A newly svelte friend walked up to me at a recent party and looked disdainfully at the sweaty Pabst Blue Ribbon in my hand.
I was expecting a comment about my crappy taste in beer. What I got instead was a recommendation for another beverage: rum and Diet Coke.
"It's low carb – you should try it," she said.
Woo hoo, a skinny-person drink, I thought. I'll try it if it makes my ass look like hers!
Now, I don't do Atkins or South Beach. My diet can better be described as the beer-and-Lean- Cuisine regimen and it works pretty well, meaning it helps me answer affirmatively the most important weight question: Do my pants still fit this morning?
But I'm an easy sell, so into my hand came a short tumbler of Captain Morgan and Diet Coke.
Baaaaaad idea.
The evening that followed falls into the category in my life called "monumentally boneheaded things I have done," keeping company with such events as getting my nose pierced by a woman sitting on a blanket on Austin's Sixth Street, and wearing M.C. Hammer pants in 1989.
My drink faintly smelled like frat-house air freshener and looked like pancake syrup on the rocks. Not really selling points, but whatever. "What would Richard Simmons drink?" I kept asking myself as I swallowed the aspartame-and- boozy-vanilla- flavored cocktail.
And you know, what with all those ice cubes in such a small glass, it went really fast. So did the second one about 10 minutes later. And the third. And the fourth.
Beer drinkers knock back their beverages with a certain speediness – there are carbonation and temperature factors to consider so we don't get a flat, warm brew. Liquor drinkers, I've since been told, sip their drinks. Nurse them for an hour. They do not do what I did and get told, "Wow, you sucked that one down!"
And so it went. And there I went. Was I supposed to remember that a shot of rum has the same amount of alcohol as an entire beer? Or that after four, I'd be shoveling Cheetos and Rice Krispie treats in my face like I was carb-loading for a 5K?
The next morning, as I cursed the existence of rum, I decided never again to touch it as long as, somewhere on this planet, a cold beer waits to be consumed. Captain's orders.
Leah only wore M.C. Hammer pants when doing the "running man" dance in public. E-mail her for more details at leah@leahshafer.com.
