“Everyone has a hidden talent they don’t know about until the tequila is poured”
Think cocktails, and wondrous visions of delicious stuff in elegant flutes, coupes and cocktail glasses swim into view, bedazzling one with their contents. Many are left shaken AND stirred to the depths of their souls (since not everyone has Bond’s panache or cool). Without a doubt, the cocktail hour advertised in so many uber chic establishments for w(h)ining and dining is one of the more brilliant marketing heists ever pulled. The mere whiff of a complimentary cocktail and guzzlers gather by the gazillion.
You can get a Hanky- Panky down, while comfortably ensconced in a Sidecar. And who needs to worry about mundane little details like doctors when despite Last Words, you can always be brought back from beyond the veil by the Corpse Reviver? Feeling like a Zombie? Well, just get on a Moscow Mule and you will be the Bee’s Knees in no time. It is easy to tour Manhattan, explore Long Island via the ice-tea route and sling Singapore into the bag as well. Well, enough of the playing with the names of cocktails before a strait-laced teetotaler like yours truly is mistaken for hic! a dipsomaniac like Captain Haddock!
Humans, as we all know, are social animals. Unless you are one of those few precocious souls who truly seek enlightenment and communion with a higher power, or have been possessed by William Wordsworth’s worthy spirit and wish to see the dancing daffodils flash before your inward eye, you will not find much solace or bliss in solitude. You will tend to congregate in herds, droves, gaggles or perhaps even murders? and hobnob with your own kind. And what better situation to do this than a party and a cocktail one at that? A perfect place to let your hair down, put on your best war paint, short frocks and rocks, network busily and ‘build up your contacts’, for doesn’t the world work like that these days? and get up to all kinds of wild shenanigans cloaked in the relative anonymity of large crowds and the happy thought of someone who is not you, not only getting down to the nitty-gritty of organizing the whole shebang, but also footing the bill.
Some of us however, are cursed with a recalcitrance which borders on the phobic. We take our cues from Bertie Wooster and set a nor’ nor’ east course if we get the slightest hint that a party is taking place sou’ sou’ west. It is not we do not like to interact with people, but we refuse to be crowd pleasers or let our guard (much less our hair) down when surrounded by relative strangers. Our conversation can be sparkling and scintillating, but we prefer to do that without the prop of a beaker of bubbly. Anonymity is not our license or ‘buzz’ for raucous behavior and only serves to put our guard up! For us, these cocktail parties mean only one type of cocktail, the good ol’ Molotov!The one which literally goes bang, before you can say ‘New Year’.
Being surrounded by crowds ‘Sha-la-laing’ or ‘Zing-Zing-Zingating’ with an overbearing DJ and zealous hostess/host exhorting everyone onto the dance floor to show off their moves (never mind if they succeed in accidentally beaning someone over the head or taking someone else’s eye out with their overflowing cup of joy) makes some of us feel as if we are carefully negotiating a mine-field, blindfolded. One false move and you will never know what hit you in the face! We look around with a sense of wonder at what people who are perfectly sane most of the time are capable of when the ‘happy juice’ gets going in their veins. The Romans had it right all along, ‘In vino, veritas’. In wine, lies the truth.
It is at times like these that I paraphrase the lyrics of ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ from ‘The Sound of Music’. All I can think of is “When I’m with them and confused,out of focus and bemused, and I NEVER know exactly where Iam….!” This brings to mind my recent tryst with destiny at a rather ‘large do’ hosted by a mover and shaker. If I’d hoped that there would be at least some of my kind (read wallflowers) clustered around, with whom I could at least exchange a smile in passing if not anything else, I was in for a rude shock.
As a conscientious ENT surgeon, I make it a point to remind all my patients about the hazards of noise pollution, even printing it on my prescription sheet and the fact that a party being held on the second floor could be heard in the parking lot did not bode well for my rather sensitive sensibilities. The sights went one better. A jostling crowd around the bar tender, tall tables topped with glass, awash in glasses of every kind, filled with enough stuff to give you a high by its mere sight. As if this was not enough, once people got going on the good stuff as well as on the dance floor, they miraculously lost their moorings. The sight of a well -respected, much older couple setting the dance floor on fire (after indulging and then some) left me wondering if I was aging in dog- years and fearing for their safety as well as that of those in their vicinity (on account of the wildly flailing limbs).
If I was looking for entertainment, I had found it in the near constant whistling (I am still on therapy for deafness, how ironic!), the throng who downed enough shots to shoot down a Rafale, an older woman with enough war-paint which would require several knives to scrape off and a sort of conga line which grew like a caterpillar from the dance floor to engulf the entire room before you could say ‘beat’. Oh yes, Molotov was here all right, ignited and whirling around the room spreading merry mayhem, one bang, one crash at a time! I spent the evening neatly side stepping all the merry makers who seemed keen to set a record of stepping on as many toes as possible, without making too much of a spectacle of myself. As I rued to myself later,if I had been expecting the quiet class of the cocktail hour, I was looking for it in the wrong place!
When it was finally time to go home, I staggered out, unfortunately punch-drunk, knowing exactly how the shell-shocked soldiers of trench warfare during the first world war must have felt. I knew that I would never take the peace of a quiet night for granted ever again. A feeling of kinship for Wordsworth and his penchant for solitude sprung up, for who knows, before he retired to his ‘couch’,he might have been a victim of such a ‘do’ too!
To meet with fellow beings and destress is very essential in the modern world. Perhaps many people would swear by the adage ‘We all deserve an alcoholiday’. While it would be wrong to sit in judgement on the ‘party scene’, it is equally wrong to do away with all the norms which make us civil society. Eat, drink and be merry by all means, but with an eye on what is enough and what is excess.Because aMartini can turn into a Molotov in the twinkling of an eye and a mellow evening can be literally set on fire before you can say ‘incineration’.
One of the best reasons why you should keep your wits about you (health reasons notwithstanding) instead of getting carried away with the flow is that you should KNOW when you are having a good time!