Bourbon Milk Punch and Gold Dresses for the Revolution
by Chaya Babu
● 2 shots of bourbon (make sure it’s the good stuff!)
● 2 shots of milk
● 1/2 shot of agave (can be switched out for simple syrup, or maple syrup for extra cozy winter vibes)
● 2 dashes of vanilla extract
● nutmeg (freshly grated if you’re fancy, which is what this is about)
Add the bourbon, milk, agave, and vanilla to a shaker. Add ice to above the level of the liquid. Cover and shake for ten seconds. Strain into rocks glasses containing a single large cube of ice each. Dust the top with the grated nutmeg. This recipe makes two cocktails.
Fun fact: the word “punch” is said to have come from the Hindi word for the number five, “paanch,” because of the five different spirits that went into the concoctions British sailors drank while on trips to and from India. The earliest discovered recipe of a punch was from the English East India Company’s factory in Surat, India in 1638. The recipe was written as containing, “aqua vitae, rosewater, citrus juice and sugar,” with water omitted but implied as the fifth ingredient.
I drink it alone because I live with myself and no one else. And no one else is allowed to come over or at least that’s how we all feel, or at least not for the frivolity of an unnecessarily fussed-over cocktail, thick and sweet and frothy.
I feel like most of the people I know don’t understand much less value the work of the single large cube of ice, like a mini-glacier in a glass. I’d want to apologize for it, for the fact that the ice I’ve been using in reality is from jagged chippings off the giant block I got months ago at some bodega or another, still in its black shopping bag, coming apart little by little only when I bang the whole frozen lump of it hard against my countertop, hoping the neighbors don’t complain. I’m making a drink, I’d say, simply. I’d want to apologize, not to them but to my imaginary guest who’d think my lending import to the geometry of the ice or the fall of the nutmeg silly. But that’s the thing—I’ve been rethinking silliness of late. Because you know what? I like adornment. I miss glamour.
When I was in college I spent fall semester of my junior year in Madrid. I arrived in September and it got cold quickly, the sky gray over basilicas in the square and wind blowing leaves around before summer’s end. We all had check-in meetings with the study abroad program director, a white woman, and mine was on one of those days when I guess I should have been wearing some chunky turtleneck that swallowed me. Instead, I sat in her office in a silk knit sweater and a velvet skirt that fell to mid-thigh; my waist-length hair was braided into a fat glistening rope and I had put on eyeshadow that matched the rich mauve of the skirt. A pair of shell nacre ovals hung from my earlobes. I was twenty, and pretty. I had a sniffle, and when I mentioned that I could be coming down with a cold, she said it was because I was presumida. Fluent in Spanish then, I was nonetheless at a loss for the meaning of the word. I went home, or to what was my home for those four months, and looked it up. “Presumida,” I learned, translates to smug, conceited, presumptuous, vain.
I probably felt bad in my little room and then put on a glittery top with smutty makeup an hour later to go get wasted at a nightclub that was once a palace for the queen. I loved the lights then. I was still brazen and untouched by the alleged righteousness in lack.
That was a long time ago. It’s been nearly two decades since. I have a quarantine group text going with three friends from my freshman dorm. We talk about needing new underwear. They talk about lactating. I asked if any of them are still shopping for clothes to wear to actual places and one of them said she buys sweatpants. Another buys outfits for her kid. I found a news story about people’s pandemic attire and retail habits in which someone was quoted saying, “The need for ‘frou frou’ is gone.” It depressed the shit out of me. That wasn’t the only feeling that arose though—I realized I had a staunch aversion to the verdict on frou frou. So I picked my stance on the matter and, phone still in hand, ordered a gold lamé dress I had been eyeing for weeks online.
I miss glamour. And completely counterintuitively, I have decided: it is time to take it back. I’m not sure who or what took it away in the first place, but I know that at some critical juncture over these years, I bought into the myth of a moral hierarchy of needs. I was tired of being looked at the wrong way, and by that I don’t just mean by rapey dudes. I believed that I was silly, gratuitous—presumida. Now, alone, with nowhere to go in the foreseeable future and only my own image staring back at me, who do I have to prove it to that I don’t care about the precision and artistry of a bespoke jacket or a well-contoured cheekbone, or the shape of the glass from which to sip the craft cocktail that I mixed with manicured hands? (Okay fine, they’re not manicured right now, but in my mind they are.) I do care. So I bought the gold lamé dress; I dyed my stubborn black hair a honey blonde that shimmers in the sun pouring through the big window at four pm even when the world is sad and stopped; and I sometimes make a sexy bourbon milk punch to drink by myself in this Brooklyn studio where I’ve threaded copper stars along the ceiling.
It’s delicious. And it’s pretty. And that makes me happy.
In a post about AOC’s December Vanity Fair cover shoot, Rebecca Solnit wrote that “people get cranky about style, glamour, and beauty,” ostensibly referencing the right-wing response to the congresswoman’s signature red lip, borrowed luxury labels, and general association with fashion. I was reminded that my old lurking sense that I ought to put away these girly games to be a different kind of woman came from somewhere real, even if irrational. Joy is scarce in these times. I’m finding that austerity is making me remember myself—as well as desire, iridescence, a love of whimsy and the beautiful that is not always about vanity but rather fun and perhaps even daring. Small pleasures are not a bonus after our more primal needs for survival; instead, isolation has taught me that they are vital, that to feed the body with softness and sparkle can at times be the difference between one side of the edge and the other.
The elixir is at once refined and comforting. It goes down smooth and warm in my belly. I remember too that “glamour” does not only allude to an exciting, alluring, fascinating quality, but also, though this meaning is more archaic, to enchantment more literally: magic, spells, bewitching. Tinctures and potions. Hexes. No wonder they want us to be plain, stripped bare. No wonder they want us to have nothing. It makes it easier to believe that they are in control of the trickery. Whenever we reach the new world we create, I’m done saving the good stuff for “special occasions.” Every day will be worth it. Every day I am worth it. I wrote this wearing my best Chantilly lace panties. Drink by my side. And, I might add, charming.
Chaya Babu is a South Asian American writer, journalist, artist, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her work focuses on power and oppression, cities, the body, foolishness, individual and collective healing, and more, and has been featured in or at The Margins, BuzzFeed, VICE, Open City, The Porter Gulch Review, GO HOME!, and Project for Empty Space, amongst others. She teaches classes on personal narrative, poetry, and reporting with Community Word Project and works as a consultant at the Columbia School of Social Work Writing Center while she works on her first book, a memoir about the intergenerational trauma of exile and the impossibility of return post diaspora. For more, visit www.fobbysnob.com.