Me and Moet

Oh man, I forgot how much I love this champagne. It's been two years since I've had a bottle. Last year I screwed up and didn't get one at all because I missed the wine store. Silly me, I thought the state ABC store would sell champagne and by the time I figured out that they didn't, it was too late.

I almost didn't get one this year even though I got to the right store in time. They had a whole wall of champagne and a few odd displays of special orders but I didn't see a single bottle of Moet. I had to ask the clerk who unearthed the last one from the very bottom of the display. The bottle was jammed up out of sight. I took it as a sign that 07 is going to be a good year for me.

Why is Moet so damned important, you ask? It's a fair question. I'm a superstitous person. I'm not naturally lucky so I have a slew of little odd traditions I've developed to increase my luck factor. One of them is that my last drink of the old year, and my first drink of the new, be Moet.

I love the stuff. It goes down smooth and easy and if it doesn't make a liar of me this year, you can get shit-faced drunk on it and still wake up without a hangover. How I came to love it so, is another story altogether.

How I Came to Stop Worrying and Love Moet

Having made several failed starts here, I'm finding it's hard to explain. To put it as simply as possible, I discovered over a course of failed relationships that long distance romances work the best for me. Thus it was that I lived in lovely downtown Noho, a seething hotbed of Peyton Place proportions of intrigue and casual opportunity, without ever having entered into a sexual union with a local guy. I made it a kind of unofficial rule because it simplified the politics of living downtown.

When I broke that embargo, being me, I did it in the most radical manner possible and entered into a torrid affair with my next door neighbor Jamie. And what a tumultous affair it was. It swung from bliss to the abyss more than once over the course of the year or two it went on. It was crazy and decadent and just so much fun. The affair ended well before we stopped being neighbors but our bond remained strong to this day.

You can't get me drunk enough to confess everything we did. All I'll tell you now is Jamie was an inventive lover and an endlessly entertaining companion. Together we invented the Moet Sunday Brunch for which we also invented the best dice game in the world - "5s" and "2s" - that none can lose but few understand.

The tradition survived the end of the affair and we kept it going until the day he left the hood. We both cried the day our paths finally diverged when he moved out of Randolph Place, but distance didn't break the bond we formed in those days and nights of reckless abandon. And so I created the New Year Moet tradition to honor that time in my life when for a brief moment, anything seemed possible. And I keep it every year so I don't stop believing that it's true.