My friends, Hallowe’en means many things to me. As you may have guessed, I have a bit of a penchant for dark stories and poetry (I mean, really, “The Raven”!). This holiday, in all of its hijacked glory, is the one chance a year most of us have to assume another identity. Of course, most people don’t see it quite so philosophically, but they still indulge from time to time. This is never quite so obvious as in the Hallowe’en party.
I’m sure you’ve all got a good story that includes too much alcohol and some sort of costume mishap. Most of my Hallowe’en party stories, however, are a bit tamer than that, because my younger sister’s birthday is October 31st. As you might imagine, the notion of throwing a raucous, booze-laden costume party was never a particularly popular sentiment at my house. Even when my sister would have been up for some pre-legal drinking, mum and dad would have wondered why they weren’t asked to the party.
All of this is to say that, after a childhood of Hallowe’en parties that involved birthday cake and presents, my sister’s 21st was destined to be one for the ages. One of the things I really love about this holiday is the storytelling. Allow me now to tell you the tale of that wonderfully mischievous night.
As I had already established myself as the go to bartender, I assumed that post for the night. My friends and I planned out a cocktail menu in advance, and made sure that we’d stocked our home bar with a good selection from across the spectrum. We were planning on some Brain Hemorrhages and other spooky drinks, and we all had our favorite liquors. My sister’s favorite was <ahem> nothing yet, for she had just turned 21 and had never had a drink in her life. ’Least, that’s what she told me. As you can imagine, it caught me by surprise when she came up and asked for cocktails by name.
Well, the party went on, and as we were on the tail end of the main part of the party, I decided that it was my job to truly initiate my sister into adulthood. I pondered for a minute as to the best method of doing this, and decided that it had to be some sort of suicide cocktail. Now, something within my clicked when I thought back to all those lame Hallowe’ens that I didn’t get to go trick-or-treating or hang out with my friends (’cause instead I was hanging out with her icky girlfriends), and I thought that this would be a great way to settle the score.
I’d provide the recipe for what I made her that night, but there aren’t enough bits in cyberspace to include all of the ingredients. I quite literally poured a little bit of every bottle into a shaker. At first glance, that isn’t too bad; there are a lot of cocktails that use a lot of different liquors to great ends. This cocktail, however, was not to be one of those. Consider for a second what Bailey’s and OJ might taste like together.
Well, I have to give her props, she drank the entire concoction. She was actually able to keep it down for about an hour and a half, too. My sister learned two very important lessons that night: Big Brother has a long memory, and binge drinking is no fun.
I tell this story not to illustrate the inherent cruelty in it, nor indicate some long-standing resentment with my sis (quite the opposite , in fact, she laughs about it now). Instead I tell this story because it’s one of those things that causes me to chuckle when I think back to my earlier days, and I was really in the mood to tell a story. I suspect that this may not reach you until All Saint’s Day, in which case I hope you had a Happy Hallowe’en, and I bid you to ‘Remember, remember, the 5th of November!’
Caw!
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