Heads in the Clouds
“So,
mutatis mutandis, the LGBT
community…” Ted was lecturing about marriage equality from his podium on our
living room couch.
“What?” I blurted. Cocktail “hour” was
pushing 90 minutes. I should have served the lamb stew and couscous already,
but I couldn’t get out of the chair.
“The
gay community must shift its praxis from the dystopian to the…”
“No,
before that. You said ‘mucous mucandies.’ What the hell does that mean?”
“You
have a Ph.D. and you don’t know what mutatis
mutandis means?” Ted was appalled.
“Fuck
you,” I explained.
We’ve
been doing this for years. We’re all academics or ex-academics. Dan has three
degrees—B.A., MBA, and Ph.D., all from Harvard.
I have a Ph.D. from Columbia; Ted has one from Princeton and teaches at
NYU; his partner, Eric, has an M.F.A. from Columbia and taught at Wellesley but
now writes screenplays that actually get made into movies. You may have caught
the farcical Brainiacs on cable; Eric
wrote it. This dinner party demonstrated where he got his material.
We
were flying on Aviations. I was in a vast liquor emporium on the Upper East
Side last week (I rarely go up there, since I’m deathly allergic to cashmere
sweaters and simple strands of pearls) and saw Crème de Violette on the shelf with a little printed recipe for the
Aviation. Maraschino, was nearby. I bought both.
By
Maraschino, I don’t mean the syrup in which innocent cherries are drowned in
artificially flavored, carcinogenically colored sugar water so children can
have their first drug rushes. I mean the clear cherry liqueur, which Italians
make from Marasca cherries and their crushed pits. Et la Crème de Violette? Yes, it’s really made from violets and
thus wins the title of The Gayest Liqueur Ever, there being no Crème de Pansy.
I
played around with the recipes I found online at the marvelous blog
www.sippetysup.com, where I learned that the drink has the reputation of being
a 1930s cocktail, but it actually dates from 1916, when only a few people had ever
seen an airplane, let alone flown in one. In those days, flying into the sky in
a technological wonder seemed miraculous. The Aviation celebrates that magic.
It has by far the loveliest color of any cocktail I’ve ever seen—watercolor-pale
lavender. And it’s extraordinarily luscious. Now that air travel is like taking
the bus, except that the bus is on time, the airplanes’ early thrill is long
gone. Unless, of course, you make yourself and your smarty-pants friends
Aviations, in which case you’ll all quickly be even higher than your IQs.
