Summer posts will be scarce. There's not much to be said about that. Last year I bravely promised a drink recipe a week just to keep you coming back, and I managed a whole five of those before summer drowned me in grass clippings and sunscreen. Let's see if I do better this time.
Wedding Lemonade.
I only tasted it once. It seared a memory into my 8-year-old brain even as it seared away the lining of my 8-year-old esophagus. For years to come, it reduced me to a kind of lemonade paranoia, asking with what must have been maddening constancy whether the pitcher of lemonade I saw in the fridge was "regular" or "wedding." Because to pour a glass of one thinking it was the other? Well, you know that startling feeling you get when you think you're sipping water but it turns out to be Sprite? This was thinking you're sipping lemonade and it turning out to be a mugging.
Lemonade and tequila. That's all it was. The lemonade was probably Countrytime because this was the late-seventies and recreational powders were just coming into style, but the tequila was definitely Two Fingers. I remember that name because my dad used to joke that the label read "two fingers" but it drank like a fist. As for the proportions, figure out just how much tequila you need to add to lemonade to cause blindness and stop just short of that.
My parents invented the drink at my aunt's wedding, and from that it got its name, but it hardly required another wedding for them to mix a pitcher of it again. In fact, I'm not sure if my parents ever attended another wedding after my aunt's. Make of that what you will.
My best friend from high school got married last week. It was a beautiful ceremony: Elegant and refined. They did not serve wedding lemonade. Throughout the ceremony, the groom, my friend Steven, grinned so incessantly I worried that when the time came to recite his vows, his jaw would simply unhinge and fall to the floor.
I do not want to co-opt their day for my own political and social agenda, except to ask them to treasure their marriage. Celebrate it. Honor it. Revel in it. Have an affair with it. Get drunk on it. Call it two-fingered but drink it like a fist. Because maybe if those of us who can marry did a better job of being married, there would be fewer people around who felt like marriage was something that needed defending.
You know, the only liquor I have in the house is a bottle of tequila--with nothing to mix it with. Or so I thought. There was also a sale on Country Time at Target. You've made my weekend--if I can wait that long.
Posted by: Deb | July 29, 2009 at 10:50 PM