Mocktails and other tipsy tales
It’s no secret to longtime Fat City readers and listeners to Central Standard Friday (tomorrow’s show, by the way, is all about the restaurant scene in Lawrence, Kansas — tune in!) that I stopped drinking a long time ago. Yes, I occasionally miss a nice glass of wine with dinner — who wouldn’t? — but for me, it was one of the few smart decisions I’ve ever made in my life. Some people just can’t successfully handle the devil’s brew, and I’m one of them. It wasn’t really that much of a struggle to quit cold turkey — not like tobacco, which has been my weakness for decades — and I was even able to pick up some shifts as a bartender, without a bit of temptation, for several years after getting sober.
Shortly before I graduated from college, I enrolled in and passed the professional bartending course at the National Bartending School in Indianapolis. Glamorous it wasn’t, and for all but one of the class sessions, we were mixing “cocktails” with colored water. (The theory: Why waste good liquor on a bunch of yahoos who are going to spend more time washing glasses anyway?) In the last class — a week before our final examination — we made complicated cocktails with real booze, like a pousse-cafe (for which I never had a request), and exotic fancy cocktails, like a Scorpion Bowl. Since we also got to taste the cocktails, I sampled everything until I passed out and was sent home in a taxi. You could say it was an omen of things to come.
