Bar Talk

The great thing about living in a house instead of a Westy is all the room. All the room divided into rooms. A house full of rooms.

It’s all very civilized.

One of the coolest little rooms in our new house is the sunporch. It’s in the back, on the eastern side of the house, and gets saturated with morning sun.


(Well, not THIS morning; there IS no sun).

Like the front porch, the floor tilts downward, from the house to the lawn. I think it was enclosed later in its life – it probably started off as an open porch, tilted down so the rain could drain off.

It’s weird and wacky walking out there, on that slanted floor. It messes with your balance, and you never quite have a hold on your equilibrium.

Which makes it, naturally, the perfect place for the bar.

We had boxes and boxes of bottles of booze (boxes of bottles of booze: sounds like a Dr. Seuss title) stored in Bill’s Mumsie’s basement the last 7-½ years. I don’t know where it all came from. I know we inherited some from Himself – our landlord-turned-tenant – when he died, back in our house in Fairfield. The rest just got accumulated along the way.

And we also have lots of cool, bright, colorful stuff from the Caribbean and Mexico, also waiting patiently all those years to see the sun again.

We threw it all together, and it seems to work. Like inventing a new drink. “Mix rum with Caribbean bus, pour over ice.” “Pour tequila (or mescal or sotol) over Mexico fishies, shake.”

Speaking of which, and because I am utterly brain dead after all the festivities last night, celebrating our friends’ 10-year-anniversary owning and running the Tavern (Thanks P&M! What a blast!), I leave you with Bar Talk much more clever, witty and sensible than anything I can come up with. It’s a column from yesterday’s New York Times’ food section, by Mark Bittman, who approaches the mixing of cocktails as he does making a pasta dish. Really.

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Add a Splash of Ad-Lib

And now I’m going back to bed.