this seems to be a Rachael Ray-free-zone,
and I didn't see any other Food Network shwag junking up the place
either.
If you're a collector, tell Don where your interests lie and
he'll lead you around to where he's got the choice bits squirreled away.
Man! Has he got some stuff! A 3rd edition Omar Kayyam, comes to mind as
does a pristine copy of The Full and By. Not to mention a 1st
(American) edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Ditto the Savoy
Cocktail Book. A couple of copies of the Stork Club Bar Book
were in the same cabinet as a boxed set of Charles Baker's South
American Gentleman's Companion. (I jokingly asked Don how much he
wanted for just the box and without missing a beat he said that I could
have it for $250 and he'd throw the books in for nothing.)
A 1928
edition of Jerry Thomas' Bon Vivant's Companion, did you say, the
Herbert Asbury edition?
Yeah. He's got that too.
And if you're looking for the street address, it's 86 Middle
Street.
Yes, that's right, as in the restaurant shorthand for stuff
we ran out of.
So there you have it, a city's Karmic balance at work. So long Breakaway, Welcome Rabelais.
few are called
A funny little commercial for an Austrian bartending school. My German is still a little rustig, but the text reads something like "Do you feel the Calling?" My sources at Drink Boy tell me that the priest is played by the owner of the bar school advertised and, as luck would have it, is named Christian. Something tells me that the almost-but-not-quite-funky vamp at the end will stay stuck in my head for the rest of the morning.
Happy Birthday, Neal
I know. And you're absolutely right. Why is the inaugural post of what
surely is a Boozer's Blog about this guy, this creep? How
could I?
What can I say other than that's the way I'm wired.
That's
how I roll, Yo.
I'm also a terrible procrastinator, always have been, so I have to set
deadlines for myself just to get things done. Like this blog, f'rinstance
I
had resolved that this would be up by New Year's day.
Nothing
happened.
I prayed that I'd have this going by St Amand's Day,
the patron saint of bartenders.
Still nothing.
I was certain, as
sure as the day I was born, that I'd have this up by my 40th
birthday (March 4th, for all those who still owe me a drink).
Nope.
I
paraded around touting St. Patrick's Day as the kick-off.
I
hadn't done shillelagh.
So I absolutley laid out March 20th as
the drop dead deadline for this here blog. I mean, if I can't get my
shit together to write about booze before the birthday of the Napoleon
of Prohibition, I'm a lost cause.
So welcome to The Thirstin' Howl where, if you'll pardon the occasional "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories", we'll have a few drinks, crack some jokes and possibly learn a thing or two along the way. And don't mind the mess, we still have some decorating to do.
So just who is the old duffer above? Glad you asked. I'll be brief.
Neal
Frederick Dow was one of the weirder cats ever to come out of
Portland Maine, the little town where I live. He was born in 1804 of
solid New England Quaker stock, the kind of New England Quaker stock
that thinks Hate-Evil is a man's surname. In 1851 he became Mayor of
Portland with the backing of anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, and various
Temperance groups. In June of that year, Dow cajoled Governor John
Hubbard to sign a bill into law that outlawed the sale and manufacture
of alcohol. Thus Maine became the first state to enact a blanket
Prohibition law and Dow became a movement's standard bearer.
So Happy 103rd General! And I won't forget to put Rose's (Lime juice) on your grave.