As I recently declared, I am making a documentary about rum. That reasonably prompts the question about why I would make a documentary about any kind of alcohol. For whatever reason, people don't seem to question it as much if you're a beer enthusiast, or a wine enthusiast, so let me tell you about my specific liquor fascination.
Alcoholism and addiction runs in my family. I won't go into specifics, but it was obvious enough that I was worried about it from a very early age. I believe my father had some issues with alcohol, and my brother with addiction in the broader sense, but my first real exposure to alcoholism was with my father's parents. It may seem weird that I don't refer to them as "grandparents," but relative to my experience with my maternal grandparents, there is no comparison. I encountered them on a limited basis, and those memories are limited to having a virtual bar in their trunk to slamming drinks at some chain restaurant where I dined with them in my teen years. (My grandfather, reading the menu, kept talking about ordering the "quickie," by which he was referring to quiche.) While I don't entirely understand the split of my parents only a few years into my life, I can't imagine that alcohol had nothing to do with it, so I was guarded about it for a long time.
In college, my sophomore year, I was a resident assistant at Ashland University. My hall director wanted to do an off-site staff thing in a hotel room (it was a dry campus), which involved a lot of drinking, and I wanted nothing to do with it. After that weekend, he laid into me hard about my non-participation (I basically played "sick" and wanted to sleep through it). I was bothered enough by it that I talked to the director of residence life, at which point I never heard about it again from the HD.
That summer, however, was a bit of a turning point. I had no reason to go home for the summer, and the radio station needed attention. So I stayed in the sweltering dorms (and had a super interesting Japanese roommate for part of it), while working the station. My faculty advisor lived on the edge of campus, and invited me on several occasions to have some beers with him, some of them in Windsor, Ontario, and I discovered Canadian beer. I didn't hate it, and I liked the way it made me feel. It was a safe, controlled environment for experimentation. In my junior year, I would every now and then, off-campus mostly, consume alcohol (Zima was big that year!), and I started to understand the limits that I had along with the way it made me feel. I didn't crave it though, which made me believe that I did not have the addiction gene.
When I turned 21 and stared my senior year, I could go to the closest bar, a BW-3 (now known as Buffalo Wild Wings). I was working at the Mansfield adult contemporary radio station on weekends, and various work study jobs on campus, so I was not well off beyond buying gas and food. But every few weeks I'd leave my then-girlfriend, future first wife, behind and go to the bar and meet folks socially, and it felt really good. Socialization was easier with alcohol, which I now partially attribute to autism with alcohol.
Even then, I didn't like the feeling of hangovers, and for the next decade plus, I definitely would get drunk now and then, but it was not a pattern. In fact, outside of hosted parties, I don't remember having any alcohol outside of going to conferences in Las Vegas between wives. Interestingly, that involved Cath, my in-between girlfriend, who frankly challenged me in a lot of ways, socially.
After I met Diana, beer started to agree with me less and less. Maybe it was my lifelong battle with IBS, but it just didn't agree with me. At that point, I had little exposure to liquor, beyond the occasional shot at a rare bar, or my desire to make mai tai's after visiting Hawaii during my first honeymoon. I started to drink a lot of cider though, in particular Strongbow, when it was still the proper English dry formula, instead of the sugary nonsense made to compete with Angry Orchard.
When I got to Florida, I was mostly resigned to drinking on cruises, and between cider (proper English Strongbow) and something called Redd's from the states, I still only stocked my mai tai ingredients at home. Being a parent only made this more obvious. Disney introduced me to Bacardi Dragonberry rum, the base in a drink at the Epcot Food & Wine festival, and I was excited to see that you could buy it in liquor stores, a place I almost never went. But even cider at that point didn't feel good to consume by the next day.
Rum was always the liquor that I seemed to gravitate to, which makes sense given its sugar content, and general tropical vibe. Over the course of several Disney cruises, I learned about various kinds of liquor in mixology classes, and rum even more in a rum tasting class. I started to collect some of these ingredients for a few simple cocktails. Last year, during our anniversary trip, we learned about Wicked Dolphin, which was not only the genesis of the documentary, but an attachment to rum.
The other accelerant was the pandemic. The early part of 2020 was cosmically weird, as it was for virtually everyone. Friday would roll around, and we couldn't really go anywhere, so we would rely on the live streams of Sofi Tukker (they did them every day for hundreds of days), and a British couple, Suzy and Alex, whom we saw on a cruise aboard the Disney Fantasy a little over a year prior. Suzy would sing her covers and we would make our cocktails and get a little drunk every weekend. I remember one of our first big "excursions" out were to a liquor store on the east side, because I mistakenly chose it instead of the closer west side location.
As we emerged from the pandemic, I mostly thought about how much I wanted to make cocktails for others, and haven't had that many opportunities. I don't have any drinks during the week very often (tonight not withstanding), and even find it "weird" that some folks have a glass of wine with dinner every night. I'll mostly confine my consumption to one night a week, and most weekends that means two or three drinks at most. Given my hypothyroidism and levothyroxine, it means not much in the way of "intoxicated" vibes.
So where does that leave me? I think I enjoy drinking a number of cocktails and tying one on, but I know my limits, and I don't approach them very often, if at all. Again, I'm hypersensitive to this. That hasn't worn off since that sophomore year of college. In the last year, again, vacations not withstanding, I've been hesitant because I've been trying to game my triglycerides into a better place. The allure has mostly been making really great tasting drinks, for myself and others. I have upwards of 25+ liters of liquor on hand, not because I want to get fucked up, but it's like having all the spices on hand to make the perfect dish. If you come to my house, I want to craft the perfect thing for you, and I have a menu for that.
All that to say, I hope the movie ends up being interesting to people. I think rum, and how it's made, is fascinating, and I'm seeing that the focus of the movie is centering on the action of small businesses and the urge for individuals to gather over food and drink. That's a good story.
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