Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not)

Where’s the Party?

63 Rita Ciresi ฀ t Where’s the Party? confession: I like to drink solo. My bad habit of drinking alone—and on the sly—dates back to kindergarten. Or maybe first grade. All I know is that sometime in the early 1960s, while my mother’s back was turned, I furtively dipped my fat little fingers into the foam dregs of my father ’s beer mug to lick up the last of his Schlitz. The sour taste of the beer made me want to gag. But the thrill I got from secretly swilling a forbidden substance made my toes tingle. I knew I had gotten away with something sinful. Which meant, of course, I would look for every chance I had to sin again. Opportunities (definitely plural) soon presented themselves at the big, blow-out Italian weddings my family seemed to attend every weekend during the months of May, June, and July. At the receptions held at Frankie’s Villa Pompeii or Amarante’sby -the-Sea, I waited until my parents got up to dance the Alley Cat. Then I snatched their souvenir champagne flutes inscribed in cursive writing: Patty and Anthony Our Love Will Last 4-ever I hid beneath the tablecloth as I drained the last of their André Cold Duck, right down to the bottom of the glasses. During my teenage years—while other kids filched Bud from their parents’ basement refrigerator and then tp-ed the science teacher’s house—I held myself far above such rowdy social behavior . I had a serious, Saturday-night job: baby sitting. Which 64 t r i t a c i r e s i meant I waited until those pesky kids were put to bed before I creaked open their parents’ liquor cabinet and mixed half a glass of vodka (reputed to be colorless, tasteless, and odorless) with half a glass of cherry Hawaiian Punch. I downed the result in one gulp and followed it with an Act of Contrition. My solitary drinking habits continued in college, where I attended a school that prided itself on “individualism” (in other words, the student body swilled the juice of psilocybin mushrooms in their dorm rooms instead of hanging out around the beer keg). Onward to my professional life as a teacher, where I never once joined my graduate students at the bar after our writing workshop (yet the minute I got home, I poured myself some Pinot Grigio and admired how it glittered like gold in the goblet ). Even at academic conferences—known to be booze-laden events—I wait until the afternoon sessions are over and then crawl back to my hotel room. Only then do I bust open the minibar to treat myself to a mediocre twelve-dollar Chardonnay that I could have drunk downstairs for free at the complimentary wine-and-cheese reception. There’s only one place on the planet where I’ll give myself permission to drink myself silly in public. It’s a hot place. A dry (climate-wise) place. Two thousand miles from home. Threequarters of a continent away from the censorious looks of my co-workers and friends and family. There it does not matter that (as the witty Robert Benchley once put it) “drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, it’s just compounding the felony.” Here no fools actually know me, and even if they did, they too are fifty-two sheets to the wind. Welcome to Vegas! t฀ ฀t฀ ฀t Every year I run away from home with my sister and spend Labor Day weekend in Sin City. Gone is the laundry. Gone the dirty dishes. Adios, demanding husband and whiny kids and up- Where’s the Party? t 65 tight co-workers who talk in mla-formatted footnotes! Hola, alcohol ! And plenty of it! No sooner do Sis and I plop our luggage in our ninety-ninedollar -a-night hotel room than we get to work on wetting our whistles. We head to the Venetian Hotel, where we sit on a faux Mexican patio watching faux gondolas float down the faux Grand Canal. We are drinking margaritas—on the rocks, not frozen, with a rim of copious salt—ostensibly to stave off dehydration in the desert heat. But really we’re just trying to get south of the border as fast as we can, without losing our chips and salsa...