Category: Screengrabs

I enjoyed highlighting local (upstate New York) spirits in each of my last two “Drink & a Movie” posts, and have therefore resolved to keep the streak going through January! I talked about Harvest Spirits’ Cornelius Applejack in September and Myer Farm Distillers‘ Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin in October; this month’s drink features Glen Thunder corn whiskey, which the Finger Lakes Distilling website describes as having an aroma “reminiscent of pulling back the husk from an ear of sweet summer corn.” My mind goes more toward popcorn, but whatevs: the distinction doesn’t really matter in my favorite concoction to use it in, cereal milk punch. The recipe for it appears in this New York magazine article, which attributes it to mixologist Jeff Bell of one of this blog’s favorite bars, PDT in New York City. Here’s how to make it:

2 oz. Momofuku Milk Bar cereal milk
1 1/4 oz. Bernheim wheat whiskey
3/4 oz. Glen Thunder corn whiskey
1/2 oz. Bärenjäger

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass containing one large ice cube. Garnish with grated nutmeg. 

You might be able to buy genuine Momofuku Milk Bar cereal milk wherever you live, but we prefer to make our own using this recipe published on Serious Eats. If you have a dog, don’t neglect the parenthetical note about what to do with your cornflake remains–they’re one of the four-legged member of our family’s favorite treats!

I love how this drink combines cereal milk with spirits that taste distinctly like different grains to remind the imbiber what the stuff that comes out of the box was originally. It’s also so good that you may be tempted to say you want to bathe in it, which brings us to this month’s movie, Souleymane Cissé’s masterpiece Yeelen. Here’s a picture of my copy of Kino Lorber’s DVD release of the film:

Although Yeelen doesn’t appear to currently be widely available to stream, some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

Early in the film, the hero’s mother (Soumba Traore) wades into a marsh and pours a bowl of milk over her head as part of a ritual prayer for her son’s protection:

“Do you hear this forlorn creature?” she cries. “Goddess of the waters! Hear me, mother of mothers! Hear this helpless mother. Save my son! Keep him from harm! Save this land from ruin! Don’t let the weeds overgrow the house of the Diarra.” Then she lets the contents of another bowl rain down over her:

Milk appears in the very next scene as well. Our hero, whose name is Nianankoro (Issiaka Kane), has been captured as a suspected cattle thief:

The leader of the men taking him to their king lifts a gourd canteen to his lips and takes a swig:

He turns to a comrade and says, “here is milk. Drink it.” This guard hands it to another member of the band:

And so on until only Nianankoro is left to go thirsty:

Contrast this with the third appearance of milk a little while later, when the same king (Balla Moussa Keita) Nianankoro was being taken to as a prisoner personally offers him a drink:

What has changed in the intervening scenes is that Nianankoro has revealed himself to be a powerful sorcerer and, using the right leg-bone of a horse:

That he buried in a termite mound:

Has conjured bees and fire to defeat an invading army:

This is another reason for this month’s drink and a movie pairing: cereal milk is the Proust madeleine of my generation, with power to transport people back to the breakfast tables of their childhoods. In other words, it’s magic! The passage of time factors into Yeelen‘s narrative strategy as well, as represented by the image of a boy (Youssouf Tenin Cissé) who we eventually realize is Nianankoro’s son and a goat that appears at both the beginning and end of the film:

The best part of Yeelen has got to be the epic wizard duel between Nianankoro and his father Soma (Niamanto Sanogo), who has spent the entire movie trying to track him down and kill him. It contains some stare songs (to bastardize a lovely turn of phrase by Richard T. Jameson) straight out of the oeuvre of Sergio Leone:

And two killer dissolves:

Before concluding with both characters being subsumed into the “brightness” (the English translation of the Bambara word “yeelen”) of the film’s title:

Another one of my favorite moments in Yeelen is this closeup of Nianankoro’s future wife Attu (Aoua Sangare):

They meet when the king mentioned above asked Nianankoro to cure her of infertility. Which he certainly does do, but then he and Attu give into their lust for one another, ultimately leading to their exile. This single beautiful load-bearing image tells an impressively large portion of that story. And then, finally, there is the movie’s ending. Years (I assume) later, Attu returns to the scene of Nianankoro’s battle with Soma to retrieve the Kore wing (the scepter of the 7th and final Bambara initiation society per the titles which precede the film) which was her husband’s weapon during it:

Meanwhile her son finds two ostrich eggs buried in the sand nearby:

He retrieves one and presents it to his mother:

She re-buries it at the spot where the Kore wing stands, then gives it to her son along with Nianankoro’s clock. They walk away together bearing both objects:

There is a closeup of the remaining ostrich egg alone in the sand:

And then a shot of Nianankoro’s son striding confidently into the future with the Kore wing and his father’s cloak:

For a breakdown of exactly what’s happening here, see Suzanne H. MacRae’s Research in African Literatures article “Yeelen: A Political Fable of the Komo Blacksmith/Sorcerers.” It doesn’t take extensive knowledge of Malian history to understand that this represents Nianankoro’s triumph over Soma, though. Or, to translate this into cocktail terms: like cereal milk punch, it’s good on both the sip and the swallow!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

Two Father’s Days ago, My Loving Wife gave me a copy of David Lebovitz’s Drinking French as a present. It’s a terrific book filled with wonderful recipes, but far and away our favorite thing in it is the Yellow Cocktail created by Franck Audoux of the Paris bar Cravan. Here’s the recipe

3/4 oz. London dry gin (Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin)
3/4 oz. Suze
3/4 oz. Yellow Chartreuse
3/4 oz. Freshly squeezed Lemon juice

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake with ice until well chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with the oils from a lemon twist.

Lebovitz calls for London dry gin, but we prefer to use one of our favorite local spirits, Myer Farm Distillers‘ Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin, which has a similar golden hue to the other ingredients. “Autumnal,” the person at Red Feet Wine Market who sold us our last bottle said, which really is the perfect way to describe it. With that connection made, it was pretty much inevitable that I would end up choosing a movie directed by master of the giallo (Italian for “yellow”) film Dario Argento to go with it, although I decided not to select something from that genre. Instead I’m keying in on the drink’s vibrant yellow color and pairing it with Suspiria. Here’s a picture of my copy of Synapse Film’s DVD release of the film:

Suspiria doesn’t appear to be streaming many places, but some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

I mention color above, and that is what I like most about this film. Maitland McDonagh describes it as a “big, bright, nightmare fairy tale” set in “a psychedelic world of swirling red, yellow, and blue jewel-tones” in her book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, and I wouldn’t dare try to say it better myself. When I was an undergraduate film studies student, I remember numerous occasions when I fell in love with the idea of a movie based on the pictures in my text books, only to be disappointed by the reality of it, usually because it was either disappointingly conventional outside of the extraordinary moments captured by the stills that inspired me to see it, or because the film didn’t really work. Suspiria avoids these traps by using a simple narrative structure as a stable scaffold for pervasive formal audacity.

On the first front, voice-over dialogue informs us during the opening credits that once upon a time a dancer named Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) “decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe.” Alas, the “celebrated academy of Freiburg” turns out to be a front for a coven of witches. Through pluck and courage she triumphs over their leader and brings the whole place down House of Usher style. That’s about it for the story. But my Godard (RIP), the images! We can begin as the film (almost) does, with shots drenched in primary colors. This one comes first:

But this one is even more red:

Beautiful right? But not terribly innovative. That’s true of this shot as well, which reminds me of the oft-mentioned-on-this-blog Chicago bar The Violet Hour:

What really makes the film interesting are all the moments that it isn’t quite possible to capture. Take this one:

This is a murderer stalking his prey shot from behind, and it doesn’t last long enough to get a screengrab that shows him clearly enough to figure this out without a prompt. Or how about this shot?

I’m sure you’ll agree that it is very green. But there’s something else funny about it as well, yeah? It’s not an unusual lens–rather, the camera is set up behind a light bulb:

Far from being a film comprised of beautiful tableaus loosely connected by a plot, Suspiria is much greater than the sum of its (occasionally breathtaking, to be sure!) parts. Sometimes this is accomplished via gimmicks, as in the case of this unmotivated reaper-shaped shadow:

I thought something similar was going on in the opening scene at the airport. It features two extreme close-ups of the inner workings of an automatic door, and I assumed that in at least one of them the machinery was switched out for a knife. But no:

Why go to the trouble if just the metal and the motion achieve the same effect? In any event, it’s everything else going on around these shots that really count. To deal with the latter scene first, the juxtaposition of ambient noise when Suzy is inside the airport:

with Italian band Goblin’s eerie prog rock score whenever we catch a glimpse of the world outside kicks everything off on an extremely unsettling note. See also this awesome use of a wind machine:

In the case of the forest where the above shadow appears, what I really remember is the haunting image of Eva Axén’s Pat Hingle running through it as seen by Suzy through the window of a cab:

My single favorite part of Suspiria is probably the ridiculous statement Barbara Magnolfi’s Olga (right) makes to Suzy (middle) and Stefania Casini’s Sara (left) which I think I heard sampled in Atmosphere’s “Bird Sings Why The Caged I Know” before I ever saw the movie: “I once read that names which begin with the letter ‘S’ are the names of snakes!” Look at these faces!

Suzy’s palpable relief during her happily ever after moment at the end of the film is pretty great, too:

I’m no connoisseur of horror films, but the opening murder surely has to be one of the most aesthetically striking ones in movie history:

And I love the way Helena Markos’s invisibility is rendered near the end of the film:

But I think the very best SCENE of all is the one which ends in poor Sara’s demise. She’s the figure in the shot bathed in green light above, and the man in yellow in the screengrab above it is the person who will eventually killer her. She attempts to take shelter in a locked room:

But the straight razor worrying the latch on the door suggests that this isn’t a viable long-term solution:

Suddenly she looks up:

The camera follows her gaze to salvation in the form of cheery yellow light streaming through a window:

She climbs up to and out of it:

And into this room:

The decor maybe should have cued Sara into the fact that all is not well, but she is understandably focused on the doorway in front of her which appears to lead to freedom and safety:

She leaps! But it, uh, doesn’t end well:

Many of the colors in Suspiria seem to exist only for us, the audience: I doubt that the idea at the beginning of this sequence is that Sara sees herself as being surrounded by green light, for instance. But this yellow window lures her to her doom! In that respect it is not at all like the Yellow Cocktail, which rewards one with bracing minerality, a pleasing sweet-tart balance, and warm spices. Unless you drink too many of them, I suppose, which might make your head feel like this:

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

Ten years ago (wow that makes me feel old!) I emailed myself a link to a recipe by Rachel Tepper for a cocktail called the Sweet New Year. Serious Eats appears to have removed it (and many others, including most tragically this one for pasta with Meyer lemon and basil that we make for dinner at least once or twice a month) from their website at some point for unknown reasons, but thankfully the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine captured it for posterity in 2012. Here’s how you make this drink:

1 1/2 oz. Applejack (Cornelius)
1/2 oz. Bärenjäger
1/4 teaspoon Demerara sugar
Handful of mint

Muddle mint and sugar in a cocktail shaker. Add spirits and stir to combine. Strain into a chilled rocks glass and garnish with one nice-looking sprig of mint.

As described by Tepper, the Sweet New Year is a simple but elegant play on the traditional Rosh Hashanah dish of apples dipped in honey, which is the main reason I chose it for this month’s drink. It’s also a beautiful showcase for one of my favorite New York spirits, Harvest Spirits’ Cornelius Applejack, my current go-to host/hostess gift. I like the addition of mint, too, both for the complexity it contributes and because I can harvest it out of my own herb garden throughout late summer and early fall.

The movie I’m pairing this drink with is Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street. Here’s a picture of my copy of the Cohen Film Collection DVD release of the film:

Hester Street can also be streamed via Amazon Prime and Apple TV for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Based on a novella by Abraham Cahan called Yekl (my library’s copy of which is available for free via the Internet Archive), the film tells the story of a family of Jewish immigrants living in New York’s Lower East Side in 1896. Steven Keats’s Jake (nee Yekl) is already living there when the story begins, enjoying the life of an apparent bachelor. This all changes when he sends for his wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and son Jossele (Paul Freedman) following the death of his father. Dismayed by their failure to embrace their new country as enthusiastically as he has, he begins neglecting them in favor of the people he had been keeping company with before they arrived, most notably a woman named Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh).

What I admire most about the film is the ingenuity on display in it. When people talk about “movie magic,” they’re often referring to things like huge sets, original costumes, intricate models, and armies of extras that Hollywood studios use to create whole worlds from scratch. Micklin Silver and company are wizards of a different sort: despite having access to few such resources, they nonetheless spin a convincing depiction of the nineteenth century out of locations, objects, and people readily available on the streets of 1970s New York. Call them alchemists. They understand that whether you are shooting an interior scene:

Or an exterior one:

The number of extras you have to work with is less important for creating a feeling of crowdedness than how well you fill the frame with them. You can also get a lot of mileage out of a well-placed reaction shot:

The only reason this sleepy fella is even in the picture is because Mamie and Jake need to ascend to the roof of Mamie’s building among the wash hanging out to dry for even a bit of privacy.

If you can so effectively establish the idea of a crowded tenement, are you really losing anything by not actually being able to show one? This scene is also a good example of another kind of economy–Silver and her editor Katherine Wenning cut away the INSTANT Jake’s lips touch Mamie’s.

What do they cut to? This close up of a sewing machine:

When you only have a limited number of period-authentic props to work with, you’ve got to make every second with them count! Similarly, when you don’t have the budget to recreate Ellis Island, you’ve got to use things like lighting and sound to create a sense of chaos and grandeur. I submit that the film does a fine job of this:

Hester Street isn’t perfect: most notably, I don’t think Keats and Silver succeed in showing us what’s going on inside Jake’s mind, which makes their version of the character much less interesting than Cahan’s. Whereas the novella describes him as being “in a flurry of joyous anticipation” on his way to meet Gitl and Jossele at Ellis Island, but then goes on to say that “his heart had sunk at the sight of his wife’s uncouth and un-American appearance,” the Jake of the film just seems put out by how much they’re crimping his style from the word go. It’s the difference between a man who wants to do the right thing but is so intoxicated by his ideal of America that he can’t and one who is just kind of a jerk. It also renders some scenes unintelligible, which Micklin Silver herself seems acknowledge in one case on the commentary track on my DVD copy of the film. She notes that this scene showing Jake awkwardly praying for his deceased father was meant to convey the idea that he’d never even gotten around to unpacking his tallit:

I think I see now how they’re trying to accomplish this by having Jake use the stylish bowler hat we saw him buy a few scenes earlier as a head covering and ending the scene with him expressing frustration:

I’m not sure I ever would have gotten there on my own, though, since you could also interpret this whole scene as just showing Jake grieving. Of course, Hester Street isn’t *about* Jake the same way Yekl is. The single best thing about Micklin Silver’s film is without doubt Carol Kane’s Oscar-nominated performance as Gitl. Whether she’s trying to make sense of her husband’s baffling decision to go out the night she arrives in America after more than three years apart from him:

Gleaning from a small, absent-minded gesture that her lodger Bernstein (Mel Howard, a non-professional actor who is also quite good here) is in love with her:

Realizing while watching him teach her son how to read that she returns his affection:

Or extracting a king’s ransom from the lawyer sent by Jake and Mamie to secure a divorce without ever saying a word:

She communicates deep wells of emotion with little more than subtle changes in expression. Especially when contrasted with the hammy antics of Steven Keats’s Jake, it’s a masterclass in minimalist acting.

Speaking of performances, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Doris Roberts’ entertaining turn as Jake and Gitl’s landlady Mrs. Kavarsky.

“You can’t pee up my back and make me thinks it’s rain!” she says at one point, and she spends the entire film embodying the essence of a person for whom this represents a philosophy of life.

Rosh Hashanah is never mentioned in either Hester Street or Yekl, but the way the former ends calls to mind the traditional wishes for a “sweet year” that the drink featured in this blog post is named after. The rabbi who presides over their divorce cautions Gitl that she must wait ninety full days before she remarries, but says to Jake, “you, young man, may wed even today if you desire.” A subsequent crane shot of him walking down the street with a veiled Mamie suggests he might well have done so! Although their conversation is all about how spending Mamie’s life savings to buy off Gitl has altered their plans for the future, it does end with a kiss and an embrace:

The next scene is the film’s last, and it depicts a parallel conversation between Gitl and Bernstein in which they talk about how they’ve invested that same sum of money in a grocery store that she will work in while he studies the Torah in the back.

I personally choose to believe both couples will be happy. Which: mazel tov!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

It’s right around this time every summer that I start to really look forward to the start of football season. By now I’ve usually finished reading the Football Outsiders Almanac, I’m catching bits and pieces of CFL games on ESPN2, and I’m starting to prepare for my family/friends fantasy football league draft, which usually takes place over Labor Day weekend. This month’s drink selection is therefore a tribute to the pigs who so generously donate their skins to our true national pastime each year, the Benton’s Old-Fashioned from The PDT Cocktail Book, which was created by Don Lee in 2007:

2 oz. Benton’s Bacon Fat-Infused Four Roses Bourbon
1/4 oz. Maple Syrup
2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass filled with one large cube. Garnish with an orange twist.

To “fat-wash” the bourbon: combine 1.5 ozs. molten Benton’s bacon fat and one 750 ml bottle of Four Roses bourbon (the one folk used to refer to as “yellow label” before the bottle got a facelift in 2018) in a large nonreactive container and stir. Infuse for four hours, then place the container in the freezer for two hours. Remove solid fat, fine-strain the bourbon through a terry cloth or cheesecloth, and bottle.

I know what you’re thinking: didn’t the whole bacon cocktail thing run its course a decade ago? The bourbon in this drink isn’t just bacon fat-infused, though, it’s Benton’s bacon fat-infused. We are talking about a product that tastes so much like a campfire that my children, six and four years old as of this writing, refuse to eat it. The drink was originally made with Benton’s country ham, which is also delicious. The point is, not just any cured pork product will do. I’m sure there are plenty of others that would work here, but make sure you taste the original first so that you know exactly what you’re looking for. We buy ours at The Wine Source when we’re visiting family in Baltimore, but you can also order it online.

The spirit which results from the marriage of Benton’s bacon fat and bourbon is savory with a rich mouthfeel and a predominant flavor of smoke, which puts me more in the mind of pechuga mezcal than breakfast, even after you add maple syrup. Speaking of which: most recipes for this drink that you can find online call for “Grade B” syrup, but such a thing no longer exists as of 2015. The equivalent new rating is “Grade A Dark Robust,” but you should just use the best syrup you can get your hands on. We are fortunate to have relatives in Ontario who make their own! Add in Angostura bitters for complexity and essential oils from the orange twist for brightness, and what you have is a clever, endlessly quaffable concoction that I’m not at all surprised turned out to be one of PDT’s all-time best sellers.

The movie I’m pairing this drink with takes everything I love about football and turns it on its head: the Marx brothers film Horse Feathers, which exactly no one attributes to director Norman Z. McLeod. Here’s a picture of my copy of Universal’s “The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection” DVD set:

The film begins with Groucho Marx’s Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff outlining his leadership philosophy (“whatever it is, I’m against it!”) for the assembled faculty and students of Huxley College.

We soon learn that his son Frank (Zeppo Marx) is a 12th-year senior at Huxley who somehow still has football eligibility. Frank informs his father that Huxley has had a new president every year since 1888, which might explain why someone as obviously unqualified as Wagstaff was able to get the job, although perhaps not why his predecessor made such a big deal about leaving. Huxley also hasn’t won a football game during this time, and Frank, who clearly hasn’t taken a statistics course yet, thinks this must surely be a causal relationship. He tells his father that two of the best football players in the country hang out at the local speakeasy, and Wagstaff sets out to recruit them to play in the upcoming rivalry game against Darwin College. Unfortunately, a gambler named Jennings (David Landau) who’s betting on the opposition has beat him to the punch:

About this guy: if Huxley hasn’t won a game in 40 years, surely there’s no way they’re the favorites in this contest, right? So if Jennings is going to go to the trouble of fixing the game, why wouldn’t he do so on behalf of the underdogs to maximize his profits? Worst gambler ever! Anyway, Wagstaff mistakes speakeasy employees Baravelli (Chico Marx) and Pinky (Harpo Marx) for the real football players Frank mentioned and recruits them instead. Many hijinks ensue over the course of the 45 minutes of screen time leading up to the climactic football sequence, including this shot of Baravelli filling an order for one quart of Scotch and one quart of rye from a common source, which hurts my soul as a lover of fine spirits:

And this one of Pinky, who by the way is also a dog catcher, gleefully shoveling books into a fire, which pains me as a librarian:

Finally, it’s game time. Baravelli and Pinky arrive late after their attempt to kidnap Darwin’s new best players goes awry and they end up locked in a bedroom instead. Despite the deck being stacked in their favor, Darwin is only up 12-0 heading into the fourth quarter, which: maybe Jennings was on to something after all! Suddenly, the tide begins to turn. First, Professor Wagstaff enters the game mid-play and makes a crucial tackle along the sideline:

Then one of Darwin’s ringers suffers a finger injury when Pinky decides it would make an excellent substitute for the hot dog he lost during the previous play and bites down:

Huxley soon turns the ball over, but this gives Pinky the chance to tie a string to it:

Which leads directly to a pick-six. Huxley converts the extra point to pull within five. Let us pretend (since it doesn’t really matter for plot purposes) that Huxley doesn’t then receive the subsequent kickoff despite being the team that scored, and that we instead see Darwin punt to give the ball back to Huxley, implying that the latter team’s defense did its job instead of that the folks who cut this film don’t know the rules of football. As Professor Wagstaff lights a cigar and Pinky munches on a banana, they snap the ball to begin the next play:

The call is a left end run by Frank, and it has all the appearances of being a game winner thanks to Pinky’s innovative use of banana peels to prevent Darwin’s players from making a tackle:

Alas, Frank makes the mistake of saying “nice work, Pinky!” while the play is still in progress, which of course prompts Pinky to trip him shy of the end zone. Luckily there’s still enough time on the clock for another play. This time the ball goes to Pinky and he’s running free up the middle when a dog bursts onto the field. Pinky reverses direction to try to catch it, but is convinced by the characters played by the other Marx Brothers to abandon his pursuit and instead jump with them into the horse-drawn garbage chariot he had arrived at the game in earlier and apparently parked in the field of play. They all race up the field for the game-winning score.

Just for good measure, Pinky’s teammates toss him three more balls which he also places on the ground in the end zone:

The scorekeeper diligently awards Huxley six points each time, making the final score 31-13.

I grew up rooting for the New York Mets and watching big events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, and World Cup, but didn’t become a general sports fan until college. Attending a Division I school (the University of Pittsburgh) with a proud football history during its basketball program’s Golden Age (RIP the Jamie Dixon era!) helped, as did living in a hockey- and football-mad city at a time when its teams in both sports lucked into a series of franchise-altering talents (Ben Roethlisberger, Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby) who won them multiple championships. This is why I root for Pitt, the Penguins, and the Steelers. It doesn’t quite explain why I reliably watch three to five NFL games every week between the months of August and January no matter who’s playing. For that, we must turn to the Peyton Manning Colts. I can remember sitting in a crowded bar ignoring everyone I came there with in favor of a TV on silent showing Manning playing chess with the opposing team’s defensive coordinator, altering plays and lofting passes to spots where only his gifted wide receivers Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne could catch them. They’d then proceed to defy the laws of physics and contort their bodies in impossible ways to get both of their feet down in bounds with the ball.

This combination of strategy and graceful athleticism is what fascinates me about football: throw in analytics and the salary cap, and in the modern passing era it’s more like watching two ballet companies compete against each other in a full-contact version of something like the Eschaton game from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest than the battle of brute strength that I used to assume it was. I enjoy football movies like Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday and Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights enough to return to them from time to time, but I’ve never seen a film that gets *this* aspect of the sport right. Unless, that is, you count Horse Feathers. When I remember great NFL moments like Santonio Holmes’s game winning touchdown catch in Super Bowl XLIII, I don’t just think about the play itself, but also the drive that made it possible, the offseasons that brought the players involved in it to Pittsburgh, and the ruling on the field that yes, this really was a completion. But what counts as a catch and what doesn’t in the NFL is based on rules that at the end of the day are essentially arbitrary and subject to change, as indeed they have multiple times since that February night in 2009!

Horse Feathers understands this fundamental truth about football, even as it’s indifferent to it otherwise except as a platform for jokes. Baravelli announcing the play that Huxley is about to run (“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Professor Wagstaff gets the ball!”) is basically the exact opposite of Peyton Manning calling out audibles at the line of scrimmage. Either way, you’ve got adults play[act]ing something that started out as a children’s game. I’d argue that in both cases the principles have elevated what they’re doing to the status of art, but if you aren’t having fun watching them, you’re doing it wrong.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

I’ve been enjoying writing monthly Drink & a Movie posts a lot. So much so, in fact, that I’m going to try to keep the series going for four full years, since I’ll have then just about programmed a year-long weekly film series. To get me all the way there, I’ll need to throw in four bonus posts. There’s no time like the present, and I figured that a good place to begin would be with the drink that started it all, a Manhattan from The Simpsons Season 3, Episode 4 “Bart the Murderer.” No, not this flat, flavorless one that gets Fat Tony the kiss of death from a fellow mob boss:

But this “superb” one that Bart makes earlier in the episode:

It’s so good that it gets him a part-time job working in Fat Tony’s Legitimate Businessman’s Social Club. The episode contains any number of hilarious jokes based on this premise, as well as a cameo from Neil Patrick Harris and two of my favorite Simpsons lines to randomly quote, “well observed!” and “I don’t have an appointment with any large men!” The funniest thing about it to me now, though, might be this drink. First, the Manhattan is of course a stirred (containing as it does only spirits and bitters) drink, but Bart shakes it, which: if you want flat, this is a great way to start! Then he drops the maraschino cherry (the ice cream sundae kind, not these treasures) garnish into it from a downright reckless height. I’d never, ever do either of these things. And yet: the “plop!” sound that the cherry makes somehow still sounds inviting to me even now!

I watched the first ten seasons of The Simpsons front to back at least four times in the years surrounding my completion of graduate school. Here’s a picture of my trusty season three box set, which is still going strong even after all that usage:

You can also stream “Bart the Murderer” via Disney+ with a subscription or via Amazon Prime for a rental fee. This is probably as good a place as any to address the Stampy in the room: yes, I know that many people wouldn’t consider an episode of a television show to be a “movie.” I’m the programmer here, though, and in the immortal words of Sir Robert Eversley, I’ll do what I like! Anyway:

At some point during this era in my life I visited my best friend Anthony in Chicago, and he took me to legendary cocktail lounge The Violet Hour. It was only natural that with memories of Bart the Mixologist bouncing around in my brain, I would order the Woolworth Manhattan created by Michael Rubel circa 2008 on my first visit. The rest, as they say, is history. I was delighted to see this drink included in the recently published The Bartender’s Manifesto by Toby Maloney and the Violet Hour’s other bartenders, and even more so by the note that “if you’re using a vermouth that doesn’t have as much body (and soul) as Carpano, you might need to add a little Demerara syrup to boost the Textural qualities.” The reason being that I clearly remember asking the person who served it to us what gave the drink its body and being served a small amount of Carpano Antica in response, which I thought was just about the coolest thing ever. We also definitely got the whole spiel about how the drink was inspired by Proustian recollections of lunch counter cheeseburgers and fountain root beers! Here’s how you make it:

2 oz. Buffalo Trace Bourbon (Four Roses Small Batch)
3/4 oz. Carpano Antica Vermouth
1/4 oz. Cynar (Cynar 70)
9 drops Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled coupe (Nick and Nora) glass. Garnish with a cherry and 12 drops of Bittercube Root Beer Bitters.

I’d make it with Buffalo Trace now for authenticity’s sake if I could, but I can’t ever seem to find it anymore. If you, like me, live a place where Carpano Antica costs nearly twice as much as other quality vermouths, do consider playing around with Demerara syrup! A 2:1 ratio of sugar and water is recommended elsewhere in The Bartender’s Manifesto. This might be one cocktail worth splurging on, though: I’m happy to report that even after more than ten years, it still strikes me as just about perfect. As does season three of The Simpsons, for that matter!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

1/18/23 Update:

It has always nagged at me that I didn’t pick a feature film to go along with The Simpsons episode for the “& a Movie” half of this pairing. Luckily Mark Mylod’s The Menu came along and bailed me out! The Woolworth Manhattan was inspired by bartender Michael Rubel’s memory of fountain root beer served alongside “an expertly griddled double cheeseburger with endlessly caramelized edges” served atop a toasted sesame bun. Behold this masterpiece by chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes):

The fact that it looks gorgeous is hardly a surprise, considering it’s clearly one of the food shots contributed by Chef’s Table creator David Gelb. Slowik’s application of thinly-sliced onions to the top of the patty immediately before it’s flipped is a nice touch as well, as is the way he presses down on the top of the bun when he plates it–perhaps those were contributions from chief technical consultant Dominique Crenn? Anyway, this photograph that our hero Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) finds in Slowik’s cottage even establishes this “well-made cheeseburger” as something of an origin story:

What better film could I therefore choose to flesh this out into a proper screening?

This month’s Drink & a Movie post is dedicated to My Loving Wife Marion Penning, who you may know as the Official Photographer for this blog series. It is thanks to her that I now spend all year looking forward to the start of the Tour de France, a sporting event that I can’t recall ever having followed before we met. Which: what a loss for me! The first one we watched together was the 2013 edition. Marion, a longtime fan, patiently defined unfamiliar terminology like “domestique” and “peloton” and explained what the different colored jerseys all meant. When the 2014 Tour rolled around we were engaged, and she was in Canada getting the family cottage ready for our wedding reception the following month. Since we basically still didn’t have internet access there at the time, I considered it my solemn duty to update her on every twist and turn of Vincenzo Nibali’s road to victory via text message, and infamously ruined my future sister-in-law’s birthday dinner (to this day I don’t know why Marion didn’t mute her phone!) in the process. By the time Chris Froome took off for the top of Mont Ventoux on foot in 2016, I was officially hooked.

Marion’s favorite cocktail is the Negroni, so a few years ago I gave her a copy of Gary Regan’s book-length study of it for her birthday. Coincidentally, the best thing we’ve tried from it so far is a concoction named after the winner of the 1924 and 1925 Tours, Kevin Burke’s Bottecchia:

30 ml (1 oz) Fernet Branca
30 ml (1 oz) Cynar (Cynar 70)
30 ml (1 oz) Campari
1 small pinch kosher salt
1 fat grapefruit twist

Stir all ingredients in a mixing glass without ice until salt is dissolved. Add ice, stir , and strain into a chilled coupe. Squeeze the twist over the drink, then discard.

As described by Burke (Head Barman at Colt & Gray in Denver, Colorado at the time of publishing) in the book, this drink honors Ottavio Bottecchia, a known socialist whose “politics put him in unpopular company” and “whose life was cut short when he was found dead in 1927 of unknown causes.” He was also the first Italian ever to win the Tour de France, and his second victory was aided by Lucien Buysse, who Bottecchia’s Wikipedia entry identifies as the first domestique in Tour history.

Per Burke, the intent of substituting Fernet and Cynar for the Negroni’s gin and Campari is to “turn it up to 11.” My use of Cynar 70, a higher-proof version of the spirit, knocks it up yet another notch. With flavors this strong, the Bottecchia was never destined to be a drink for all palates, but I think Burke is right when he also notes that the salt tempers the bitterness of the other ingredients. This is, in fact, probably the most successful example of using salt as a cocktail ingredient that I’ve found so far.

The movie I’m pairing with the Bottecchia is Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville. Pictured here is the Sony Pictures Classic DVD release I purchased from Amazon a few months ago:

The film can also be streamed via Amazon Prime and Apple TV for a rental fee. The Triplets of Belleville opens with an animated one-reeler featuring the eponymous sisters singing an earworm called “Belleville Rendez-vous”.

Their performance is part of a demented act that includes, among other things, a Fred Astaire lookalike who tap dances so hard that his shoes fly off, come to life, and devour him:

The sequence ends with the sepia tones of old celluloid dissolving into the grays of a mid-20th-century television set, which almost immediately loses reception:

The camera pulls back to reveal a boy and his grandmother, the heroes of our tale:

We soon learn that she will do anything for him, even if that means (in a sequence which artfully blends digital and hand-drawn animation) chasing an ocean liner through stormy seas in a paddle boat.

But that comes later, after the boy, whose name is Champion, has been kidnapped by French mobsters, The grandmother, whose name is Madame Souza, will pursue him to Belleville, where she’ll meet up with the triplets and join their ensemble, which now features improvised instruments made from household objects:

They’ll eventually rescue Champion after an extremely over-the-top chase, but before any of that happens, Madame Souza gives her grandson a puppy named Bruno:

Then she gifts him a tricycle:

The Triplets of Belleville features all sorts of delightful grotesqueries, including a frog-based tasting menu that ranks among the most memorable meals in movie history. My favorite, though, is what happens to Champion’s body after he receives this present. It isn’t just a thoughtful gesture, you see, but a raison d’être. When we see him again he’s training for the Tour de France:

Madame Souza is right behind him on the tricycle whistling a cadence:

The scene which follows this is one the real prizes of the film. Champion, now rail thin with the exception of absurdly oversized leg muscles of a professional cyclist, staggers inside after his training ride:

He collapses on the dinner table and Madame Souza goes to work on his body. She attacks his calves with first a vacuum:

Then egg beaters:

After that comes a lawnmower back massage and scrubbing brushes:

And then it’s time for dinner. While Champion eats, Madame Souza repairs his bike wheel using a tuning fork and a statue of the Eiffel Tower:

He consumes exactly as much food as his body needs, as determined by a scale hooked up to an alarm clock:

Bruno is watching so attentively because he’ll get whatever is left. Finally, it’s time for bed:

Following a brief glimpse of Bruno’s dreams, we are next transported to a Tour de France mountain stage. Madame Souza tracks Champion’s progress from the broom wagon (so named because it follows the race and “sweeps up” riders who aren’t able to finish in the time allotted) using binoculars:

Unlike the eventual winner, whom IMDb identifies as five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil, neither Champion nor Madame Souza ever cracks a smile.

Champion will ultimately prove unable to finish the stage, but this doesn’t register as failure. Now, to be sure, this is in part because he gets abducted, setting off the film’s second act; however, there’s also a very strong sense that it wouldn’t have been mattered anyway. This, as much as the images, is what makes The Triplets of Belleville such a great depiction of the Tour de France. The finishes are very dramatic, yes, but I also love how much else is always going on. It doesn’t just matter who wins the stage, it also matters who wins each climb and intermediate sprint along the way, because while a small subset of GC (or “General Classification”) riders are competing for first place overall, others are competing for King of the Mountain or points leader. Yet others are trying to be the most successful rider under 26 years of age or the most combative rider. Most riders don’t even aspire to win anything for themselves, but rather are there to help their team or individual teammates.

In other words, the Tour de France isn’t a simple race, but rather a whole suite of competitions, each with its own set of strategies, rivalries, and drama. It’s impossible to tell from the film what exactly Champion is in the race to do. Maybe he exhausted himself early in the stage helping his team leader over a tough climb. Maybe he’s a sprinter and it was always going to be a struggle to finish this portion of the race. What we do know is that he, like everyone else in the race, devoted the better part of his life to the pursuit of just getting there in the first place. And although it isn’t necessarily written all over his or his grandmother’s faces, it’s obvious that this has given their lives structure and meaning and that they are happy as an old cabaret singer with a frogsicle.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

For my first April Drink & a Movie post, my mind went to one of the rainiest movies I know, Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole. Pictured here is the copy of the Big World Films DVD I bought on Amazon a couple of months ago:

The film can also be can rented or purchased for Video On Demand viewing through the Big World Films website. Some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Despite Boston-based film critic Sean Burns’s eminently reasonable suggestion in a review published this past September that The Hole “might be the best film about how it feels to be alive right now,” the drink I’m selecting to pair with it is called the 20th Century, specifically the version in The PDT Cocktail Book which author Jim Meehan attributes to C. A. Tuck via W. J. Tarling (author of the Café Royale Cocktail Book where it was first recorded):

1.5 oz. Plymouth Gin
.75 oz. Marie Brizard White Crème de Cacao (Giffard)
.75 oz. Lillet Blanc
.75 oz. Lemon Juice

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe (I used my favorite Nick and Nora glass). No garnish.

In addition to changing the glassware, I also used Giffard white crème de cacao instead of the Marie Brizard that Meehan calls for throughout this book, since I’ve never been able to find it. Honestly, though, I haven’t sweated this ingredient too much ever since a bartender at The Violet Hour in Chicago told me that *they* aren’t very picky about it a few years ago, and I’d advise you not to be either. Just go for white over brown for the sake of the appearance of the drink, is all.

As Meehan notes, the drink is actually named for “the 20th Century Limited luxury train that traveled between New York City and Chicago from 1902 to 1967.” Said train has appeared in many movies, including North by Northwest, The Sting, and of course Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century, but so far as I am aware no character ever orders the cocktail named after it. Which is too bad for them, because it’s one of my absolute favorites! One thing that makes it unique is its unusual combination of flavors that don’t seem like they should go together–chocolate, juniper, and lemon. This is why I chose The Hole to pair with it, because do you know what else doesn’t sound like it makes sense? A bleak depiction of life in a city beset by both an epidemic and a never-ending rain storm shot mostly in long takes and containing very little dialogue that also includes cheerful, lip-synched musical numbers based on the songs of singer-actress Grace Chang!

Both the drink and the movie absolutely do work, though. In the case of the former, each ingredient brings an important component of balance to the party: the crème de cacao supplies sweetness and texture, the gin gives the drink substance, and the citrus chips in acidity, all of which matter more than how each them tastes. Similarly, both the fantastical and realistic elements of the film are necessary to bring to life the surreal experiences of being isolated from one’s fellow humans even while being surrounded by them and trying to piece together a coherent narrative about the virus upending your life from one meager scrap of information at a time.

Like the train that the drink is named after, The Hole is meant to represent an aspect of the century during which it was created. It was commissioned as part of a series called 2000, Seen By…, and “eerily prophetic” (quoth Jeffrey M. Anderson of the San Francisco Examiner) though it may be, Tsai’s focus was very much on the present when he conceived it. As he told socialist film critic David Walsh, “[w]hen they first came to me with this project of making a film about the new millennium, I thought the end of the century was too close to describe a future predicament, so it’s actually a reflection of contemporary society.”

Last but not least as far as connections between this month’s drink and movie go, scroll up again and take another look at the picture of a 20th Century taken by My Loving Wife. Now dig this shot of Yang Kuei-Mei’s The Woman Downstairs from The Hole‘s penultimate sequence, which the brilliant Darren Hughes says “might be the most extraordinary of Tsai’s career”:

They both glow, yeah? Certainly each one is beautiful. As far as the rest of the film goes, it really is bonkers how many moments it contains that are likely to resonate with contemporary audiences. Take this shot The Woman Downstairs arriving home with a haul of toilet paper:

Or this use of a mask as an erotic device, our first indication that the Woman Downstairs is attracted to Lee Kang-sheng’s The Man Upstairs:

Or the fantasy world dramatization of the onset of the “flu-like symptoms” we’ve all been dreading for the past two years set to “Achoo Cha Cha”:

The rest of the song and dance sequences are quite wonderful, too. I particularly love the beginning of the one for “Tiger Lady,” which starts right after The Woman Downstairs defends herself against incursions into her apartment through the hole in her ceiling for the first time using bug spray:

This is superhero lighting! Another thing I get a kick out of is Tsai’s use of clocks, which are more often associated with his next film What Time Is It There? than this one. Here they seem to function as an index of how time has different meaning during a time of crisis. I count three of them. Number one can be seen lying on a table while The Woman Downstairs watches a news report about how long you need to boil untreated water for and how many days afterward it’s drinkable:

The Man Upstairs walks by clock number two holding a can of food for a stray cat he has been feeding:

As he rounds the corner, the number of empty cans strewn about cue us in to the fact that this has been part of his daily routine for quite awhile!

Finally, clock number three appears at the end of Tien Mao’s cameo appearance as A Shopper. He asks The Man Upstairs if his store carries a particular brand of bean sauce. “They stopped making it years ago,” is the reply. The Shopper stares at what he now realizes is his last can and then wanders off in a daze in a shot which lasts nearly a minute:

In all three instances, the point seems to be that you don’t mark time in seconds, minutes, or even hours when you’re living in quarantine and have no place to go.

I’m worried that I’m making The Hole sound more depressing than it is, so I will close by note that it ends with the Man Upstairs and the Woman Downstairs together:

And a signed note from Tsai preceding the end titles which says “in the year 2000, we are grateful that we will have Grace Chang’s songs to comfort us.” This is, ultimately, a film about getting through something. Be it a century, pandemic, cross-country train journey, or just a long day of work, how better to celebrate than with a drink and a movie?

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

The idea for my first Drink & a Movie post started with the beverage, while the inspiration for the second one was the film. This month’s edition is sort of a hybrid. I was cycling through possible hooks (lions, lambs, March Madness, etc.) when my mind lit on Pi Day. I immediately remembered the bottle of Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps that I bought over the holidays, and suddenly I was all set! The drink I’m writing about today is a concoction by Misty Kalkofen of Boston, Massachusetts (whose name you’ll see again if I keep this series going) called In Vida Veritas. With a hat tip to the Haus Alpenz website, here’s how you make it:

1 1/2 oz. Del Maguey Vida Mezcal (Vida de Muertos)
3/4 oz. Zirbenz
3/4 oz. Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur
1/2 oz. Benedictine
10 drops Xocolatl Mole Bitters (Bittermens)

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled Nick and Nora glass, and garnish with an orange twist.

The movie I’m selecting to go with it is Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale. Here’s a picture of the DVD I bought from the Criterion Collection Store during a flash sale of yore:

It’s still available there on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and can also be streamed via the Criterion Channel with a subscription or Amazon Prime for a rental fee. On a very superficial level, the drink (thanks to the pine notes of the Zirbenz) and the movie share a Yuletide vibe. They both also feature casts of eccentric characters that don’t seem like they should be able to co-exist in the same glass or house until they do, but afterward you almost can’t imagine them apart from each other. Here are the stars of In Vida Veritas:

Be forewarned: some of these ingredients may be hard to source. I had to ask the good people at Red Feet Wine Market in Ithaca to special order me a bottle of the Nux Alpina, for instance. That’s also the only place around here I’ve seen Xocolatl Mole bitters. The version of the recipe published on Kindred Cocktails calls for Fee Brothers Whiskey Barrel-Aged Bitters instead, which might not require as much of a search. No matter which one you choose, I like how the bitters bring a bit more CONCACAF thunder to the party to keep the mezcal company amidst all these Europeans. Speaking of which, Del Maguey Vida Mezcal is one of my absolute favorite value spirits. Where I live a decent bottle of single malt Scotch will set you back $80 easy, but even the 45 ABV Vida de Muertos special release pictured here costs half that and delivers something just as complex, smoky, and sippable. Anyway, whatever effort you have to put in will be amply rewarded! This exactly is the kind of deeply intriguing, miraculously balanced drink that made me fall in love with cocktails in the first place.

As far as the movie is concerned, the connection to Pi Day is a scene in which Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), a Fields Medal-winning mathematician, shows up to help his wife’s family decide whether or not their matriarch Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) should accept a bone-marrow transplant to treat the degenerative cancer that has a 75% chance of killing her or decline based on the fact that it could result in a condition called graft versus host disease or GVH that itself has a 35% mortality rate.

It begins not quite halfway through the film with a shot of a pile of books gradually coming into focus as seen through a frosty window pane.

Cut to Claude.

What he’s beholding here are the chalkboards and easel pads which his father in law Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) has been using to try to calculate the correct course of action. “What’s this?” he asks.

“I can’t remember what I wrote,” Abel replies. “There’s still a tiny chance that Junon’s not sick.” Claude taps the board.

“You’re pessimistic,” he says. “Survival increases life expectancy. This is what you’re scared of. The doctors kill a healthy woman.” “She’d lose five years without being sick!” Abel replies. So Claude goes to work. “You can’t keep reasoning in segments. Counting from one year to another. Junon is going to die at a precise moment. Not on an anniversary.”

“Getting hurt or dying are absolute events,” he continues. “You don’t die a 10 or 12% death. You get the entire event. The game is on, like it or not. You either treat it or you don’t. You die or you don’t. You’re playing the game. Go from the discrete to the continuous.” He grabs a marker.

“The ratio is not one half. 50% equals 1 minus exponential minus lambda. Lambda, the logarithm of 2. The survival formula is an integral from zero to infinity.” Abel takes notes on a pad while his wife and daughter Elizabeth (Claude’s wife, who is played by Anne Consigny) listen.

“1.45 years,” Claude declares, circling the answer.

He switches back to the chalkboard. “No transplant gets you six more months. In the same way, with treatment, this increases to 3.7.” He circles that number, too.

“Now weigh your living five fewer years with its low probability against 2.3 extra years with treatment weighed with a higher probability,” Claude continues. “And you get. . . . ” Abel interrupts him. “May I?” he asks. “Be my guest,” Claude replies. He approaches the board and solves the equation.

“Sick or not, if you’re treated you gain about two years,” Claude explains. “You’d rather pass. Your only freedom is to bet.” Abel’s response: “That’s better.” Although the expression on Junon’s face makes it clear that she is not similarly reassured, she, too, will eventually come to the same conclusion.

This scene resonates with me because it basically explains why I got a pi tattoo twenty odd years ago. The idea wasn’t that pi itself has any particular significance for me, but rather that it represents something that does. And this is it! When I first learned about irrational numbers as a child, I was captivated. The idea that you could spend a lifetime calculating, but never succeed in expressing them in decimal form fascinated me, as did the notion that from a practical standpoint, it doesn’t matter! Because pi can be represented by a single character just as surely as the numbers one, two, and three can: π. My twelve-year-old self saw this as inspirational: maybe you can’t ever figure out exactly who you are, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be useful!

There’s a lesson in this for the Vuillard clan, I think. Each of them is a relentless seeker of meaning, whether they look for it in books, the bottle, or the bedroom. But that isn’t what makes them a family. Similarly, the numbers on Abel’s chalkboards and pads aren’t a perfect representation of reality, but they don’t need to be. Like Claude says, the game is afoot, and that means that even if Junon refuses to act, she is nonetheless making a decision, whether she realizes it or not. By showing her and her family this, Claude illuminates the path they are on and makes others visible. Seeing the paths laid out before them and where they lead, they can choose which one they want to take. Choosing sets them free. How cool is that?

A Christmas Tale is a dense film bursting with references and allusions, wonderful performances, and delightful cinematographic tricks. I could easily write a whole other post on any of those things, and maybe someday I will. For now, though, I’m going to close with an observation that surely must be trite by now, but is new to this blog. I didn’t think there was anything unusual about any of the scenes that featured Doctor Zraïdi (Azize Kabouche):

Or any of the scenes that included Henri (Mathieu Amalric):

Until very late in the film when they appear like this:

Which, this looks more normal to me now! But maybe not for much longer, though? One can hope.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.