Thursday, June 6, 2019

DAYDREAM COCKTAIL NATION



I’ve been in California.  On the plane on way there I read, belatedly, Kim Gordon’s Girl In a Band.   I thought the earliest parts, about her family, were the best, especially about her father, Calvin Wayne Gordon.


She writes, "He’d grown up doing chores beside his mother and sister – cooking and gardening - pretty much anything involving his hands – and the habit had stayed with him.”


This included making cocktails. “During cocktail hour which my mom and he never missed, he made amazing martinis and Manhattans with a chilled martini shaker kept in the freezer at all times. This was the late fifties and the early sixties - people took their cocktail hours seriously.”

Kim, some of us still do. The family spent some of their weekends fishing on the Klamath River, just south of the Oregon border, and stayed in a rented trailer.  There are photographs and film of these weekends apparently, though I’ve never seen any. 

“Jackie goes around taking photos, then they go for double martinis at Steelhead a lodge nearby where they went to drink at night ... In one of the videos – it must be 1986 – I show up and Thurston trails in, though usually he liked to hole up in our camper, reading, until happy hour.”


You know, that doesn’t surprise me one bit. 

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