Crash Test Girl by Kari Byron

Author:Kari Byron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

In the 1990s, my parents ran a champagne cellar every weekend, hosting tastings and giving tours of the cellars. Basically, they worked for wine. Did you know the sound of clinking glasses is called “tintinnabulation,” meant to sound like the ringing of church bells and to ward away evil spirits? I do, because I have heard my dad share this little fact almost a million and three times. He and Mom had a deep appreciation for the beauty of wine—the color, the aroma, the ritual of the pour. Could they be any more Northern Californian? In our family, it wasn’t only that a drink could make you the life of the party. There was no party without it.

My drinking life apart from family parties began in earnest in high school and it served a very specific purpose: Drink to open up. From what I’d observed at my parents’ parties and from my own experiences, people got loose after a drink or two. Drinking was the perfect remedy for all my high school social problems.

Before a kegger in someone’s backyard or basement, I’d pre-game with my friends who were a bit older and knew the special liquor store just outside of town limits that didn’t check ID. Our inaugural teenage drink of choice was a Fuzzy Navel, the perfect cocktail for a teenager’s taste buds, consisting of orange juice and peach schnapps. After three of them, I felt like the most charming person in the room. While my friends used alcohol to lighten up, I used it to transform. I knew, from the bottom of my heart (and glass), that if I hadn’t had a pitcher’s worth of Fuzzy Navels, I wouldn’t have been talking, laughing, smiling, making eye contact with cute boys, or playing spin the bottle. I would have been cringing in the corner. There’s a reason it’s called liquid courage, and drinking Absolut(ely) worked for me.

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