National Martini Day may or may not be next week

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

It has come to my attention, via a press release for tequila, of all things, that June 18 is National Martini Day. I have to admit I got really excited and began dreaming of all the delicious martinis I would drink and where I would drink them and whether or not I would take a bath with one.

Then I turned to Google to learn more about the hallowed holiday. Much to my chagrin, I couldn’t find anything conclusive about the actual existence of the happy day, which was very likely dreamed up one gin-soaked midnight by a PR firm.

So, I’m left high and dry (quite literally), unless someone out there can send me something more conclusive. But before I sign off, I’d like to leave you with my very first memory of a martini:

It’s 1988, I’m 12 years old and “Vice Versa” starring Judge Reinhold is playing at the AMC theater at the El Con Mall in Tucson. In the film, Reinhold plays a dad who swaps bodies with his son (body-swapping was a popular plot line in the ‘80s), and there is a scene involving the boy-in-man’s-body confronted with a martini.

I remember sitting in the big-box darkness beside my mother in her “Put Your Brahms Around Me” T-shirt, and staring at the drink on the screen, its crystal-clear coolness in that perfect glass with the slender stem, punctuated, as it were, by a perfectly green, globular olive, and thinking, “How beautiful! I want one!’

When I turned 21, I would have three.

-- Jessica Gelt