It’s 5:00 PM. Do You Know Where Your Vodka Is?

Keeping up with your girlfriends can be a challenge. Connie Stetson offers up a solution that is shaken, stirred and intoxicating.

“It’s 5:00 PM. Do you know where your vodka is?” Okay, I actually stole that line from my pal, Barbara. It was just too funny not to use and she’s a funny girl, especially around cocktail hour. I’m not sure exactly how much vodka she and I have consumed over the last 20 years, but certainly enough to be awarded Russian citizenship with full honors. “Nostrovya,” ya’ll!

When I moved up here to Yosemite 23 years ago, I fretted as to how to keep my friendships in L.A. thriving. For a long time, I’d find any excuse possible to get back there. I needed a haircut, shoes, movies, the theater, the Apple Pan, or just the smell of good, salty ocean air, (which I still long for every day I’m in the woods.) But mostly, because I was so bloody homesick for everyone who knew me, and because I had not yet reinvented myself into the mountain bitch I am today.

I’m not sure anymore who’s idea it was to start the Monday Night Martini, but Barbara and I agreed that Monday was good, because nothing was on TV anyway, and who doesn’t need a cocktail on Mondays, yes? And we were both cooking lovely dinners for our lovely husbands, so why not do it together? Brilliant! One or the other of us would call; make our mar-not-so-teenies together, and “Cheers!” We were off. As we chopped, sautéed, boiled, baked, and “sauced,” we also mixed the cocktail for a 25-year friendship. Over that martini, in that hour, we yakked, gossiped, laughed, fought, shared recipes, tears, anxieties, our sex lives, Oprah’s weight, our weight, politics, well, everything—and managed to get dinner on the table.

When I shared the idea of the Monday Night Martini with my other girlfriends, thinking they might like to start a similar tradition, I didn’t factor in that they would all want to start it with me. Soon, Monday became Wednesday became Friday, became…well, you can the see the challenge. I finally had to put a screeching halt to that little exercise, because though I’d love to meet Amy Winehouse, I don’t want to meet her in rehab—no, no, no. (I would like to say, as an aside to my sober sisters and brothers, that the binding tie does not have to be the martini. A great brewed tea will do, as long as the friendship is intoxicating.) And I also have come to the wisdom of the martini, which is, “One, Good—Two, Bad.” Learn it, know it, live it.

Nowadays, Barbara and I are just as likely not to have a martini. Things change, too busy, not cooking, not drinking, (and, by the way, alcohol is no friend to the hot flash), but we generally do talk to each other on Mondays, our friendship now conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs, (though our reward usually has a big, fat olive in it.) And when she does call and say, “I need a martini,” I grab my cocktail shaker, toothpick two plump olives, pour that icy silver bullet into my favorite martini glass, go upstairs so that Lee doesn’t have to listen to us howl, and we’re off, just like in the old days. So “Cheers!” my darling old friend. I’ll call you Monday at 5:00 PM. Do you know where your vodka is?