That'll all change, we hope, sometime in the next few weeks -- and it's about frickin' time. Our irises, half-closed since October, will soon be as broad as Frisbees, and the light will nail our hearts with the velocity of a snowball chucked at a school bus. The sprouts will poke and uncurl, the trees will start speckling with green and drinks will turn a pretty, pretty blue. Blue drinks to go with the blue sky. Red drinks to go with the blood boiling in the burning spring heart. Green drinks, colored like the envy you feel for your Southern Cali brethren right now. Let's hear it for the future, only a heartbeat away. Let us now praise our favorite color, blue; our favorite astronaut, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin; and our favorite time of year, early spring.
Buzz Aldrin: astronaut, badass and namesake of the Aldrin, a blue concoction that the clever drink kings at Tangerine offer as part of the Lunar Libations triumvirate, along with drinks named for fellow Apollo 11-ers Neil Armstrong and (the underappreciated) Michael Collins. Aldrin the superhuman manifests his greatness at the Washington Avenue restaurant/bar as a cocktail of the same name, the Aldrin, and it's one of those "future drinks." It's blue, first of all, and it contains Blue Ox (one of those freaky Austrian energy drinks à la Red Bull), Skyy Citrus vodka and blue curaçao liqueur. In addition to being a freaky color -- it feels very future to be imbibing a blue drink -- the Aldrin (served in a pint glass with a load of ice and a strainer, which you use to pour the drink into an accompanying itsy martini glass) tastes of both vanilla and citrus, which is strange because anything blue, you'd think, would taste of blueberry, morning glories, toothpaste or windshield-washer fluid.
At eight bucks a pop, it's a tad pricey, especially because, as with all of those big drink/strainer combinations at Tangerine, half of the drink will inevitably end up dribbled on the table; it's a problem, and in all the years that Tangerine has presented drinks in this fashion, you'd think the staff would address the obvious functionality problems. But they haven't, so your table will flood with blue.
Oh well. It won't be so bad -- unless you're wearing white and put your elbow on the table. Then it's a problem. But springtime will erase such petty concerns, and you can just store the shirt until fall. For now, we're ready for the color to arrive; all else is secondary.
