Doctor Cocktail's Sabbatical

Since January, I’ve been on so-called sabbatical from Martini Republic in New Orleans. You may remember, I was last there a week and a day before Katrina swamped the city at the end of August, and January 2nd displayed a city only just coming fitfully to consciousness. Dale DeGroff, Martin Doudoroff, Phil Greene, and I trekked down to pack up The Museum of the American Cocktail exhibit on the second floor of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum (which, fortuitously, sustained no damage) so to transport it to its new temporary home in Las Vegas, in a banquet room, in the satellite Commander’s Palace Restaurant, in the Desert Passages shopping mall of the Aladdin Casino resort. This was at the invitation of Ti Martin and the Commander’s Palace Group. Ti is still camped out at her Café Adelaide while the original New Orleans Commander’s Palace remains closed, its roof breached by Katrina. Once the Museum artifacts were carefully swaddled, Dale and I drove them to Vegas in a U-Haul truck. I had earlier stated flatly that I wouldn’t trust shipping companies (especially in the January chaos of NOLA basic services infrastructural repair) to safely transport such treasures.

Dale and I had several offers to film the journey, as though we were Thelma & Louise; as though we would pull into towns along the way in tuxes, breeze into swank cocktail venues, wittily tipple Martinis and hit the road again. We declined. As Dale would say, “why ruin a good story with the truth?”

New Orleans has always been a city symbolic to the rest of the country. To many, New Orleans seemed somehow frivolous with its year-round festivities, its embrace of hearty drinking, and its odd culture of accents, sensibilities, and cuisine. Even worse than the artificial, history-faking Sodom and Gomorrah image that has long tarred Las Vegas, New Orleans just seemed silly to a lot of people. Katrina changed that impression but not the judgmental attitude; you either “get” New Orleans or you don’t. Me? I was captivated, from my first visit in 1993, and the love compounded in my heart with every subsequent arrival.

It was emotionally difficult to move the Museum to Las Vegas. I’m less charitable with my impressions of that burg (though I adore its gin-loving Mayor.) That it was Commander’s Palace (my favorite NOLA restaurant, by the way) offering us space gave me the necessary umbilical cord to the Crescent City to curtail despair. As I’ve said in interviews, Vegas IS becoming a more substantial destination for fine dining, drinking, and the arts – for those like me who disdain gambling. There too, the stereotype of the place is both incomplete and out of date.

Having deposited the artifacts into temperature-controlled storage, I headed directly back to New Orleans to assume the position of Graphic Designer for the first movie to be filmed there post-Katrina. This gave me four months to view the city’s progress and tribulations, all while slurping Sazeracs, Vieux Carrés and Milk Punches. Every Friday evening I’d return to Las Vegas to oversee the installation of custom-designed display cases and to mount the new Museum exhibit. Every Sunday I’d return to New Orleans.

There is no need to relate oft-told vignettes of devastation, but the January views of burned out crushed minivans in parking spaces next to the humdrum vehicles of the workaday world is not one I’ll ever forget. The seeming acres of car-husks lined up beneath bridges and overpasses heading from the intact French Quarter and Garden District into the newly minted wasteland were a vacuum of life and spirit. The city rebuilds, slowly, in agonizingly small increments – and the wear was evident in the faces and words of its residents. Yet traffic lights, comatose since the storm, one by one, would go from black to blinking. The telling carcasses of cars would disappear with the debris extending inexorably the living perimeter of the city.

While there I did radio, magazine, and newspaper interviews. I held a seminar entitled “The History of the Cocktail in 7 Drinks & 7 Plates” at Café Adelaide at the behest of dear, dear friend Ti Martin and it was the best calculated pairing of cocktails and food I was ever involved in or, in fact, had ever encountered. I invented several new cocktails on that fertile ground and I’ll be back there in July for the annual weeklong Tales of the Cocktail event to try it again. Comfortable back in Los Angeles after months of hotel life, I miss that fitful, hopeful city already.

A curator's work is never done

….at least when it involves a fledgling start-up museum, however serious.

My initial curatorial duties on behalf of the Museum of the American Cocktail were to augment the temporary display area in the room designated for us on the second floor of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. I turned built in bookshelves into displays and filled low, Victorian-era display cases. I designed freestanding partitions to create more wall graphic display space and to make three areas out of one. I designed all of the graphic captioning that told the major story and I wrote the narrative sequence that WAS the story, 1806 to present. I wrote the scores of little captions that graced specific displays, and I oversaw the printing/cutting/mounting of all of this. I subdivided the real estate and created islands of information, like a timeline, and unpacked and arranged the hundreds of contributed artifacts into their respective areas.

All of this work occurred in December here in Los Angeles and between January 3rd and 12th in New Orleans where the planning and designing gave way to installation. The display is a sort of a preface. It is a temporary exhibit meant to raise awareness of the organization, to convince the Press that it was no silly joke - that the history and our treatment of it was a serious and consequential endeavor, to promote monetary contributions from spirits companies and the memberships of others, to augment seminars given under the Museum banner, and mainly, most urgently, to provide a taste of what might be accomplished given our own homeplace - a bit of real estate finagling needing to be scheduled before the end of September when we lose the space the Pharmacy Museum so kindly provided for us.

We believe we have now found such a space. While the specifics are under wraps as details are hammered out, contracts drawn up, and final negotiations completed, the museum board feels assured enough that it is time once again for me to go into design mode. Unlike the current display, there is no "repurposing" display cases and book shelves. All must be built anew to match the pristine restored space into which all will be installed. While this is additional work, it allows and presumes display areas suited perfectly to the story we are telling. The additional space allows us the luxury of instilling quite a bit more design drama to the presentation as well.

All of this begins Monday when I fly into New Orleans for three days to photograph, measure, and extrapolate the space and its potentials. I’ll be back there in August as an author for Southern Comfort’s Tales of the Cocktail, (a yearly event, also of three days, that celebrates the cocktail by importing those who are celebrated for writing about it - and giving the public access) and then at the end of September when all the artifacts must again be packed up, transported, and arranged in their new home. I’ll update everyone here as plans progress, and suggest checking out museumoftheamericancocktail.org occasionally for additional info.