Mixers Mixed

A Sober Inquiry into “Why a Cocktail?”

by Percival Slathers

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There is in Maryland an upstart town which has recently celebrated the “eightieth anniversary” of this noble drink, thus arrogating to itself evolution and destiny. Bladensburg had about as much to do with the invention of the cocktail as it had with creating the solar system. The cocktail belongs to the aeons of the past, when the ancestors of the citizens of that little hamlet were cracking bones with their molars and drinking coarse potations from the horn the auroch. The cocktail idea is covered with the rime of antiquity as thick as the rime of frost which should adorn the vessel in which the drink is served.

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