Popular Culture
In 1917, Bill W. (William Griffith Wilson), co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, consumed his first Bronx Cocktails as a World War I soldier. He did so at a dinner party thrown by the wealthy wives of other soldiers, a social situation that Bill found awkward and made him feel inferior. He found drinking them to be, at the time, transformative; he described it as removing a "strange barrier that had existed between me and all men and women." This began his alcoholic episode which persisted until December 11, 1934.
Peruvian agent Elvira Chaudoir code-named "Bronx" (after the name of the cocktail) by MI5 during the Double-Cross System WW 2 espionage operation.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel This Side of Paradise (published in 1920), Amory Blaine, the central character, orders a Bronx Cocktail after Rosalind, his fiance, breaks off their engagement.
In the 1934 film The Thin Man, sleuth Nick Charles (William Powell) says that a Bronx must always be shaken to "two-step time."
In the 1973 novel Marion's Wall, by Jack Finney, a Bronx cocktail is what the narrator's wife orders when possessed by the spirit of a flapper. The bartender doesn't recognize the drink.
Read more about this topic: Bronx (cocktail)
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.”
—Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)