Derby Day is Coming!

Izzy posted one of his favorite Walker Percy essays: "Bourbon," from Signposts in a Strange Land. Great southern writing...

A snippet:

1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to say to her, let alone what to do, and whether she is “nice” or “hot”—a distinction made in those days. But what to say? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that’s all right. The taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linesmen in a single synesthesia.

1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the limberlost.

Go read the chapter and be sure to finish with the recipe for “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.” We have it every year on Derby Day.

(yes, we'll have to make some sort of diabetic alteration to the recipe -- horrors!)

FYI: Izzy will be bringing home the "hoops machine" and we'll be viewing the Derby on the big screen. Let us know if you'd like to join us. We'll powder some more ice.