Potable Potions

Today, one week has passed since I finished all grading for the semester, Now is the time to start talking about alcohol.
I came to drinking late, as far as I can tell. except for communion wine (we used the real thing) and my mother's homemade cherry wine, I hadn't tasted alcohol before I graduated from high school. I wasn't part of that scene. Had I known it existed, I would have wanted to be part of it, but who knew?
We'll skip the summer of learning to drink and smoke--I did require instruction in both, actually--and go right into the college years. I suppose that most of my drinking during college took place at "functions"--parties thrown by upperclassmen at the American Legion hall just west of town on Route 50. They would rent the basement, charge a couple of dollars a head to get in, and then get 50 cents for beer and $1 for a "mixed drink." What I drank probably depended on how much money I had, but my preference was the sloe gin fizz or the Singapore sling. They were probably identical; the "bartenders" would pour them ready-made from bottles and add a little soda. Voila! They were sweet, somewhat alcoholic, and cheap. The Epicureans, a group of guys from SU (then SSC) played the popular music of the day, and we'd drink and dance the night away.
The most important thing was making sure you had a ride home, especially if you were a freshman girl. Curfew on Thursday nights was 10:30. Girls needed to be in their dorms (mine was Holloway Hall) before curfew, and they had to be able to sign in without revealing any disabling intoxication. Just as it is today, Thursday night was the big drinking night, so functions were almost always then. That meant both an early curfew and, for me, an early phys ed. class. Jumping jacks at eight a.m.after a night of questionable alcoholic mixtures--not fun.
The best thing about functions (other than that they were held in plain sight in violation of all the campus rules--signs all over campus said "FUNCTION THURSDAY 9/22" and nothing else) was that I met Michael at the first one of my sophomore year, which was his freshman year. I won't go into all the details, except to say that we had been eyeing each other on campus for a few weeks, and I decided to ask him to dance. The rest is history. That was almost 44 years ago, and we've been together ever since. It took us ten years to marry, but we didn't break up and we didn't live together in all that time.Strange but true.
We did the usual college drinking and then the occasional party drinking after college, but we really didn't drink much as a couple. Michael traveled a lot for work and socialized with his colleagues and his customers, so he did a fair amount on the road, but that's probably at least partly why he wasn't particularly inclined to drink at home.
We had both tried wine and found it not so much to our liking, but we've decided, now, that that was probably because we didn't buy good wine, not even good cheap wine. Once we started going to wine tastings ten or so years ago, we realized how good wine can be, and we began to develop our own tastes for wine.
Rather than go on with this, I'm going to end with two drink recipes. These are my favorites, not necessarily Michael's. He likes them, but I love them. I'll talk more about wine another time.

Dark and Stormy:
2 oz Goslings Black Seal rum (it's not a D&S without this brand)
6oz Maine Root Ginger Brew (if you can find it--Gosling's Black Seal ginger beer is an acceptable--if not perfect--substitute)
squeeze of lime juice
Pour together over a tall glass of crushed ice

Champagne Napoleon
1 1/2 oz Mandarine Napoleon liqueur
chilled champagne (I prefer Moet & Chandon White Star; be sure to use a good one)
orange peel for garnish
Pour the liqueur into a flute; add the champagne slowly down the side to fill the glass; toss in the peel

Enjoi!!