Swell
About four years ago I was chatting with some friends, and we got to talking about cocktails. We realised that there was a long list of drinks that we'd heard of, but never tasted. We didn't even know what was in them. And it's not like you can go into the average pub and say, "I'd like a pina colada please."
So we decided to get together and have a little cocktail party. Everyone would bring a bottle, we'd all dress up for the occasion, and we'd all have these Pina Coladas, Harvey Wallbangers, Mai Tais and Manhattans. Twelve people met at my house, and a grand old time was had by all.
Four years later, the 4th Annual Cocktail Party was held at my place last Friday night. There were forty-four guests, all dressed in lounge suits and evening gowns. We started with Champagne Cocktails a la Blandwagon, my own recipe made with champagne, sugar cubes dipped in bitters, fresh raspberries and a splash of either brandy or red vermouth. After I'd made forty or so of those, I just circulated with large pitchers of Mojitos, Long Island Iced Teas, Cosmopolitans and Cutthroats. For spacer drinks, there was a bin of chinottos, sanbitters and limonatas. For snacks, we had scotch quail eggs, oyster dip, toasted Lebanese bread with green olive tapanade and baby bruschettas, among other things.
Musically, we enjoyed the cool retro stylings of Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto and Cal Tjader for the first few hours, until JC tried to impress a chick by putting on My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. But that sort of worked too, as it turned out. In the fashion stakes JB was very impressive in his tan safari suit, but AB's chocolate velvet swinger suit won hands down. It once belonged to his father, and it's hard to reconcile the portly, grey bearded academic I know with the groovy, snake-hipped young man he'd have to have been to slide into this suit.
It cost me a fortune, the next morning the house looked like one of those garbage houses you see on tabloid news shows, and my head felt, as Blackadder memorably put it, like it had a Frenchman living in it. But what a swell party it was.
So we decided to get together and have a little cocktail party. Everyone would bring a bottle, we'd all dress up for the occasion, and we'd all have these Pina Coladas, Harvey Wallbangers, Mai Tais and Manhattans. Twelve people met at my house, and a grand old time was had by all.
Four years later, the 4th Annual Cocktail Party was held at my place last Friday night. There were forty-four guests, all dressed in lounge suits and evening gowns. We started with Champagne Cocktails a la Blandwagon, my own recipe made with champagne, sugar cubes dipped in bitters, fresh raspberries and a splash of either brandy or red vermouth. After I'd made forty or so of those, I just circulated with large pitchers of Mojitos, Long Island Iced Teas, Cosmopolitans and Cutthroats. For spacer drinks, there was a bin of chinottos, sanbitters and limonatas. For snacks, we had scotch quail eggs, oyster dip, toasted Lebanese bread with green olive tapanade and baby bruschettas, among other things.
Musically, we enjoyed the cool retro stylings of Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto and Cal Tjader for the first few hours, until JC tried to impress a chick by putting on My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. But that sort of worked too, as it turned out. In the fashion stakes JB was very impressive in his tan safari suit, but AB's chocolate velvet swinger suit won hands down. It once belonged to his father, and it's hard to reconcile the portly, grey bearded academic I know with the groovy, snake-hipped young man he'd have to have been to slide into this suit.
It cost me a fortune, the next morning the house looked like one of those garbage houses you see on tabloid news shows, and my head felt, as Blackadder memorably put it, like it had a Frenchman living in it. But what a swell party it was.
posted by Blandwagon at 7:36 PM
1 Comments:
Good grief, I have 4 people over and it's a full house. If I tried to have 44 over the place would look like one of those clown cars.
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