“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays we will be running monthly. We are excited to have writer and mom Patty Nasey share her fresh perspective as she embarks on the road to sobriety.

STEP THREE

by Patty Nasey

In the spring of 1996, I converted to Judaism. A week before I officially joined the tribe, I wrote in my journal: “My conversion marks the beginning of a spiritual journey – not the end.”

Fourteen years later, my journey derailed. I hadn’t completely skidded off the track, but I was certainly heading in the wrong direction – away from humility and toward self-centeredness. My feet were no longer firmly planted on the ground; they were teetering four inches above it in $1,200 Alaia platforms.

Since I’d converted to Judaism, I had maintained a solid marriage, given birth to two beautiful daughters, bought a big apartment in the city, and, after several years as a stay-at-home mom, landed a full-time position at a fashion magazine. I became too busy to light Shabbat candles on Friday night; I felt too tired to go to services during the High Holidays; I didn’t have to teach the girls about religion – they went to Hebrew School.

I was slowly and subtly disconnecting from God. Instead of being grateful for my blessings, I was cocky. I believed that all this good fortune was the result of my hard work, my smart choices, my drive, my determination. And I deserved to be rewarded — with luxurious cosmetics, designer clothing, expensive haircuts and, of course, alcohol– the good stuff – Veuve Cliquot champagne, Patron margaritas, Ketel One Cosmopolitans, imported dinner wines and Grand Marnier with dessert. I didn’t need a Higher Power – I had the power and I was going to use it.  And, ultimately, abuse it.

The boozing got me into A.A.  And A.A., specifically the Third Step – the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God– got me back on a spiritual path. Down in the church basement, I stripped away my protective coating: the clothes, the make-up, the lies, and the alcohol. Over the years, I had piled on these layers to make sure nobody saw the pain I was wearing underneath all that armor. But to get – and stay – sober, I had to expose myself and let others see me emotionally naked, powerless and vulnerable.

The process reminded me of when I converted to Judaism. I had gone to the Mikvah, the ritual immersion bath, where I literally shed my clothes – and my past – and humbly asked for guidance in my new life as a Jew. Now I was again in need of spiritual cleansing and decided to revisit the Mikvah as the Third Step in my recovery.

I was nervous when I arrived at West Side Mikvah, but a friendly older woman in a uniform greeted me warmly and showed me to my private waiting area – a full bathroom with clean white tiles, a plush robe, slippers, a  large shower and a medicine cabinet filled with toiletries. I carefully followed the Mikvah preparation checklist that was posted on the mirror – shower, shave legs, wash hair, clean ears, remove nail polish, clean navel, remove all make up, take out contact lenses and remove wedding band, earrings and other jewelry. I put on my glasses, robe and disposable slippers and pushed the call button on the wall labeled “Ready for Tevilah (immersion).”

After several minutes, the Mikvah Lady – a fashionably dressed redhead in her mid-30s – knocked on the door. She asked me to follow her down the long, narrow brightly-lit hallway to a small, windowless room at the end. She gently inspected my hands and feet and noticed a speck of red polish on the inside edge of my big toe.

“Here, I’ll get it,” she said, kneeling down with a cotton ball and polish remover to wipe the last of the lacquer off my nail.

Finally, I was ready for immersion. The Mikvah Lady helped me step into the square pool. I dunked under the lukewarm water, came up and recited aloud the blessing for immersion in Hebrew. I dunked again and when I resurfaced, I stayed still for a moment, truly grateful that I had returned to this spiritual place as I humbly asked my Higher Power for guidance in my new life of sobriety.

I went home, refreshed and renewed, eager to continue on my journey. But there was one more thing I had to do to keep my feet on the ground. I logged on to eBay and put my sky-high Alaia shoes up for sale.

Patty Nasey is a 20-year veteran of the magazine industry. She has worked at Time Out New York, Jane, Lucky, Teen Vogue, Mademoiselle and SPY, and written for a variety of publications, including Time Out New York Kids, New York Magazine and
 PAPER.  She lives in New York City with her husband, two daughters and a dog. Read Patty’s first post and second post of this series.

Photo Source

My husband and a fellow Rakia-maker in Croatia

by Caren Osten Gerszberg

Every year leading up to Father’s Day, it’s moonshine-making time on my back patio. Like his Eastern European mother before him, my husband collects sour cherries in early June—and more recently gooseberries from our garden—to prepare for his next vintage of vishnik.

After enlisting (read: bribing) our three children to help harvest the berries and de-stem them, he lovingly places them in clear four-liter jugs, blankets them with sugar, and sets them on our patio—amidst the flower pots—where they sit and soak up the sun…for weeks. Every day when he returns home from work, he checks the pressure in the jugs, and pays such detailed attention to his berries’ fermentation that you’d think he was getting ready for a Fantasy Football draft.

So you can only imagine my husband’s joy when he discovered–on a recent bike trip we took to Croatia–that just about every Croatian seems to make his/her own vishnik, or rakia, as it is known there. Although factory-made rakia has an alcohol content of 40%, the homemade stuff can be as strong as 60%, and that’s about all we were served—between bike rides, after bike rides, and naturally, before and after dinner.

The image for his next label

Here at home, people who learn that my husband makes his own booze can hardly believe it. For what reasons would he want to produce this potent alcoholic beverage in his spare time, which he now bottles, labels and gives out as gifts (when he’s not drinking it on his own)? Well, the irony here is that in Croatia, people can’t believe it if you don’t make your own rakia. They live off the land in a way that many of us don’t, and grow nearly everything they eat and drink. Got cherries? Rose petals? Olives? Sage? Lemons? Well, why not make rakia with it then…

So for five days, as we meandered our way on two wheels, up and down the many hills of the Dalmatian islands of Brac, Hvar and Korcula, we were often handed a glass—quickly filled by hosts who are as proud of their rakia as my husband is of his vishnik.

“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays we will be running monthly. We are excited to have writer and mom Patty Nasey share her fresh perspective as she embarks on the road to sobriety.

STEP TWO

by Patty Nasey

Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  That pretty much sums up my relationship with alcohol, especially in the past 5 years. I’d drink moderately, then get drunk, then beat myself up, then quit drinking, then decide I could control it because I’d been able to stop, then start drinking again, then get drunk, then quit, then start all over.  It was insane. I was insane.

But there was something about A.A.’s Second Step – the idea that I had to buy into this “Higher Power” thing in order to get sober — that made me a bit uncomfortable.  Not because I didn’t believe – I was raised Catholic, I converted to Judaism in 1996, I certainly believe in God.  It just sounded a little too much like “Jesus Saves” which totally freaked me out.  Because I had been “saved” once before — and it was scary.

When I was 12, my friend Roberta invited me to Wolf Mountain, a weeklong sleep away camp located near the small Northern California town where we lived. She told me it was co-ed so we could meet boys (not like the all-girls Catholic camp from which I had recently returned).  She told me it was “Indian Camp” so we would sleep in giant tee-pees.  She did not tell me, however (maybe she didn’t know) that the camp was run by fundamentalist Christians.  Every night at the campfire, Running Bear or Spotted Wolf (all the staffers had Indian names) would announce the campers who had accepted Jesus Christ as their “personal savior” that day.  I had no intention of adding my name to the list. I’d had my First Communion, I went to confession regularly, I was going to be Confirmed in the coming year. I assumed I was on the fast track to Heaven.  Then on the last night, all the campers were herded into a barn-like auditorium to watch a film about the Rapture. The film depicted, in terrifying detail, the moment when all of the “true Christians” would be gathered together to meet Christ upon His return, leaving all of us fakers behind to die a lonely, miserable death on Earth. It scared the crap out of me. Afterward, I sprinted back to my tee-pee, dropped to my knees and begged my counselor, Little Duckfeet, to save me, too.

Rationally, I knew that A.A.’s traditions were nothing like Wolf Mountain’s salvation-by-intimidation approach.  Still, around my 40th day of sobriety when my sponsor wanted to meet to review the Second Step, visions of Little Duckfeet danced in my head.  I told her I needed more time.

That same week, I was invited to an event at the very trendy Standard Hotel in New York City’s Meatpacking district. Some of my former Conde Nast colleagues had rented the terrace overlooking the High Line with panoramic views of downtown Manhattan.  As we got off the elevator, a young, good-looking waiter greeted us with a tray full of champagne.  I watched enviously as my friends lifted the gold-filled flutes, clinking, toasting, and drinking.  Then my insanity came knocking.

I can have one drink.

I have been so good, I deserve it!

How can I not have a glass of champagne?

Everybody else is drinking, why shouldn’t I?

I walked toward the bar.

“Champagne?” the bartender said as he popped the cork on another bottle.

I imagined the bubbles in my mouth, tickling my palate at first and then becoming sweet and smooth as my troubles melted away with each sip.  I wanted to say “Yes” so badly, and had I been trying to get sober on my own, I probably would have.  But I thought of all those people I had met in my A.A. meetings — unfailingly honest, day after day, sharing their experience, strength and hope with me. They’d given me their phone numbers, invited me for coffee, clapped and cheered when I announced my sober day counts: 12 days…23 days…36 days…41 days.  As the waiter filled up the glass, I imagined calling my sponsor to tell her that I’d have to forfeit those hard-earned days of sobriety and start over. I pictured myself telling all those people who had been rooting so hard for me that I “went out” over a glass of champagne.  I couldn’t do it.

“Just a Perrier with lime,” I finally said. The waiter handed me the unfamiliar drink and I winced as the bubbles stung the inside of my mouth. It was a lot to swallow – this unsatisfying champagne substitute, this strange state of sobriety, this saying no when I wanted to say yes, this Second Step. But I did it.  While physically I was at a glamorous Conde Nast event, mentally I was in a church basement with these strangers I’d come to know, trust and rely on for help. Together, they formed a power that was greater than myself. Together, they helped rescue me from my own insanity.

In the book, Twelve Jewish Steps of Recovery, Rabbi Kerry Olitzky writes, “It doesn’t matter if God has a long white beard, what matters is there’s someone beyond you and beside you.  You just have to connect with it.”  I realized that day that it’s irrelevant whether I am Catholic or Jewish; Born Again or Atheist. What’s most important is that I’m not alone.

Patty Nasey is a 20 year veteran of the magazine industry. She has worked at Time Out New York, Jane, Lucky, Teen Vogue, Mademoiselle and SPY, and written for a variety of publications, including Time Out New York Kids, New York Magazine and
 PAPER. Patty currently works as a retail marketing consultant for Women’s Wear Daily, a division of the Fairchild Fashion Group. You can see her read from her unpublished, unfinished, unauthorized memoir at the NY Writer’s Workshop series at KGB on June 12. She lives in New York City with her husband, two daughters and a dog. Read Patty’s first post of this series here.

Photo Source

For a new series of essays, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Helene Stapinski

Dexter Roadhouse was a shack of a bar that sat 10 miles outside Nome, Alaska, on the Kougarok Road. On the way, you passed the old mining claims from the Gold Rush era — the scarred, but still immensely beautiful tundra flashing by in red, gold and rusty orange. The Sawtooth Mountains loomed in the distance, like ancient cathedrals waiting for you to stop in to say a prayer.

But you hit Dexter first, to worship at its old wooden bar. When I lived in Nome, it was the great equalizer, where everyone in town came to worship. The judge sat next to the man he just sentenced for DWI who sat next to his next door neighbor and her ex and somebody’s uncle.

It’s rumored that Wyatt Earp once owned Dexter. And that Hoagy Carmichael wrote “Stardust” here. But I never believed anything anyone ever told me in Nome, since most people were drunk when telling it to you.

The first time I visited Dexter was my first night in Nome. I had arrived earlier that day on an Alaska Airlines flight to serve my year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at a church-run radio station named KNOM (MONK spelled backwards). Nome was muddy and ugly and smelled bad, at least in our house. One of the former volunteers was cooking moose stew, which gave off a gamey, awful stench.

To get away from the smell, we went drinking at the local bars that night. There were quite a few. And when they closed, there were the after-hours roadhouses on the outskirts of town: Safety, at milepost 22 on the Council Road, and Dexter.

We took a drive out around 2 a.m. in the station vehicle — a blue, beaten Jimmy SUV, which on most nights, beginning in October, would be plugged into the house to keep the engine from freezing up.

But this was August. The sun had just set around midnight, so the last hints of twilight had been blotted out for good. The road to Dexter had no lights. A dark emptiness stretched for hundreds of miles, threatening to swallow us whole for eternity in its vast loneliness.

I wondered that night, from the crowded but silent back seat, why I had come here and thought maybe it was a mistake. Among a few darkened homesteads along the road, and the sleeping, blanketed mountains, Dexter was all there was out in the middle of all that nothingness. You could see it glowing in the dark, like a firefly hovering, warm and pulsing.

There were only a few stools left when we arrived. We climbed onto them, cowboys already weary at the beginning of a long journey, and steadied ourselves. Bill from Iron Creek, a gold miner, was tending bar and welcomed us with his crooked smile. “Welcome to Sin City,” he said.

From Bill, we learned to drink — and later mix — duck farts and BBC cocktails. But that’s not all Bill taught us. As the months unfolded, we would become regulars and then bartenders at Dexter — at least on the nights when the roads weren’t closed because of snow. The loneliness of those dark roads was replaced with a feeling of freedom mixed with a weird sense of community.

Lazy Sundays that following summer were spent not at church, but playing bean bags in the dirt outside the roadhouse, drinking long necked beers and staring at the silhouettes of those cathedrals in the distance, thinking maybe Hoagy really did write those words here:

The last time I was in Alaska, July 1996, I tended bar at Dexter with Bill for an overflowing crowd. Beanbags were in full throttle and Nome’s mayor danced around in a tall striped Dr. Seuss hat. Little did I know that it would be my last night inside Dexter, that six years later, the roadhouse would be replaced with a new, improved version, bigger, but not necessarily better.

As I drove away that night, twilight segueing into dawn, pinpricks of stars trying to take hold, I took a longing look at the roadhouse through my rearview mirror and prayed that Dexter would be there when I got back.

Helene Stapinski is the author of the bestselling memoir Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music.  She has written articles for The New York Times, New York magazine, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Salon.

Photo Source

This is the first of a new series of essays. We have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these essays as they appear each Monday.

by Laura Vanderkam

Boxers was my second stop of the night.

I’d been out for dinner with friends on a cold February Saturday in 2003 when a friend from college called. She was at this Irish bar in the West Village with a man she’d recently started dating and roughly two dozen of his colleagues. Feeling outnumbered, she wanted moral support. So I went. The walls of the crowded space were covered with pictures of Irish writers. Some (Brendan Behan) were obscure. Others less so; as I was ordering a drink, a man asked me, “Now James Joyce – what did he write?”

The literature lover in me got flustered. “Um, Ulysses?” The man smiled, and as I started talking to him, it soon became clear he knew who James Joyce was. He knew a lot of things – more specifically, how to get a woman to start chatting about something substantial in a bar. He was tall, and I’d always gone for tall sorts. He was also handsome and eager to hear about my writing projects. He turned out to work at the same company as my friend’s new boyfriend (though not with him), so there was no awkward exchange of numbers as I soon ducked out of the bar to head home. He worked his channels and emailed me soon after. And for many, many days after that as we started talking, dating, getting engaged one year to the day after meeting in Boxers, getting married, becoming the parents of two little boys, and so forth.

Looking at my children now, I’ve often pondered the magnitude of a seemingly small decision. I could have not picked up the phone. I was having fun at that first restaurant; I could have told my friend we would make plans some other night. But bars are always, in some sense, about possibilities. Sometimes, in life, you are open to trying the second bar. You are open to talking with someone new, even if you can’t yet hear, in his laugh, the echo of your babies giggling years hence.

All you can do is trust that when you are, in general, open to such divine gifts, that is when wonderful things start to happen. Even in a bar. Why not? Jesus turned water into wine, not the other way around. Wherever people are talking and celebrating together is a good place for a little touch of some force larger than ourselves to join the party as well. It swoops down, changes everything, and then like Boxers the bar itself (now closed) is gone.

Laura Vanderkam, a New York City-based writer, is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Portfolio, May 27, 2010)

Photo Source

by Deirdre Sinnott

The champagne fizzed over the rim, so I snatched up the goblet to sip off the excess. I dabbed at a wet spot on the green polyester tablecloth with a paper napkin. A v-shaped metal nutcracker sat next to my newly-purchased digging and extracting tools. They stood ready to take apart the lobster still boiling in the pot. A demitasse cup filled with melted butter waited for bits of meat. Alone in my quiet kitchen, I carried out my first Be Kind to Deirdre Day.

At the time, I bounced from weeks of toil in darkened theaters to advance my “show business” career to a part-time cashier job that paid the rent, a flurry of high stress and low compensation. On free evenings, I prowled bars looking for a partner. I found plenty of short-term company, but no one to satisfy my ravenous appetite for a sinner/savior.

I existed on a series of rewards that I designated as appropriate remuneration for my troubles. If I had to get up early and fight a hangover, I allowed myself something gooey-sweet to eat as well as hot and cold caffeinated beverages. Stay late at work? Visit a bar on the way home. Endure frustrating days of waiting for a call from last weekend’s pickup? Spend time by the phone consuming chips, creamy dip, and multiple beers. Need to cut lose after an intense period of putting a play together? Get drunk, as fast as possible.

Be Kind to Deirdre Day became an über-award designed to buffer the damage and begin anew. I considered it my gift to me. And, in my alcoholic state of mind, it was the best I could do.

The highlight of the Day was dinner. I usually chose the same menu: a live lobster, ruddy and thrashing when going head first into the pot, vivid red when emerging, and champagne, always champagne. I don’t suppose that the French consider the bottle a single-serving size, but I did.

Alone at the kitchen table, I cracked the claws, split the tail, sucked the juices out of the spider-like legs, and feasted. Between bites, I drank the champagne–sipping it, tasting it, gulping it. The sharpness of the bubbles raked my throat and the sticky aftertaste soothed the burn.

My belly swelled and ached. I stood up, pushing aside the plate of broken shells, and dragged the goblet and the bottle over to the sofa where we could be alone. There the two of us, alcohol and me, could hunker down and consume each other.

When I woke the next morning, bloated and headachy, I never grasped that Be Kind to Deirdre Day was its opposite. Not only was the whole concept flawed (what, only one day for kindness?), but I blamed my uncomfortable condition on the last drink or the last bite of the night, not the first. If every time I bought a bottle of champagne I finished it and if every time I finished a bottle I got a hangover, then why ever buy champagne? If my life felt so punishing that I set aside a special day to not hurt myself and ended up doing just that, didn’t it mean, at minimum, my system of rewards had to change?

Other people might have stopped drinking when they felt the twinkle of a buzz. Some might be appalled at the notion of sitting alone with an alcoholic beverage. Champagne is made to be shared, they’d scoff. But that’s not how I did it.

And after two decades of experimentation (tonight just beer, tonight only a few glasses of wine, tonight no mixing, tonight stop before getting sick, et cetera ad nauseum), I figured out that I was not normal.

My last official Be Kind to Deirdre Day was more than 13 years ago. However, the “be kind” concept survives. I nurture it.

When actively boozing, I never knew how much I was hurting myself. I had to stop to feel the absence of pain.

I’m free from the logic of drinking, where, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, alcohol was both the problem and the solution to everything. I’ve moved beyond just lobster and champagne. I get to choose my pleasures–like the sour crunch of home-grown cucumbers in a yogurt-dill sauce or being the focus of my cats’ neurotic neediness or the repeated delight of loving the same person. Those joys rushed in to fill the vacuum left when I put down the bottle(s).

My goal is to be full-time kind to Deirdre.

Deirdre Sinnott, a regular contributor to Drinking Diaries, is working on a memoir called Drunk Dreams. You can find more information about Deirdre on her website.

What does an alcoholic look like?  Quick–what is the first image that comes into your mind?

If you’re like me, you see an old man with a scraggly beard, slumped in a door stoop, clutching cheap wine in a brown paper bag. Perhaps you see solemn, lonely people–men, probably–crouched on uncomfortable metal chairs in a church basement telling war stories about their drinking at a Twelve Step meeting.  Maybe your mental image is a stumbling, mumbling man with a bulbous red nose, or a drunken relative making a fool of himself at a party.

Here is what you probably don’t picture:  the slim PTA Mom with the freshly frosted hair and manicured nails; the shy woman who sings next to you in the choir; or the leader of your daughter’s scout troop.  You probably don’t envision the funny, friendly neighbor who laughs with you over a cup of coffee while your kids play in the next room.

You probably don’t see me:  a thirty-something mother of two; the woman next to you at the soccer field, who cheers her kid on ; the loyal, funny, confident friend who lives in the cozy house up the street from you.

In fact, I know you don’t picture me when you think of an alcoholic, because I move fluidly around you.  It’s easy to be an invisible alcoholic, because hardly anybody is looking.

You don’t notice that I am an alcoholic because I am very careful not to let you see.  I’m not the one getting really drunk at a party.  I don’t show up falling down or slurring my words at the soccer game.  I don’t cause scenes.  I have mastered the art of blending in, of drinking like everyone else.  I drink in secret, because I suspect that if you found out how much I drink you would ask me to stop.  I am very careful, and it is easy to lie to you because you aren’t looking.  Why would you?  I don’t fit the part.

You may notice some odd behavior.  You might worry about the emotional phone call from me that I downplayed the next day, or why I seem to be sick with the stomach bug or food poisoning a lot, causing me to miss a night out or a play date.  Perhaps you wonder why I seemed tipsy at dinner, when you only saw me have a glass or two of wine.  Maybe you notice that I beg off or miss morning activities more and more frequently.

You know something is wrong, and you wonder if it is trouble in my marriage, financial problems, stress about the kids, work or both.  Increasingly, things aren’t adding up.  I seem to be falling apart.  You know something is wrong, but you don’t know what.  You notice that I’m slowly withdrawing from the world, and you don’t know why.  You don’t consider that I’m drinking too much, though.  The thought that alcohol could be behind my problems probably doesn’t even occur to you.

And then one afternoon you smell wine on my breath and you start to ask yourself, quietly at first, is she drinking too much?

You probably dismiss the thought, thinking you are mistaken.  If you question me about it, I laugh and tell you I had a few too many with my husband last night;  that it must be coming out my pores.  You laugh with me, relieved.  Of course she’s not drinking during the day, you think.  We’re good friends, after all.  Good friends would know such things.

One night I call you, upset, and I’m clearly drunk.  Maybe this happens more than once.  You are getting worried.  A few weeks later you see me coming out of a liquor store at 2 pm.  You can’t ignore the facts anymore.  You know I’m drinking too much.

You have no idea what to do.  You worry that if you confront me, I’ll get angry and withdraw from you even more.  You question your own sanity a little.  Maybe you’re wrong?  If you accuse me of drinking too much and you’re wrong, it might end our friendship.  Maybe you do confront me about it, and I deny it.  I say I’m going through a rough patch, but that it is caused by some other problem.  Perhaps I say that I’ve been drinking a little more than usual, but that I have it under control.

You can’t believe that I would lie to you.  We’ve been friends for so long, you and me.  You share your secrets with me, and you believe I would do the same with you.

You believe me, because the alternative is painful to consider.

Besides, you don’t want to hurt my feelings.

* * *

I am a recovering alcoholic, almost three years sober.

What I describe above comes from my personal experience, and from the countless stories I have heard from women–suburban moms, sisters, friends, wives and daughters–at recovery meetings.

We need to start breaking down the denial most people have about female alcoholics.  If what I describe resonates with you, if you have a friend or family member whose behavior is increasingly inexplicable, consider addiction as the possible cause.  The evidence of drinking or drugs is usually there, if people are looking in the right place.

I am sober today because my friends and family made a hard choice:  they were willing to walk away if I didn’t get help.  Did it make me angry?  Very.  Was I resentful about it?  Yes.  Do I realize, now that I’m sober, that their hard decision was the ultimate act of love?  Definitely.  Would I be sober today if they hadn’t drawn a line and stuck with it?  No.

I’m certain I couldn’t have stopped on my own.

When Ellie isn’t chasing around her two young kids (ages 7 and 4) or going to recovery meetings, she is working on her manuscript, blogging at One Crafty Mother, or making jewelry.

Photo Source

“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays we will be running monthly. We are excited to have writer and mom Patty Nasey share her fresh perspective as she embarks on the road to sobriety.

STEP ONE

by Patty Nasey

After years of trying (and failing) to stop drinking on my own, I decided to go to A.A.  last November.

I had tried (and failed) to go to A.A.  once before: I was 29 and heading up the launch of a weekly magazine, in the process of converting to Judaism, and about to move in with my soon-to-be fiancé. And I was drinking heavily.  On the recommendation of my therapist, I agreed to go to an A.A. meeting.  But as I walked toward the cluster of people talking and smoking outside that upper west side church door where the meeting was being held, I chickened out. I was too embarrassed to go in, and I convinced myself I could cut back on my own. So I kept walking.

I managed to keep my drinking mostly under control (minus a few crazy nights here and there) for the next fifteen years. But as I got older, I started to feel like I was playing Russian Roulette every time I drank. Sometimes the gun didn’t fire; I could have one or two drinks and be fine. Other times when I pulled the trigger, the gun would explode and I would find myself bingeing, blacking out and then beating myself up for days afterward. After one such explosion – a booze-filled Saturday night last November that left me so hung over I missed my kids’ soccer games on Sunday – I felt I’d hit bottom (again). And on Monday, I bumped into Sam*.

Sam and I worked on the same floor at the Conde Nast Building; I was on staff at a fashion magazine and he was in Office Services. We had formed a casual, water-cooler friendship, and I would often plop down on his welcoming couch when I felt like procrastinating. At one point, he had shared with me that he was a recovering alcoholic.

“How was your weekend?” he asked me on that November morning.

Normally I would have said “fine” even when it hadn’t been. But not that day.

“I drank too much, I don’t remember most of Saturday night, I’m still hung over, I think I have a problem,” I blurted out, all in one breath.

“Okay,” he said calmly. “Let’s go to your office so we can talk.”  He then shared with me his story: how he’d worked for a fashion designer, how he was hospitalized for an alcoholic seizure in his 30s and how had been sober for 18 years.

“There’s an A.A. meeting a few blocks away today at 12:30,” he said as he wrote down the address. “You really should go.”

I looked at the Post-It note after he left:  St. Mary the Virgin on West 46^th Street.

Great, I thought. An A.A. meeting at some church basement in Times Square. This felt way too seedy for me, too Taxi Driver, too Midnight Cowboy. I imagined myself in my skinny jeans, sky-high boots and designer sunglasses, walking into a windowless room full of smelly, unshaven men and strung-out, toothless women drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Or even worse, I imagined seeing someone I knew.

Forget it.  I am too busy. I just need to be more disciplined. I don’t need A.A.

And yet, just as I’d surprised myself by opening up to Sam about my drinking problem, I found myself walking up Broadway at 12:15 toward St. Mary’s.

When I arrived at the side entrance to the church, I poked my head in tentatively with my feet still outside the door, ready to bolt.

“Hi. You’re in the right place,” said a nice looking lady with short blonde hair. “It’s so great you’re here.”

She looked normal, I thought, as my 4″ heels click-clacked up the stairs toward the Beginner’s Meeting. I left my sunglasses on and sat down on a seat next to the door–in case I had to make a quick getaway.

But I didn’t leave. I looked around and felt like a jerk for my crazy thoughts about who would be in this room. The crowd looked like a typical cross-section of New Yorkers, an eclectic group you might see on the subway during a morning commute. One by one, they shared their powerful stories. Unguarded and unafraid to be completely honest in that space, they talked about feeling unloved and abandoned by parents who also had problems with alcohol; about their harsh self-judgments and constant self-criticism; about trying to control everything all the time; and about not knowing how to feel or express anger and not knowing how to ask for help.

As the tears rained down beneath my dark glasses, I knew I was in the right place.   Their stories were my story, and I did see someone that I knew in that room – I saw myself.

*Sam’s name and work details have been changed to protect his anonymity

Patty Nasey is a 20 year veteran of the magazine industry. She has worked at Time Out New York, Jane, Lucky, Teen Vogue, Mademoiselle and SPY, and written for a variety of publications, including Time Out New York Kids, New York Magazine and
 PAPER. Patty currently works as a retail marketing consultant for Women’s Wear Daily, a division of the Fairchild Fashion Group. She lives in New York City with her husband, two daughters and a dog.

Photo Source

by Ann Hood

The first time I drank single malt whiskey, I was soaking wet and shivering on the isle of Skye. My then husband and I had been touring Scotland for a few weeks. We’d gone on a midnight Ghost Tour in Edinburgh, looked for the Loch Ness monster, and hiked the highest peak in the Highlands. But somehow we had not even tasted one wee dram of single malt.

Years earlier, I’d had a sip of a boyfriend’s Johnnie Walker and decided that would be my last drink of scotch. Turpentine came to mind when it burned its way down my throat. But for the past three days, Bob and I had been walking around Skye in a steady drizzle. The space heater in our B and B didn’t dry our clothes or warm our bones. By the afternoon that we walked into the local pub, it seemed that I might never be warm again. The bartender asked what we wanted. “Anything to take the chill away,” I said. He placed before me a glass of amber liquid. It smelled like smoke and curled its way around my tongue, instantly warming me.

That whiskey was Talisker, and although I became a fan, the price tag kept me from buying it very often back in the States. A dozen years later, I had a different husband, two children, and a better bank account. A bottle of Talisker or Laphroaig was almost always on my shelf.

In April, 2002, my five year old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. One day she was twirling in her ballet class and the next day she lay dying in the ICU at our children’s hospital. In the days after she died, friends brought us food: lasagnas and stews, cookies and fruit, loaves of fresh bread. They brought bottles of wine too, the big ones. Sitting around our kitchen table, stunned, those bottles emptied every evening.

Sleep was impossible for me in those first weeks. The wine I drank each night managed to make me drowsy, but also had me waking up at three in the morning. The world always looks bleaker at 3 a.m., but when you are grieving, that bleakness takes on even deeper dimensions. I prowled the rooms of our house, as if I might find Grace there somewhere. The emptiness that greeted me in each room sent me into fresh waves of misery. Grief begs for anesthesia of some kind, anything to dull the pain and quiet the screams that threaten to emerge at any moment. Despite my desperate need to be numb, I realized that gulping too many glasses of Australian shiraz was actually making things worse.

The first night I stayed away from the wine, I didn’t sleep at all. Instead, I lay in bed, awake and alert, haunted by the time in the ICU and by images of my little girl dead. The wine had at least given me a few hours respite. The next night I took a few Benadryl. That knocked me out, but made it hard for me to wake up, and kept me fuzzy headed and cotton mouthed the entire next day.

When everyone gathered again at our kitchen table that night, I remembered our bottle of single malt and poured myself a good-sized amount. The thing about good whiskey is that it wants to be sipped, not gulped. My husband had some too, and soon all of us gathered there were sipping whiskey instead of wine. That night, I slept uninterrupted. Not the deep sleep that comes when your children are safe and alive in their beds; that particular sleep will perhaps always elude me now. But for many hours I slept fitfully, and woke to another day without Grace, clear headed and broken hearted.

I cannot say how long this ritual continued. Sometimes it seems that bottle of single malt was passed around our table for many long nights. Like other aspects of grief, one day I looked up and I was once again enjoying a glass of wine with my dinner. The single malt took up its residence on our shelf again, opened on chilly winter nights or special occasions.

My father kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in the liquor cabinet, beside dusty bottles of Drambuie and Crème de Menthe. That bottle came down on the Christmas night his brother died, on the cold January day when my grandmother died, and during the grief filled summer of 1982 when my brother Skip died. The sight of that square bottle with the black label used to make me tremble. It meant something terrible and irrevocable had happened. It meant my father, the person I relied on for strength and support, needed some himself. And now I have my own bottle, saved for those times when the force of grief returns. Grief, it chills me to the bone.

Ann Hood is the author of 8 novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine; two memoirs and a collection of short stories. Her most recent memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was a NY Times Editor’s Choice and one of the top 10 non-fiction books of 2009 by Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Red Thread, was just published on May 1st.

Photo Source

by Patty Nasey

Last month, my 11 year-old daughter and I were playing Kadima on the beach in the Dominican Republic. It was early evening and we were waiting for my husband and youngest daughter to get ready for dinner.

“Let’s meet them at the bar,” I said. “You can get a mango smoothie and Mommy can get a Presidente.”

“Why do you keep ordering beer?” my daughter asked. “I thought you didn’t want to drink anymore?”

She was right. Sort of.

Almost two years ago, I quit drinking. There was no intervention, no DUI, no court-ordered rehab, no AA.  I didn’t think I had a “problem.”  Sure, I sometimes had one too many and was often the last one at the party, but it’s not like I carried a flask of in my bag or drank every day.  I just liked to have fun. Then I turned 40 and the drinking became less fun.  I had trouble remembering conversations after two drinks, yet I would keep refilling my glass. And my hangovers had become debilitating, sometimes lasting for two days.

My self-imposed abstinence began in April 2008. I was consulting for a fashion magazine and had been invited to a staff dinner at a Mexican restaurant. After two (or three? or four?) cucumber agave margaritas, I rallied some friends to meet me for a nightcap. I remember champagne, Grand Marnier and a plate of fries. I do not remember the cab ride home. I do not remember losing my phone.  And I do not remember anything my friends and I talked about.

The next morning, I had an 8am breakfast meeting at Conde Nast with the magazine’s publisher and her management team.  I slipped quietly into the executive dining room and kept my throbbing head lowered, trying to avoid making bloodshot eye contact with anyone.  I hoped nobody would notice my trembling hands as I picked up a piece of plain toast and a cup of coffee, and prayed I wouldn’t have to speak since at any moment I could start projectile vomiting like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

“Are you okay?” one of my colleagues asked after the meeting. “You looked like you were dying in there.”

I was dying. Instead of feeling like the successful, accomplished professional who enjoyed a social drink once in a while, I felt like a pathetic, out-of-control, sloppy drunk.

“I’m quitting drinking!”  I announced that night at dinner with my husband and kids.  Perhaps because I’d worked for so many magazines, I had a habit of making big, headline-style declarations of some new self-improvement campaign.  They had heard me announce with great gusto…

“I’m getting organized!”

“I’m through with carbs!”

“I’m joining a gym!”

“I’m not coloring my hair!”

…only to see me come back from the salon with fresh highlights, eating a bagel while trying to find my gym membership card in my messy, disorganized purse.

But this time the stakes were higher than the number on the scale or the shade of my hair color. And I managed to stay off the sauce for a full year. My husband doesn’t drink much so my sobriety didn’t significantly alter our lifestyle.  My friends assumed I was on another one of my self-help kicks so they just rolled their eyes as I brought my own Fresca to their dinner parties.

In April 2009, I celebrated my year of sobriety with a glass of Veuve Cliquot.  Nothing bad happened. I didn’t get drunk. I remembered the conversations.  So I decided I could start drinking again – but only in moderation and not in front of the kids (interestingly, I wasn’t ready to admit to them that I had caved in on one of my resolutions.)

But the hiding was hard – I found myself lying all the time.  I’d put beer in an opaque glass and say it was Fresca. I’d decline a glass of wine and then gulp down my husband’s when the kids weren’t looking. I got so drunk at a party that I fell down and broke a rib, but told the girls I’d tripped on a step.  When I was bedridden with a hangover after my 44^th birthday party – an event that began with mango margaritas and ended with belly dancing at some Middle Eastern restaurant –I pretended I had the flu.  And when I ordered a Presidente in the Dominican Republic, I told them it was “grown-up soda.” But they knew it was beer.

“I’m on vacation,” I told my daughter as I tried to get her to leave the beach and go to the bar with me.   “Mommy can have one drink.”

She stopped playing Kadima and looked me right in the eyes.

“You know what happens, Mom” she said. “One drink leads to another, then to another, then to another. And before you know it you’re drunk.”

I was dumbstruck.  How did she know what I didn’t yet know –that it’s the first drink that gets you drunk?  How did she know what I was still unwilling to admit to myself – that I cannot drink?

So I didn’t.  I didn’t order a beer that night. Or the next night.  Or the next.  I’m not making any promises or grand declarations.  I’m just trying not to drink. One day at a time.

Patty Nasey is a 20 year veteran of the magazine industry. She has worked at Time Out New York, Jane, Lucky, Teen Vogue, Mademoiselle and SPY, and written for a variety of publications, including Time Out New York Kids, New York Magazine and PAPER. Patty currently works as a retail marketing consultant for Women’s Wear Daily, a division of the Fairchild Fashion Group. She lives in New York City with her husband, two daughters and a dog.

Photo Source 1

Photo Source 2

I’m not sure when it started. My problem’s been growing steadily in recent years, but I think it all began about 15 years ago when my parents received a gift from their friends in Arizona. I stood next to my mother while she opened the box and unwrapped the mounds of white tissue paper. She gently pulled each one out, and I stared, mesmerized by the colors. They were the funkiest and most beautiful champagne flutes I’d ever seen. Tall and majestic, hand-blown and thick, they were like pieces of art, with each stem differing in color—bright blue, orange and yellow—from its bowl. My mother placed them on a round tray in her dining room, where they’ve been sitting ever since.

My interest was piqued when I moved into my first house 12 years ago. No longer cramped in a city apartment with a tiny galley kitchen, I was faced with seemingly endless cupboards to fill. And that they did. First with some Hungarian clear, crystal old-fashioned glasses with small fish-shaped etchings, which I picked up at Crate & Barrel. Then with some Morroccan-inspired glasses (3 red, 3 blue, 3 green) from Shabby Chic in Soho. My husband drank his Scotch with the fish, while I sipped my wine “from” Morrocco. We also had some traditional wine glasses—basic ones that suited any kind and color of wine, and that wouldn’t make me cry if they broke. (We’d quickly returned all of our wedding-registry crystal, knowing we just weren’t mature enough at 25 to have such expensive glassware.)

About seven years ago, my appreciation of/love for/focus on (I really don’t like the word “obsession”) accelerated when we moved into a bigger house with even more cabinet space. They were just begging to be crammed with new colors, shapes, textures and sizes…of glassware.

My husband and I picked up some pilsener glasses at a brewery in Vermont, and some every day white and red wine glasses from Bloomingdales. On vacation in the Berkshires, we perused in a store in Hudson and I simply had to have these hand-blown glasses with a rich, brown tortoise pattern. I couldn’t wait to make room for those.

Now when I wasn’t buying glasses for my own use, I was deriving deep satisfaction buying them for others. I bought Reidel “O” glasses as gifts on more than one occasion, and the same set of the most exquisite, stemless champagne flutes for two girlfriends (they live far away from one another so I knew I’d get away with it).

Things got a bit more intense a year ago, when I befriended a publicist who has ties (read: discount) to a company that makes some pretty amazing glassware. My kids have started making fun of me, as the boxes arrive on a seemingly regular basis bringing so many glasses (well, I needed some stemless for us, too, and then I fell in love with a few other varieties) that I’ve had to relocate some of the older models to a basement closet. I know my husband hesitates after he opens a bottle of wine—his eyes spin around with confusion as he approaches the cabinets and their growing collection, trying to select the “right” glass.

I’m really trying to curb my habit, and have cut myself off from any additional glass purchases for a while. But I may need to eventually clear a little more space, as I’m still secretly hoping that one of these days, my mother will pick up that tray in her dining room and offer me those flutes from Arizona.

Photo Source

On a recent trip to Rome, my family of five fell upon a wonderful, homey trattoria called Matricianella. Checkered cloths covered each table, where families–large and small–gathered for a Friday night out on the town.

We were the sole Americans in the place, which only added to the authenticity of the experience. I was happy in my little trattoria element.

When the waiter approached with a basket of crusty peasant bread, my husband quickly ordered a bottle of red wine to get the meal’s festivities going. While we discussed how many carciofi giudea (fried artichoke Jewish style, a Roman specialty) to order, the waiter returned with the bottle of vino, four glasses in hand.

Peering over us with little patience, the waiter asked our daughters if they wanted glasses for wine. They are 16 and 14 years old, and they each peered across the table in slight wonderment. With our known approval, our eldest said, “Si,” and our younger one declined. I supposed it made sense that he didn’t offer a glass to our 9-year-old son.

We are completely comfortable with our daughter having a few sips of wine with us on vacation–though she really doesn’t like red wine. And the Italians clearly think nothing of it. But this is such a stark contrast to the ways of the land from where we come, that I am still always amazed that they offer. 

I honestly can’t say what the statistics are about problem drinking in Italy, or declare whether or not it is an issue among Italian teenagers. But I do know that my husband and I are okay with the laissez-faire attitude. And so, we will let our children drink il vino a Roma. Cin-Cin!

Photo Source 1

By Reva Mann

It is Seder, one of the most dynamic events on the Jewish calendar. On this Passover night, we commemorate our freedom. Expounding on the story of the Israelites coming out of Egypt is the most central commandment of the evening and, as a wine addict, I understand why.

We need to verbalize our personal narrative in order to always remember where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. We are all slaves to something, whether it be money, power, nicotine or whiskey. By re-enacting the exodus, we are thrown into a psychodrama that reflects our own personal bondage.

I sit here at the Seder table, munching on matzo, thinking of the Jews leaving Egypt, musing on how strange it is that the promise of freedom after building pyramids under Pharoah’s vicious bullies was so hard for them to embrace. Even after experiencing the miracles of the Red Sea parting and the manna falling from heaven, the Israelites complained. Many wanted to go back to Egypt, to the familiar abuse, to the comforts of hell, as the unknown is often too frightening to face.

As I read the familiar story of my ancestors, I focus on my own redemption, and how, like the Israelites, I so often crave returning to the chemical haze or inebriation that a bottle of wine can bring. A place where I can allow the illusion of safety from the knocks and bruises life often brings to envelop me; where I can lie back with a stupefied smile stuck on my face and grin into oblivion.

Since I have been clean for five years now, the theme of freedom from slavery rings true for me on a personal level as well as a national one. Dipping a stick of celery into salt water to simulate the tears of my ancestors, I cannot help but remember my own suffering.

I see myself as a teenager, the Rabbi’s daughter, grabbing pills and dope and acid, anything that would take me as far away from my traumatic home-life as possible–sleeping around, hungry for the moment when men would lose themselves inside of me and I would feel connection with someone, anyone. Later, after my divorce, I found alcohol, a legal, socially accepted poison that proved to be far more dangerous than anything else I had used before.

I bite into bitter herbs and realize how similar my own story is to that of the Israelites, who had almost fallen to the lowest level of impurity–a spiritual dimension from which there is no way out. My redemption from a lifetime of substance abuse came when I, too, was at my lowest point, sunk in darkness.

And isn’t Passover a time of detox, too? We give up chametz, the basic ingredient in cookies, bread, pasta–the yeast that swells wheat into bread, which parallels the pride that makes us bigheaded and puffs up our egos. This is the time of year where we do a spiritual spring cleaning, as well as obsessively cleaning out every nook and cranny of our homes.

But redemption, as the Israelites knew so well before me, is not a smooth process. There are many obstacles along the way, and each day I have to survive anew.

The hardest thing to deal with is loneliness. I can no longer bear the company of some of my dearest friends. They are still stuck in their junkie lives–buying, cutting, pruning grass, passing joints around, uncorking bottle after bottle, giggling at random. I want to create and produce, set a challenge and meet a goal. And so I find myself staying home, preferring my own company or that of a good book over a group of middle-aged people spacing out on their own nothingness. Yet as much as I abhor their actions, I am still one of them, still yearning to flee the here and now. The only difference is that I have engaged in a battle with my addictions that I am determined to win.

It is time for the second cup of wine. The drinking of four cups at Seder represents the four different aspects of freedom described by four different expressions of deliverance in the Torah. With each glass we drink, we move forward in the redemptive process. Alas, I cannot join in. If I were to drink the prescribed amount of wine, I would jeopardize all the good work I have achieved so far. No way! My redemption is of the sober kind.

Drinking wine is part of being Jewish. Every Friday night we use wine to sanctify the Sabbath. On the festival of Purim, we are commanded to drink until we cannot tell the difference between good and evil, when the boundaries are fully blurred, when reality has no meaning and we come to realize only God guides the world. An eight-day old baby boy is given cotton wool soaked in wine as anesthetic to suck at his circumcision, and at a wedding, the bridal couple drinks wine from a goblet as part of the consecration of their marriage. There is no getting away from it. So what kind of Jew am I?

If asked why is this night different from all other nights, the most popular question of the Seder night, I would answer that tonight is different for me because, while downing four cups of water, I am making a healthy, constructive and conscious choice to leave my very own Egypt behind forever.

Reva Mann, author of the racy, best- selling memoir, The Rabbi’s Daughter, is now helping writers discover their voice and get their work ready for publication. Find out more about Reva on her website at Revamann.com.

Photo Source (Seder Table)

by Deirdre Sinnott

It was a wine tasting party that discouraged spitting, and from my first glass, I knew I was in trouble. Not only could my stunted palate, numbed no doubt from its normal fare of Budweiser and bottom-shelf scotch, not discern the subtleties that others raved about, I was gulping.

Henri (pronounced the French way: Hon-ree, never Henry), a big, salty, son-of-the-Cajuns and a retired seaman, was the host of the event. The racist system of apartheid had fallen and he wanted to celebrate with a sampling of the South African vineyards.

His dining room table was arranged with scores of wine goblets, a case-worth of bottles, several cork screws, water for cleansing the mouth, but no wine spittoons. I asked him about it and he chuckled. I didn’t have to get instructions like that twice. A green light in my brain blinked on.

When Henri first mentioned that he was in a wine tasting club, I shook my head, trying to reconcile that information with what I already knew about him. He had regaled me with a lifetime of adventurous sea stories as we sat back-to-back in the office where I worked. He was famous on the merchant marine ships for having memorized the union contract, much to the chagrin of the shipping companies, and eventually became the vice president of the Masters, Mates and Pilots union. He was a serious supporter of progressive causes, boycotting South African products when the anti-apartheid movement called for it and volunteering at the social-justice center where I worked.

But he took his pleasures seriously, too. And while I loved to listen to him and was dying to be invited to a tasting party, I didn’t know him well enough to insinuate myself into one of his occasions. I have a slight knowledge of French wine. And one day I showed him a nice chateau merlot bottled in the maison that I intended to drink (all alone and to the last drop) that evening. He took the dark green bottle in his burly working-man’s hands and studied the label.

“Drank a lotta wine in France,” he said. “Let me know if it’s any good.”

“If I have any left over, I’ll bring you a sample,” I said.

“Leftovers? What’s that?” he said.

So when he slipped me an invitation to the wine tasting, saying, “Waited a long time to try these,” I was pleased that I’d finally made it. The flyer listed several wineries with strange, Dutch-looking names that were filled with hard consonants and double vowels.

At the tasting, I tried to keep up with the wine talk, but for the most part I was outclassed. Henri uncorked the first bottle and began pouring a splash into several goblets. A good-looking older gentleman in an African-print shirt took his glass and began examining the contents. “Henri,” he said, smiling, “how does an old union dog like yourself become a wine connoisseur?”

Henri held up a glass and began swirling the pale wine in it, studying the liquid as it slid down the sides. “Nothing is too good for the workers,” he said.

It always amazes me when I look back on the drinker I was. Despite knowing that I was faster than anyone else, despite having a sane little voice in my head telling me to slow down and chew the wine as others did, my impulse to swallow won out. It was wishful amnesia. At the beginning of the sip, I remembered my goal to sample reasonably, but by the time I had swished the wine over my tongue, I just wanted it to be inside of me. I forgot that I was not at home alone where there was nobody to see me stumble into a wall. I failed to consider the fact that the mornings after I brought wine home for dinner, my apartment would be in a shambles: bottle empty, dishes unwashed, clothing scattered across the floor (or still on my body). I did not recall the wine hangovers, the gagging during tooth brushing, and the pain in my back just around my liver.

Instead, I only saw the sparkling goblet filled with a liquid more delicious, more fragrant, more viscous, more delightful, more everything than water.

At Henri’s party, I successfully skirted around the sickening, evening-ending mouthful, the one where I would become unwell — until he pulled out the Cuban rum.

I had gone from 1977 to 1994 without rum. (See “Demon Rum, Part I” to find out why.) Unlike every other alcoholic beverage, I turned down rum whenever offered. But this, this was a special bottle. Henri cradled it like it a newborn infant and when he held it up, everyone sighed. It was once-in-a-lifetime rum, personally smuggled into the country by Henri after a trade-union trip to Cuba. He had bluffed his way past US customs, no doubt employing a blinding combination of charm, bluster, and stealth. It was a rum bottle with history.

Tumblers were passed. The rum looked like honey, slow-moving and clingy. It was uncontaminated by cola. I rolled it over my tongue, trying to squeeze out every sticky taste until, boom. I swallowed one sip, then another and another. I decided that I wanted more and helped myself to another serving. I crossed into the misty territory of total drunkenness.

Nobody said anything to me when I crossed the room, concentrating on my path as if I was being examined by a platoon of cops with breathalyzers in hand. In the bedroom, I dug my coat out from the pile. Henri caught me at the apartment door.

“Leaving?” he sounded perplexed and a little disappointed. I was the first to be going.

“Air,” I said.

Henri rested his heavy hand on my shoulder. He smiled and nodded his head, and for a moment I knew what his shipmates must have known. Henri understood that sometimes you just had to leave and that while he may be able to drink for several more hours, you’d be better off elsewhere. I knew too that I hadn’t embarrassed him. We were mates and it was okay by him if I got drunk because that’s what we mates did sometimes. He patted my back and ushered me to the elevator.

“Get home safe,” he said. And I did. Though I did stop off at a lesbian bar for more rum and an embarrassing round of sloppy pool. In the morning when I woke up creaky, headachy, and feeling poisoned, I understood that I’d never be a life-long drinker like Henri. My long party would, one day, have to end. But, I secretly prayed to the Lord of rum and all alcohol: Not yet.

Deirdre Sinnott, a regular contributor to Drinking Diaries, is working on a memoir called Drunk Dreams. You can find more information about Deirdre on her website.

Photo Source wine tasting

Photo Source Cuban rum

by Pamela Redmond Satran

You there, with the coffee mug full of clear liquid, sipping vodka because you think it won’t make you reek of alcohol at your 9 a.m. meeting: I’m not actually talking to you.

No, this directive is aimed at all you casual Cosmo lovers, you Saturday night vodka martini drinkers, you Bloody Mary and vodka tonic tipplers.

You probably developed your taste for vodka way back before you really knew much about drinking, precisely because vodka didn’t have much taste.  You could mix it with anything — Gatorade, say — and manage to get efficiently wasted without gagging on any of those overly adult flavors.

Plus, vodka was the new liquor, freshly risen from the Russian gulag, the people’s poison.  Drinking it was revolutionary, almost.  In 1968.

Which is exactly why the Evil Young have turned their backs on vodka, which is now officially The Liquor of The 52-Year-Old.  So what, if you want not to act old, are you supposed to drink instead?

Gin is always groovy.  Likewise, most brown liquors, especially Woodford Reserve bourbon or rye, like your Uncle Stanley used to drink.  Tequila, not so much.  Basically, anything you’ve been drinking all these years is bad, and anything your parents served in the early 60s is good.

If you’ve been to a hipster bar recently, you know that mixology is the thing: Precious cocktails concocted from a drop of this and a dram of that.  Last week I went to the most uber-hipster of them all, Freemans Restaurant on the Lower East Side, and happily settled into the hunting lodge-style atmosphere — from before even I was born! –  and ordered a Freemans Cocktail.

Never mind that the bartender had, as the New York Times’ Frank Bruni put it, all the charisma of Cujo.  The glimmering gold cocktail standing atop the zinc bar beneath the stuffed deer’s head looked so poetic, I was moved to hop off my barstool to take a photo to send to my friends Hugh and Kim, who were supposed to meet us that night but had to go out of town.  ”See what splendor you missed?” I was going to say.

But when I sat back down, Cujo said to me, “I can’t have you taking pictures of the product.”

Wha?

“You can take pictures of yourself and your friends enjoying the place,” she continued.  “But you can’t take pictures of the product.”

Whether the “product” was the drink or the animal head or just the whole gestalt, I wasn’t sure, but of course from that moment on all I wanted to do was photograph the stupid place, which I immediately loathed, plus watch Cujo concoct my next Freemans Cocktail so I could broadcast its recipe.  So here’s the product:

Although you can find the recipe online in a more refined version, this is how the bartender actually made mine:

1 tsp pomegranate molasses (thanks to my son Joe, this is an item we actually have in our refrigerator)

1 jigger lemon juice

1 jigger simple syrup

2 jiggers rye

a dash of orange bitters

Shake over ice, strain into a cocktail glass.  Take a liquor soaked orange peel and set it aflame so closely under the nose of an unsuspecting guest that she screams.  Sip and feel instantly 20 years younger.  Or is it older?

(*This post appeared originally on the blog How Not To Act Old.)

Pamela Redmond Satran is the author of the New York Times bestselling humor book, How Not to Act Old, based on her blog of the same name.  She is also the author of five novels, including Younger and The Man I Should Have Married, and the coauthor of ten baby name books that she’s developed into the website nameberry.com.  Her latest project is an online serialized novel called Ho Springs, at hosprings.com.