ON THE NINTH DAY OF DECEMBER
Oh it has been a long week at work, hasn't it? People get extra pissy around the holidays and you are expected to just play along like usual and make believe that they're not being HIDEOUSLY UNREASONABLE and/or unbearably waffley. Plus, have you seen how people are driving?! Yikes. I know two people personally who have had the front of their cars ripped off in accidents this week.
They're both ok, but Jessica and Sue - you guys, and the rest of us, could use a drink. Nothing seasonal, nothing requiring juicing a kumquat or infusing vodka with hazelnuts, nothing garnished with marinated prostate of baby Pacific eel, just a delicious cocktail that we know we love.
A couple months ago I was deep in the middle of reviewing the mightily terrible, inexplicably boring YA novel Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, and believe you me, reviewing that book was exactly like a long work week. I needed to take a break. Inspired by the uptown locales, bloody stabbings, and crystal barware that were the only interesting parts of that book, I invented this:
Murder on the Roof of the Guggenheim Cocktail
1 part Campari
1 part Hendricks gin
1/2 part Lillet Blanc
Chill a martini glass and run a piece of orange peel around the rim. Shake ingredients in a shaker full of ice, strain into the glass. Dribble a tiny drop of bitter brown Punt e Mes into the drink so that it swirls around looking mysterious.
Sam at Parenthetical.net, who marches beside me, figuratively speaking, on the quest for excellent YA, tried this cocktail and gave independent confirmation that it is indeed delicious and rather glam.
It's called Murder on the Roof of the Guggenheim because last time I was on the roof of the Guggenheim, I should have murdered a certain person. If you ever have a chance to go up there, take it. The way the building faces Central Park across Fifth Avenue, all you see from the roof is the Reservoir, making it look like somehow you are on the shores of a lake even though you are right in the middle of Manhattan. (Probably an unintended effect by Frank Lloyd Wright - a nice one, unlike the other unintended effects at that museum, which include poor roof drainage, no loading dock, and exhibition personnel driven insane by CURVED WALLS. What the hell, Frank? You thought in the future people would no longer make art on flat surfaces?) (Dude, I can rant about anything.)
Drive safely, boys and girls, and keep your phones charged. I can come and get you if some flailhead T-bones you, and I'll have a flask in my pocket.
How can there not be any comments to this piece of literary and alcoholary genius??!!??
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