by Debbie Naples.
Back in nineteen eighty-four or five or six, I drank beer at South Street Seaport with all my young Wall Street professional friends. We were all just out of college, full of hope and ignorance wishing for the best of life, which often included a sailboat, hand tooled leather shoes and a Manhattan condo. I lasted on Wall Street for two full weeks, there was something about the Ritalin-Quaalude-infused materialistic driven werewolf-like atmosphere that kind of wrecked it for me plus everyone had to wear blue suits. Blue suits, why blue. Ok well, I suppose it was easy to mark me as a future gardener based on the clothing choices alone. Anyway, at that time I drank beer, not a lot of beer, but enough to feel the wash of drunkenness for a few short hours. Back in nineteen-eighty-five it never occurred to me that beer was made of plants and lots of them, back in ninety-eighty-five I had not been initiated into the plant kingdom at all, plants all looked the same as it were, everything was a daisy. But back to Wall Street, I never went in for the cocktails too much I mean there was an occasional incomprehensible drink of spirits I would order at Juniors Cheese Cake in Brooklyn which incidentally made the cheese cake really pop! Nothing like cream and sugar and alcohol to massage the mind of a twenty-year old, I have always been surprised that the CIA has never engaged this recipe for mind control…but then again Juniors was always suspicious. And I’d like to add that spirits are also all made of plants! Plants, Plants, Plants. I know the subject of this blog is beer and movies and I have not mentioned movies but this whole description is really kind of a movie….
Later much, much, later when I discovered I had Celiac and that class of plants slid off the grid of my life, and I began to wander grain-less through the grocery store, not one beer available, I began to study medicinal plants, (a debilitating and mysterious illness will drive you to a that) and even later I turned into a professional gardener. At that time plants became 3-D. And now without further ado my movie along with my marquee, of sorts: ‘Bootleg Garden” rated ‘W’ for ‘whatever’, depending on your gardening and drinking habits:
Main Characters
Absinthe (artemesia absinthian) or Wormwood- that green vaguely hallucinogenic drink of the 19th century French poets
Tequila Agave tequilana, or blue agave or (agave azul) or tequila agave which won’t matter after your third margarita
Wine, grape wine that is, Vinis vinefera, the drink of the Greek god Dionysus (for a good time call Dionysus) and all people across the world for centuries including Jesus but not Alexander the Great. Al drank mead, mead is made from honey by the way for the blog about bees.
Rum (Saccharum) is made from sugarcane and in case you didn’t know the rum ration or “tot” was a daily amount of rum that sailors got on Royal Navy ships. The tot was eliminated in 1970 because they thought it might interfere with sailors’ ability to run machinery, imagine that.
Damiana (Turnera diffusa), ashrub of the Southwest, thought to be the Viagra of plants, hmmm, the bottle is in the shape of a shapely women with no head and the liquid is yellow, I am not entirely sold on the sexiness of this.
Gin (Juniperus communis) gin is made from juniper berries, “of all the gin joints in all the world” my direct memory of gin, is involves a big globe glass, playing croquet and North Carolina, the rest is a blur…
Hops (Humulus lupulus)/ Barely(Hordeum vulgare L.) /Wheat (Triticum spp) and Rye (Rhynchostylis), Sorghum (Sorghum) beer beer and more beer so much beer.
Exit stage left the bar room door…