The Persuaders

Since tomorrow is Easter, I am going to go to brunch somewhere swank--St. Regis, perhaps--and drink champagne. I am not big on champagne, as a rule: I do like a good champagne cocktail (pink, preferably) but they're hard to find unless I mix it myself. Since I have been in bed at nights with a combination of pain killers and sleeping pills, cocktails have been out of the picture for some time, but that may well explain my sudden craving for what looks like the most hideous cocktail of all time, the Creole Scream.

I found this cocktail in episode one of The Persuaders, a 1971 tv show starring--get this--Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. It is actually a fine thing to watch on your laptop in bed before drifting off to a drug-induced stupor. First of all, it has a lot of fighting (Tony did his own stunts, which probably explains the matching leather driving gloves he wears in almost every scene) and car chases, but it also has crushingly awful dialogue, girls in bikinis and teased hair, and lots of shots of the Cote d'Azur. The protagonists get into an argument about the Creole Scream--one olive or two?--and as the thing is a mixture of white rum, vermouth, grenadine, bitters, and a hint of ice, the thought of adding one olive, let alone two, to this potentially nauseating mixture seems --well, nauseating.  However, as I have to go into school today and prep lessons, I have to go drug free, which means after school I will come home and mix myself up a Creole Scream (the scream is when you ruin the rum by adding vermouth, bitters, and ugh, grenadine) and see for myself if it is indeed the type of cocktail manly men like Tony and Roger would indeed have dug back in the day. I'll let you know.