For my latest dream occupation, I’m going to pick…cocktail photographer. I will have the highest of artistic standards and develop a field of study in creating stock photography of neon colored cocktails. My images will be specifically for the display of happy hour drinks on those little flip-book table stands that sit nestled in with the salt and pepper shakers at the far end of the table. Captured in bold living color will be sumptuous strawberry daiquiris, standing tall, wearing nothing but a whole strawberry crowned and cleaved on the rim of its glass. There will be glowing mint juleps with mint leaves tossed gently on white cotton and a twig for you holiday romantics. We’ll get contemplative with starker, more serious images of highballs and whiskey classics. These images will invoke overworked late nights at the firm, a fine brandy before climbing back up to Capitol Hill. I’ll make some sour with Anisette and Orange bitters over glistening cubes of sharp ice. The models will be cooperative and lovely. Their glass shapes will be at times robust and stout while others stand thin with beautifully large mouths. They will hold their alcohol well and never complain when asked to accessorize with Celery, a pink parasol, or straw.

When I get good at my job, then I will be anointed into the wine club, the most sophisticate of all forms of drink photography, and I will be able to give up on happy hour flip stands and concentrate on capturing the stoic still life of a fine chianti. My life will be one of cosmopolitan travel and high society lifestyle. I will spend months in the California Valleys and French Bordeaux selecting the right background, lighting, and glass to show off the anise or plum composites of a ’93 Citran Haut-Medoc. Ernest college kids will have my posters in their dorm room. I will look down on all my friends and bore them with wine talk and with tales of my last jaunt through the Ribera del Duero. It will be a fine and good life. It will become wiser with age and increasingly grave in manner as I am assigned to solved the most complex and weighty of the worlds problems through the raised eyebrow renaissance of my ART. My pieces will sell for heavy sums and my biographer will go to great lengths to show the sober truth of my sedate concern over the Latvian heiress when she was on the brink of an exhaustive collapse in the 30’s. Yes! It will be a righteous life. I think now I will go practice on the half rack of MGD that I have cooling in my fridge.