Making cocktails naked
We’d had “Matt teaches Kate how to make a Southside” on our ever-growing Things We Should Do Together list for a while, but I didn’t know it would happen the way it did.
“I’m going to make a Southside while talking you through every step as I do it, and then you’re going to make one for me,” Matt said.
“Oh, and you’re going to do it naked.”
Being completely naked in a kitchen is a very particular mood. (I was not even permitted, as I sometimes am, to keep my socks on.) It’s all cold tile and granite and chrome. Each step feels pronounced, each touch of your unprotected skin against any surface that isn’t someone else’s body. I’d barely finished tossing my last garment on the floor when Matt pushed me up against the screaming-cold refrigerator, making me gasp like I’d just been dunked in icewater, and kissed me, hard. I love learning all the various unexpected and random ways their sadism can manifest.
Thus satisfied – and definitely smirking – they began to make my drink. Muddled mint leaves, sweet simple syrup, good dry gin, fresh-squeezed limes. I observed each step, taking mental notes. I willed myself not to let Matt shake the thoughts out of my head like an Etch-a-Sketch when they agitated the drink in their metal shaker, home-bartender biceps tensed and working hard. I watched them double-strain the green drink into a chilled coupe and float a mint leaf delicately atop it. We each took a sip: perfect.
My process was slower; I spent more time scanning the counter for the components of each next step. I muddled messily, poured precariously. I needed help with the juicer because my hands are weak and full of pain zaps. But I built the drink successfully, eventually, and then we got to the shaking.
“Would you mind not looking at me for this part?” I asked. “I know that’s weird, but... it’s an anxiety thing.”
It’s an anxiety thing is always shorthand for something much more complex, and in this case it was: I’m nervous that I will do a bad job at this thing I know you value (having heard you comment admiringly or questioningly on many, many bartenders’ shakes), and that you will see it and think me less attractive for it, and I’m also worried that my many jiggly bits will jiggle when I jounce the drink around, in a way that would be imperceptible if I had clothes on, and that that, too, will make you love me less, even though you’ve seen me jiggle – in some cases made me jiggle – in all manner of situations both silly and sexy.
So I don’t want you to watch me shake this drink because I think it will shake your resolve to love me, somehow.
I’m sure Matt didn’t know all the parts of this internal apprehension, but they knew some of them. They knew me well enough to agree to close their eyes while I walked around the corner into the living room and shook the hell out of that drink where no one could see.
It was delicious – not as pretty as the one Matt had made, but I would’ve gotten a good grade, had I been graded. We retired to the sofa with our Southsides. “Can I put my clothes back on?” I asked, and Matt laughed and said yes.
Now I sometimes make drinks for my roommate in our tiny kitchen, and when I get to the shaking part, she always dances. The ice thrashing against metal makes a rhythm that inspires in her a bodily need to move. I don’t hide anymore when I shake our drinks; I just watch her and we laugh together as the cold metal begins to frost over in my strong, practiced hands.