Amy's Robot

Hey kids! It's summer! Time to get drunk with the NY Times!

Today's Dining section of the Times features a selection of personal memoirs called "Reflections in an Ice Cube: The Drinks of Memory". The feature is intended to be a nostalgic look back at refreshing and delicious summertime cocktails that some writers enjoyed in their younger years, and some of the entries very nicely achieve just that.

And some of the entries are about teenage girls getting wasted.

Here's Monique Truong, whose very classy and respectable summer drink is white sangria, but the drink of memory that inspires her choice is, and this is just a guess here, Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill:

And Gabrielle Hamilton still loves her Long Island Iced Teas, which she first enjoyed as a 13 year-old, first helping herself to her parents' liquor cabinet, then hitchhiking into New York and going to a bar:

Then much later they get a ride home, drunk, with some random man they meet on the train and oh my god are teenage girls morons. These girls probably grew up watching Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic in middle school health class, too.

These stories are told with a rapturous tone that makes teenage drinking sound not just appealing but totally irresistibly fun and adventurous; if I was a 14 year-old reading these stories at home, I would wait until my parents had gone to bed and march right over to the hall closet and start pouring Seagram's 7 into my mouth with a funnel.

I can't wait to see the dismayed letters from concerned parents who have been noticing their own bottles of whiskey have been getting a little bit... paler lately.

There's also a tamer, but still technically illegal drinking anecdote about a journalist in Iraq who talks with an Army captain there about how much he misses beer, and then the journalist sneaks him a case of Carlsberg in a garbage bag.

categories: Culture
posted by amy at 2:32 PM | #