It’s become quite fashionable in journalistic circles to introduce a story about a particular cocktail as being something you might have expected to see your grandparents drink but that you should try it anyway.

I’m going to suggest it’s time to retire this approach.

I didn’t know my grandfathers well but when I reflect on my grandmothers I remember two women who loved laughing loudly, group singalongs and a drink. Or two.

I also remember the stylish cocktail carts and elegant freestanding ashtrays of their houses.

Nothing out of date about that (except smoking I suppose).

I also remember the Sherry.

My grandmothers – the delightfully symmetrically-named Mabel and Muriel (Mae and Mu) embraced the full potential of Sherry as a pre-lunch tipple.

Poet Maya Angelou apparently did same so they could have had a Mae, Mu and Maya Mid-Morning Sherry Drinkers gang. And if they’d ever worn a t-shirt, that would have been a good thing to put on them.

But Sherry, after centuries of having proven its worth is now on the social outer.

Christopher Columbus loaded his ships with Sherry, making it the very first wine to be drunk in America.

And when Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519, he spent more on Sherry than on weapons.

Fast-forward to the 1970s, Sherry was still everywhere.

Here’s Sean Connery in 1971’s Diamonds are Forever. James Bond using his superior knowledge of Sherry to assert himself in a genteel cock-fight.

Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry HERE was even a call-to-arms for emancipated women to just bloody invite themselves over for a shag if that’s what they wanted.

A valiant, somewhat feminist-if-you-squint-your-eyes message for the 1970s.

The good news though is Sherry is BACK.

And better than ever.

Before I get to my evidence for that claim, a few things to know about this versatile fortified wine which can be equally at home as an aperitif or digestif, at 11am or 11pm.

Firstly, Australian Sherry died in 2010.

The good news was that it was reborn on roughly the same day as Australian Apera, tasting pretty much the same.

Like Champagne – which we are getting used to calling Sparkling Wine now unless it is from Champagne – the drink was redesignated as being primarily about the growing location of the grapes (which you’ll remember is the opposite of Japanese Sake).

In this case, Sherry is only from white grapes grown in a specific region of Andalusia in Spain. You may have heard of Andalusia because of the bizarre dancing horses that tour every couple of years.

Apera is the Australian version, made with the same process.

Basically, the wine-maker deliberately leaves some space at the top of the barrel in which the wine is aging and introduces flor, which is a yeast (a word I enjoy almost as much as “Moist”), and oxidisation occurs, turning it into a fortified wine.

A good Sherry or Apera is delightful on its own – take the Pedro Ximinez here at Sydney’s The Bridge Room.

Fun to order, you get to try out your Inigo Montoya accent, with the double benefit of tasting great.

But Shake, Stir, Muddle is about cocktails so to talk Sherry, we need to talk Sherry cocktails.

And through this investigation, I have gathered the evidence that we are at the precipice of a Sherry Revolution.

Cue dodgy 80’s music HERE.

For once, we aren’t looking to popular culture for our proof.

It was used as a character device in 2011’s fun Cedar Rapids to show how Ed Helms’ Tom Lippe is supremely uncool because he orders shots of Cream Sherry.

Not a positive reference. And quite isolated.

But popular culture is not everything, not even at Shake, Stir, Muddle.

What does feel like everything though is entering Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.

In the smallest sail, the only freestanding one, is Bennelong, a restaurant of white napkins, neat-bearded waiters and $5 oysters (totally worth it).

Sit at the bar and peruse the cocktail list, you’ll find a lot of tortured puns among the 8 featured cocktails.

Notable among these is the Rye’it in the Middle with You, a delicate and delightful creation of rye whiskey, fino Sherry, tangy pink grapefruit, orange and raspberry.

Sip and ponder this extraordinary cathedral of the Arts that was opened in 1973 from a design dating back to the 1950s.

Yet no one would write it off as being too old fashioned to be relevant or cool.

So it is appropriate that it is here that we see the resurrection of this classic drink;  a bit like the Sydney Opera House in that it belongs to this age as well as those past.

In recognising that beauty is not only found in the new or the complex, to complement the cocktail they’ve got two Sherries on the Digestif Menu – a Fino and an Amontillado.

You can order these as my Grandmothers enjoyed them, old school, straight up.

Like all wines, there is a spectrum of sweetness – or dryness if you prefer – in Sherryland.

Fino is the driest style, Amontillado still dry but slightly sweeter.

Harvey’s Bristol Cream, in spite of its undeniable role in bringing the gender pay gap to only 20%, joins other cream sherries as being the sweetest.

There’s no actual dairy in them, the story goes that it was once described as being “the cream” of the sherry crop. (It’s not).

Its sweetness tells me that it was quite likely what my grandmother was serving in the early 1970s when my brother – then a toddler – walked cutely around from lady guest to lady guest in my grandmother’s social gathering, sipping a minuscule and seemingly harmless amount from each glass before wandering out into the garden and pulling up ALL the flowers and trashing it in his pissed state.

A lovely family story.

The other Sherry story from family lore is that my other grandmother – with a theatrical flair her life and marriage didn’t really leave room for but way ahead of her time and setting the pace for Keith Floyd some decades later – liked to tuck into the cooking sherry while she prepped meals for her five children in the 1940s and 50s.

My grandfather was a very kind man but when I think of my paternal grandmother, I think of a Maya Angelou’s caged bird singing in the apparent freedom of white middle-ish class NZ.

And for the removal of doubt, drinking the cooking Sherry is not a solution to anything.

So seek out the good Sherry or Apera and break out those tiny glasses that are useless for anything else, or order a Sherry cocktail.

I’d suggest a pre-Prohibition cocktail, the Up-to-Date.

Drink it in memory of three people born about the same time as the cocktail was invented.

Jorn Utzon, who never got to see his masterpiece completed, and to my fabulous grandmothers who I would love to have had a Sherry with (or a Scotch, they were quite tolerant of diversity).

30 mL Amontillado Sherry

30 mL Rye Whiskey

5 mL Grand Marnier

2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir over ice. Drain into a cocktail glass. Serve with a twist of lemon.

Cheers!

PS Please, please watch The Ship Song Project clip below, it is a remarkable tribute to this beautiful building and I promise you, you will LOVE it

I’ve been guilty of a little hero worship on this site. I’ve focused on the big name booze that forms the basis of every cocktail and glossed over the importance of the other beautiful contributors.

But this week I’d like to focus on an unsung hero, one that I became interested in when writing about the Old Fashioned two weeks ago.

Bitters.

Not the aperitif bitters – like Campari, which although bitter to the palate is drinkable on its own – we’re talking about the smaller bottles that do for cocktails what spices do for cooking.

Without a few drops of Angostura Bitters, the Old Fashioned is just bourbon with a sugar cube. And yet we so often overlook these pungent little drops.

Bitters are liquid extractions or infusions of bark, herbs, seeds, roots, flowers, leaves and fruit and were originally used by apothecaries to cleanse the body of toxins and aid digestion.

Like me, you probably first heard of an apothecary in high school. The apothecary was the precursor to modern pharmacists – dispensing herbal and chemical solutions to the old and infirm.  Like the buffoon from Romeo and Juliet.

“O true Apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”

Romeo’s last words. Then yep, he died.

Or more cheerfully, like Miracle Max in possibly the greatest movie ever made – The Princess Bride. If you haven’t seen this 1987 movie, immediately go and watch it. If you have seen it and don’t like it, we’re going to need to rethink our relationship.

Thanks to science, bitters have been extracted from the medicine cabinet and put behind the bar but we must pay homage to the apothecaries for this fine work (and simultaneously ask the homeopaths to stop peddling the same pointless shit).

References to apothecaries appear as far back as ancient Babylon. Notable apothecaries include Nostradamus, Benedict Arnold and ludicrous over-achiever John Keats, the English poet who wrote, amongst other things, Ode to a Nightingale, To Autumn and Ode to Fanny, while completing his apothecary apprenticeship.

All before succumbing to tuberculosis at age 25.

I know as much about Keats as I know about any poet, thanks to high school English. In Year 10, Keats was the source of much mirth in my class thanks to his reference to panting lovers on the side of that Grecian Urn and of course because he had several works that legitimised repeated use of the word “Fanny” in class. Never not funny.

Not quite as good as Religious Education classes affording opportunities to make our male teacher explain circumcision to our all-girls’ class, but entertainment aplenty on a hot Brisbane afternoon.

While there has been some maturing of my humour in the
intervening decades, when you see the quality of the material I was producing 1982, we’d all agree I’ve wasted a genuine comic talent.

See? Here’s my school dictionary – the very tome designed to help you spell words CORRECTLY.

Genius.

Look, it was the 1980s, we were close to two decades away from having the advantage of Dawson’s Creek’s Joey Potter showing us how to be proper 16 year olds.

“She’s sixteen years old and so are you. We talk like we know what’s going on, but we don’t. We don’t have any idea. Look, we’re really young and we’re gonna screw up a lot! You know, we’re going to keep changing our minds and…and sometimes even our hearts…Don’t let yourself get so angry that you stop loving because one day you wake up from that anger and the person you love will be gone.”

Because, yes. That’s totally how 16 year olds talk. Go to any Westfield Food Court and listen.

No, all we had was Mallory from Family Ties and Denise Huxtable from Bill Cosby’s knitwear-clad perv-fest. We were adrift in a sea of hormones – something an apothecary might have given me some bitters for in centuries past had that not fallen out of fashion.

And even the cocktail use of bitters nearly disappeared from use last century.

Thanks to our old friend, Prohibition.

Bitters were so heavily in use during the P – to mask the flavour of the booze – that they fell out of fashion after the 21^st Amendment and only three pre-Pro brands still exist – Angostura Bitters, Peychaud’s Bitters and one that died and was resurrected.

The fantastically-named Abbott’s Bitters.

Seriously. If there aren’t a few bars in Canberra stocking that right now, that is a real opportunity missed.

Bitters have had a resurgence in popularity though and there are hundreds of good ones on the market with different flavour bases for different uses – orange, grapefruit, chocolate and even celery bitters for your Bloody Mary or Red Snapper. Try here, or here.

But the one that I guarantee you know the best is Angostura Bitters and it has led me to today’s unsung hero, Doña Manuela Sáenz, a broad I would love to have had a drink with (in kind of the same way I’d like to have a drink with Courtney Love – because you just know something really bizarre is going to happen before you’ve paid your bill).

Angostura Bitters was invented in 1824 by Dr Johann Siegert in Venezuela.

Siegert was Surgeon-General for Simón Bolívar. Simón José Antonio de la Santísma Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios was a South American soldier who was instrumental in the continent’s revolutions against the Spanish empire.

Siegert created the bitters in the town of Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar) to treat tropical stomach ailments. Apparently many sailors would feel sick after their time on the Orinoco River and would feel less sick when they had the bitters.

Now as someone who gets horrendously seasick, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that some of the healing may have come from getting onto dry land, but that’s the tale anyway.

Angostura’s recipe is secret, but is apparently not from the root of the Angostura tree. It can be bought for less than $20 a bottle (and yes, the ill-fitting label is a design feature – it started as an administrative cock-up but is now a “signature feature”).

But Manuela.

Manuela was a Revolutionary and a Spy and Bolívar’s lover for the last eight years of his life. At age 26, Manuela ditched her lacklustre English husband and joined the rebels.

She saved Bolívar’s life twice by thwarting planned assassination attempts, including once by showing up at a Masquerade Ball she wasn’t invited to and making such a scene that Bolívar had to come out, thereby saving his life (see? There’s that Courtney Love thing).

For this, Bolívar gave her the nickname “the liberator of the Liberator”.

Manuela participated in some of the greatest battles of the revolution – as a combatant, sporting my old favourite, the fake moustache – and attained the rank of Colonel. Back in the cities, she would revert to the waist-cinching attire of a noblewoman and sniff out valuable intelligence under the guise of gossip.

There may or may not have also been a pet bear.

A true Renaissance woman (and read more about her and other kick-arse women at this fantastic site – Rejected Princesses from Jason Porath, former Dreamworks Animator who will soon have a book to go with his site about “Women too Awesome, Awful or Off-Beat for Kids’ Movies”).

Of course, Manuela died a pauper.

When Bolívar died in 1830, his enemies came to power in Colombia and Ecuador and she was unwelcome in those countries. She died in a diphtheria epidemic in Peru in 1856 and was buried in an unmarked, communal grave (where were the goddamned apothecaries then?).

Manuela was reburied in 2010, beside Bolívar’s grave in the National Pantheon of Venezuela, the final resting place for national heroes.

Given the nature of her original burial, some soil from the mass grave was treated as symbolic remains and it was those transported with much ceremony through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia before being given a full state funeral in Venezuela, 154 years after her death.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Manuela Sáenz – an unsung hero with every right to be
bitter.

Cheers!

PS – Sit, Ubu, Sit. Good dog.

(Who knows where that’s from without looking it up?)

The downsides of having small children and liking cocktails are obvious.

The upside is that not only do I have a heightened sense of excitement every single time I enter a bar, but my adjusted sleep patterns have sparked some creativity.

Like whenever I have to test my party stamina that’s now more familiar with pre-midday than post-midnight frivolity, I will order an Espresso Martini.

It’s not really a martini and should more accurately be ordered as a “Vodka Espresso” but it’s served in a martini glass and let’s not quibble over names.

Instead let’s pay homage to its creator, legendary London bartender Dick Bradsell who died over the weekend after more than 40 years of serving (and creating) cocktails.

I never had a cocktail made by Dick, but by all reports, he was the goods when it came to shaking, stirring and muddling and his legacy is an impressive list of well-known cocktails.

Legend has it that Bradsell invented the Vodka Espresso at Fred’s Club in 1984 when a now world-famous model (rumoured to be Naomi Campbell) requested a drink that would ‘wake me up, and then fuck me up’.

Hey presto, the Vodka Espresso was born.

50ml Vodka

5ml Sugar syrup

10ml Kahlua

10ml Tia Maria

1 short strong Espresso

Pour all ingredients into a shaker, and then add the ice. Shake hard, and then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with 3 coffee beans.

It’s often confused with the Black Russian – but Bradsell’s offering is different (and vastly superior in my view). The Black Russian contains vodka and coffee liqueur (like Kahlua or Tia Maria), but no coffee. It was reportedly invented in Brussels in the 1930s.

If you want to read more about Dick, here’s a great piece by Simon Difford from Difford’s Guide. It also includes a list of 30 cocktails Dick is credited with creating.

Cheers Dick Bradsell.

Happy birthday to The Man in Black.

Yes, today would have been Johnny Cash’s 84th birthday and as I’m writing this, I’m listening to Johnny’s Drink to Me and it makes me happy and sad at the same time.

I’m advised that in Johnny’s country of birth there are quite a few disgruntled white men belly-aching about being discriminated against (cry me a river guys) and that’s why Donald Trump is current front-runner for the Republican nomination to possibly become the President of the USA.

These are words I hoped never to write and on their own present a reason to drink.

But it’s always cocktail hour here at SSM, so that means focusing on positives. Like one gem from the world of cocktails for which we need to thank a disgruntled white man.

The Old Fashioned.

The world’s first classic cocktail. Its full name (because we like to be formal here at SSM) is the Old Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail (whiskey here definitely spelled with the e because it’s a rye or a bourbon whiskey) and we can thank our old friend Prohibition again for rebirthing it.

See although it dates back to the early 1800s, during the Big P, people who didn’t have the readies to get down to Havana, would make their own booze.

And it would have been bloody awful.

To mask the taste, bartenders added pretty much anything they could think of to cocktails – fruit, honey, mint, sugar syrup, whatever.

Dark days my friends.

Fast forward to 1936, three years after the repeal of Prohibition, and the habit had stuck. A crotchety gent writing under the nom de plume “Old Timer” wrote to the NY Times to complain about the lost art of cocktail making. OT said in no uncertain terms that he wanted a return to the Old Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail.

Whiskey (probably rye since that was more readily available pre-Pro), ice, a sugar cube and 3 dashes of bitters.

That’s it. That’s the recipe.

If you doubt me (but seriously, why would you?), take a look at Robert Simonson’s definitive tome on the matter;

Muddle the sugar, bitters, and a barspoon of warm water at the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass until the sugar is dissolved. Add the rye or bourbon. Stir. Add one large chunk of ice and stir until chilled. Twist a large piece of orange zest over the drink and drop into the glass.

You do need to muddle the sugar cube because it won’t dissolve effectively in alcohol, but other than that, it isn’t a very fussy cocktail.

Not fussy but highly contested.

According to the IBA, you garnish it with a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry.

And look, I hate to say this, because it is a bit of a game-changer for SSM where we use the IBA as the authority for cocktail recipes, but the IBA is WRONG.

There’s no call for an orange slice – it’s a twist.

There’s an art to getting the twist right. Cut a slice of citrus peel, with minimal pith (flip it over and check if you can see the pores of the zest through the pith – if not, throw it away and try again. For a great how to guide on the twist, take a look at THIS) then you twist it over the drink until some of the citrus oil is released into the drink.

Then run it around the rim of the glass or drop it straight in.

So no orange slice, no maraschino cherry, no soda water and certainly no bloody LEMONADE.

Simple but seems it’s hard to get right.

The Old Fashioned is the drink of choice of Mad Men’s Don Draper and there’s a great scene where he makes one for Conrad Hilton.

Great scene, crap Old Fashioned.

Did you see what Draper gets wrong? He adds soda water.

Ryan Gosling gets it mostly right in this scene from Crazy, Stupid Love, but he sprinkles sugar just before serving. Unnecessary (so unnecessary that it makes me suspect it’s actually Rohypnol but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt).

Remember, we’re using good quality whiskey nowadays so we’re not trying to mask its flavour, we’re enhancing it.

It’s quite a blokey cocktail. As well as its origins, it isn’t presented much in popular culture as being popular among the laydeez.

One notable exception is Bette Davis’ 1942 film Now, Voyager which takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem The Untold Want.

“The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted.

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

Although an admirable premise and with some interesting themes, this is kind of a shitty movie.

Its primary message is that if you have bad eye-brows as a woman, you are destined to be a self-conscious, unattractive spinster (but apparently if you’re a bloke with bad eye-brows, you can apply for all sorts of interesting jobs).

Fortunately, Davis’ Charlotte Vale puts us all out of our misery and casts off her glasses, has an eye-brow wax and becomes deserving of love. Phew.

Then she drinks a bourbon Old Fashioned with her love interest. Just to keep things balanced though, she doesn’t order it herself, in her journey of self-discovery a man orders it for her.

But screw all that. If you like a good cocktail, order an Old Fashioned, whatever your gender or eye-brow shape.

Feel free to leave it to the professionals though.

SSM did some field testing on a rainy night in January (not February, February is Prohibition and February is sucking).

First in Sydney’s subterranean Palmer & Co. The ice was the only problem – the Old Fashioned calls for one big ice cube, so it doesn’t melt too fast.

Revolving 47 floors above George Street at O Bar and Dining, absurdly handsome Swedish waiters will bring you drinks as you spin slowly, pausing in conversation to glory in the majesty and beauty of the Sydney Opera House every forty minutes or so.

When the aforementioned handsome one asked me how I would like my Old Fashioned, I stammered that I’d like bourbon, but wanted the bartender’s choice of bourbon. At altitude, seems bartenders favour Booker’s.

Booker’s is a Jim Beam Distillery product and was invented by Jim Beam’s grandson who had the spectacular name of Booker Noe.

Booker was the sixth generation of his family to make Bourbon and died, aged 84, in this week of 2004.

Booker’s was introduced in 1988, long after today’s birthday boy had given up the drink. In his drinking days though, Johnny Cash favoured a bourbon with a water, so you may like to raise an Old Fashioned to him this week. Or watch THIS CLIP for Hurt and try not to cry. There’s a great article HERE about the story behind the clip that makes it even sadder.

Cash and Elizabeth Taylor used to speak each year around this time since her birthday was the day after his.

No mention of whether Johnny would ring his other birthday pal, unlucky-in-love balladeer and walking advertisement for regular hot oil treatments, Michael Bolton.

Feel free to raise a glass to MB if that’s your bag (remember though, he said he love you…but he lied – please, please take 5 minutes to watch that clip – Eagles! Fire! Horses! Chest hair! Spectacular scenery and something very special at 1:34).

And just to finish back on a note that is my single biggest worry at the moment, there are two other white guys in the USA with more in common than you’d expect.

They don’t share a birthdate, but they do share a birthplace (Queens) and quite clearly a desire to do the same thing to the country.

Donald Trump and porn star Ron Jeremy.

I won’t drink to that, but next week I’ll drink to you.

Cheers!

Last time, we saw Bryan Brown in Cocktail, boldly downing a Red Eye, an alleged hangover cure that contains tomato juice, vodka, beer, tabasco sauce and a whole egg in a drinking experience that must be akin to vomiting in reverse.

It seems only fair to position the egg in a more positive light for its contribution to drinking. And it does feature in a surprising number of cocktails.

I’m not a massive fan of the Nogs or the Flips which contain a whole egg, but I will concede that I may not have explored these at their finest. I favour the Sour or the Fizz. A Fizz can contain the egg white, yolk or both, and the Sour contains the egg white only – if at all. The defining characteristic of a Sour is that it has a citrus base.

Like the Peruvian Pisco Sour, an excellent place to start.

Pisco is a brandy made in Peru and Chile (but the Chilean Pisco Sour doesn’t contain egg), and when mixed with lemon juice, egg white and couple of other simple ingredients (it’s another IBA Official Cocktail) creates a tangy and frothy cocktail.

I say leave matters to the professionals and can recommend a sashay down AC/DC Lane in Melbourne to Pastuso for their Journey Through Peru set menu and accompanying Pisco Sours. Yes I can.

Unsatisfied with leaving you, dear readers, with only one road-tested eggy cocktail, I worked tirelessly over my holiday and went to a bar in Christchurch.

Christchurch has had a bastard of a time since the quakes in 2010 and 2011 and there’s still parts of the city with extensive damage. But trust those plucky Kiwis, there are cool bars and restaurants aplenty, and to assuage parental travel guilt, try the brand spanking new Margaret Mahy Playground where you’ll need to resist the temptation to elbow the kids out of the way and hog the equipment.  Best playground ever.

But quick, back to the bar.

At Mexicano’s I tested the rum-based Jamaica Sour, the hibiscus making it pretty but more sweet than sour, before shifting to the Loco Explosivo, a tequila, Grand Marnier, chili and egg-white offering. The egg-white in both adds little discernible taste, but the shaking makes the egg-white fluffy, with a latte-like foam on top. A counterpoint to the chili-burn.

Plus an option to buy a moustache.

After the Explosivo, this seemed a capital idea, although the $2 spent on my new look seemed an awful waste of the thousands of dollars I have spent on hair removal over past decades.

Sour done, on to the Fizz.

Back in the 1980s, you’ll remember a fantastic little quartet from England won Eurovision with THIS great song. Their name was Bucks Fizz (annoyingly without an apostrophe), which is also allegedly the name of a cocktail.

Except, much as you wouldn’t technically call Bucks Fizz a band (even if, like me, you know ALL the words to Land of Make Believe and Making Your Mind Up – and I defy you to name a single other BF song without using the internet), Buck’s Fizz the cocktail isn’t a Fizz, even though it does have an apostrophe. Nope. It’s just champagne and orange juice.

See real Fizz has egg. There’s Silver Fizz, which contains egg white, Golden Fizz with egg yolk and Royal Fizz with the whole enchilada. And the secret is in the shaking baby (and check out the shaking in the clip below, paying particular attention 1:17 where Cheryl expertly deals with a flaccid mike and to the extras throughout who apparently serve to make up The Land of (piss-weak) Make Believe – oooh it’s so mystical, a juggler, a fire-twirler, an old-fashioned couple and a body-builder doing pointless pec wiggling at 2:42. Ah, the 1980s).

And the Ramos Fizz, that’s a REAL Fizz. Created in 1888 in New Orleans by Henry C Ramos and becoming such a hit at Mardi Gras that Ramos’ bar employed 35 Shaker Boys working solely to meet demand for the cocktail in 1915. A great cocktail, but labour-intensive as this video shows. Your Shaker Boy or Girl will need to shake for between 1 and 12 minutes, first without ice (the Dry Shake), then with the ice. Don’t stand for a one minute shake, that’s just lazy. Don’t order one on a Friday night before Christmas at the Opera Bar. That’s just rude. And tip your bartender. That’s just polite.

For reasons I can’t quite get to the bottom of, the cocktail is attached to Tennessee Williams and is drunk regularly in his honour in New Orleans. I can’t find much evidence of Williams favouring the cocktail, nor writing much about it. In this PARIS REVIEW interview, he speaks of his heavier-drinking days and of wine, but this isn’t a cocktail you’re going to be downing at a Hemingway rate. Too much effort and can’t be slipped into a flask for opening nights.

But Williams would no doubt have approved of the phalanxes of Shaker Boys, and his work has been important in “normalising” homosexuality in entertainment, in getting the conversation out of the closet. (And read Caitlin Moran’s excellent Gay Moon Landing piece from The Times in 2011 for a fab discussion about the importance of art in advancing human rights. Better yet, buy Moranthology and get this plus a great interview with Keith Richards that I was reading on plane as it landed, immersed in marveling that this man could still somehow be alive as phones around me were turned on and news spread that David Bowie had died. Still seems impossible).

Interestingly, Williams (again in Paris Review) explicitly says he never felt much of a need to explore homosexuality in his work, but he certainly does in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

If you haven’t read this, or seen the 1958 movie, I’d recommend you do both. The movie adaptation glossed over much of the relationship between Brick and Skipper, but it’s still a worthwhile watch, and not just for the exquisite beauty of Elizabeth Taylor or the blue of Paul Newman’s eyes.

There’s only one cast member from the movie still alive, Madeleine Sherwood who played “that monster of fertility, Mae” and owns every single scene she’s in. Pregnant Mae also reminds us of how pleasing it is that maternity fashions have progressed in recent decades. I have a massive girl-crush on Sherwood and would love to have a cocktail with her.

In 1963, Sherwood was arrested and jailed in Alabama (in her grey plaid culottes) as she joined the Freedom Walk. The Freedom Walk was started by white mailman Bill Moore in April 1963 when he attempted to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to hand deliver a plea for racial tolerance to the Governor. He was shot dead. One week later, nine activists attempted to finish his walk but were beaten and jailed. This was the first of five unsuccessful attempts to complete Moore’s delivery. Sherwood risked her safety and her livelihood in this post-McCarthy-era but her presence drew important attention to the Congress on Racial Equality’s non-violent direct action (read Mary Stanton’s Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust for more).

Sherwood also portrayed Mother Superior in The Flying Nun, the super-strange late 1960s TV series in which Sally Field’s Sister Bertrille can’t actually fly, is just so dangerously underweight that she gets lifted away by the wind under her coronet. There’s a good message for the kids. Here’s an episode where the nuns conspire to get their hands on a huge organ. (I don’t recommend you spend 23 minutes of your life watching it, but I wanted to make that organ joke).

But Sherwood’s greater work Cat on a Hot Tin Roof deals with gender roles and vicious fights for control of a dynasty. I’m sure it has been much on the minds of the various iterations of Bucks Fizz as they battled in court over who owns the name. Good news for fans is that you can catch one of the new iterations (there are two, Bucks Fizz is proliferating at a dangerous and unnecessary rate) at London Hippodrome on 1 April 2016 as they commemorate 35 years since their Eurovision win. Somehow there are still tickets available to a concert where people will know precisely two songs.

Maybe that’s unfair, there is possibly a new generation of fans (clearly not the guy who posted this on You Tube though, take a look at his commentary) who came from facial-hair-free-perpetual-blonde Bucks Fizz core member Cheryl Baker’s stint on BBC morning television with her fantastically and symmetrically-named Eggs ‘N’ Baker.

Cheers!