“If there’s one thing, one piece of advice I’d pass on to future generations after I die, it’s that you vote for leaders, not entertainers. If there are two things, the second is that your tastes are your own.”

-The Voice*

He has a point, taste is a very personal and subjective matter. How else to explain why an otherwise apparently intelligent person would voluntarily drink a Bloody Mary?

You can blame The Sicilian** for this. That girl is all over the social media with pictures of Bloody Marys that transcend the regular abomination that is a Bloody Mary. These are apocalyptic abominations. They feature sandwiches on skewers sticking out of the glass. Burgers. Giant pretzels. Shrimp and pickles and onion rings. One of them displayed a whole pizza on a stick coming out of the drink. Another had a roast chicken. Yet another, a whole extra Bloody Mary rising out of the first. That’s some Inception level shit, right there. Amazing feats of balance I guess, but still abominations. These monstrosities now haunt my nightmares, and have driven me to publicly share my feelings about even the most basic Bloody Mary. These are my feelings:

Yuckity yuckity yuck yuck yuck. It’s like I’m the only one who has noticed the Emperor has no clothes. I want to run around smacking these vile concoctions out of people’s hands, shouting “Stop, what are you DOING?? Don’t you understand these are HORRIBLE???”

Look, I have nothing against vodka, I’ll drink a Moscow Mule or a Screwdriver or especially a White Russian. I’ll even drink a vodka martini***, but I have no idea why anyone would want to ruin perfectly good vodka by putting tomato juice in it. Tomato juice: the worst of all the fruit juices. Tomato juice is where tomatoes go to die when they haven’t got what it takes to be sauce or soup. Tomato juice is just……just wrong. Like puréeing banana and putting it on pasta.

Yes I know, you’d think adding vodka would help. But it doesn’t. Especially since pretty much everything else that gets put into a Bloody Mary seems designed to see just how bad this beverage can be, and people will still drink it. Worcestershire sauce, wrong. Pepper, wrong. Horseradish??? So, so wrong. These are things you put in a casserole, not a cocktail.

And then there’s the celery stick (which according to my research, more on that momentarily, is a more recent addition). Really?? Celery is to vegetables as tomato juice is to fruit juice. Vile, insipid, and entirely unnecessary. Celery is right up there with organ meat on my list of foods to avoid.

So I always say that I’m convinced the drink was invented as a joke, and I was going to write a humorous little scene about a couple of drunk guys inventing it as a joke, but first I thought I should, y’know, do a little research and what do you know I don’t even have to write it because THAT IS BASICALLY WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.

I kid you not. Ok, history is a little divided over who originally came up with the recipe, but I’ve researched this extensively for at least 20 minutes, and the most likely candidate is George Jessel, in 1927.

George Jessel was a comedian. A comedian. He’d been drinking all night with a playboy named Elliot at a bar in Palm Beach. They were trying to sober up for a volleyball game, the bartender was laughing at them and handed over some vodka, and George invented the Bloody Mary. Really. Go look it up. The Bloody Mary was actually invented by a drunk comedian.

And I have to admit, I hate Bloody Marys, but I love that story.

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* In a literature essay about how much he hates Pride and Prejudice. Or in his own words, “This rant I try to pass off as a literature essay”

** YOU remember The Sicilian!

*** I know. I’m a Philistine.