Too Close to Home, or The Old Fashioned

Last evening I decided to brave the Old Fashioned at the Roaring Fork, which is right next to WildFish, not to be confused with the Roaring Fish or WildFork.   Having just watched a three hour gangster movie with my buddy (she knows who she is) that took place largely in a French prison, I thought I had the stuff for it.  Maybe not. 

The trouble with the Old Fashioned is that, right from the first whiff, the scent of bourbon brought me dangerously close to my childhood, in which the madeleine/Manhattan ratio was way out of whack.  Out, out, damned Proust!   I know I'll be forgiven if I skip the Manhattan altogether and forever, and I hope that is as redundant as I want it to be. 

On the Roaring Fork menu the Old Fashioned is listed under "Rustic Drinks", and in fact there are only two drinks in that section, it and the Manhattan. They are rustic in their way, certainly their scents are redolent of an old cabin in the Maine woods, complete with pipe tobacco, pine, and old Pendleton blankets. My friend and I decided that they probably meant rustic in the sense of worn, even worn out, which led us to a discussion of how our faces were beginning to look like marionettes, or nutcrackers, which cracked us up (get it?) and then at least we looked like happy marionette nutcrackers, which is a little scary in itself, reminiscent of that old Anthony Hopkins/Ann Margaret movie where the ventriloquist loses it, whose title I can't recall, which is a little scary in itself, and oh my, it's time to sign out.