I hope everyone had a good Easter (if celebrating that holiday is your kinda thing). I have to say, I had one of the most surreal weekends I can remember.
Amber and I hit the road Saturday morning to head up to Porterville. It's apparently up by some place called Bakersfield (which I hadn't heard of either. It might as well have been near East Luma Guma for all I know of anything in California north of Los Angeles). It's actually really beautiful up there and it's amazing how, even an hour out of L.A. it's a whole different world. It felt more like Maine than California. In the good way.
We went out to dinner and then afterwards spent the rest of the evening drinking Absinthe. Her Dad is really into Absinthe. He buys it from France and the Czech Rebuplic, has the fontaine, sugar cubes, spoons...the whole deal.
There's a whole ritual to drinking Absinthe and that's kinda what I dug about it. You pour a little into a glass then place this special spoon (kinda looks like a small cake spatula with holes in it) across the top. You place a sugar cube on it and put the glass under one of the faucets on the fontaine and then let it drip. It slowly produces a cloudy look to the liquid (called the louche). Once the entire contents of the glass are louched, you then allow the glass to fill up with the ice water. The whole deal takes about 15 minutes or so.
The drink itself has a black licorice taste to it (kind of like Sambuca, which apparently replaced Absinthe after it was "banned") and can be really bitter. The sugar and ice water smooth out the taste considerably. It also has a milky green coloring to it (which is where the term "chasing the Green Fairy" comes from) It gives you a buzz that's somewhere between drinking alcochol and smoking pot. It's a very relaxed feeling.
So we have a glass or two of Absinthe and then watch the movie version of the book "Conversations with God". It was pretty good. I've read the book before and, although I'm not going to bore you with my spirituality here, I agree with a lot of the basic tenets of it.
Back at the hotel and still a little lit from the Absinthe, we put on the absolutely awful Ten Commandments movie (I always think back to that Billy Crystal joke about Edward G Robinson..."Where's your messiah nowwwww, sheee?!") and drifted off to an odd sleep. I then got up and went with Amber's family to an Episcopal service that wasn't a whole heckuva lot different than the Catholic Masses I remembered growing up. I was thankful I didn't have to sit through a 2 hour Easter Vigil like I remember from my youth. My grandparents were such faithful church-goers that even when they could no longer drive, they'd just watch it every morning on TV. Had a communion dispenser right by the set so they could play along at home.
So that was pretty much my Easter weekend. I never even looked for an egg.Labels: absinthe, easter, green fairy
