"Gimlet"

Oil on museum quality, archival ampersand gessobord™ panel - 6” x 8”

I can't drink a gin gimlet without thinking of Harvard Lampoon's "Bored of the Rings," a clever spoof of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" - -

"Gimlet, son of Groin, your obedient servant," said the dwarf, bowing to reveal a hunchback. "May you always buy cheap and sell dear."

"Frito, son of Dildo, yours," said Frito in some confusion, racking his brains for the correct reply. "May your hemorroids shrink without surgery."

The dwarf looked puzzled but not displeased. "Then you are the boggie of whom Goodgulf spoke, the Ringer?"

Frito nodded.

"Do you have it with you?"

"Would you like to see it?" asked Frito politely.

"Oh no thanks," said Gimlet, "I had an uncle who had a magic tieclip and one time he sneezed and his nose fell off."

Frito nervously touched a nostril...

  Tolkien's dwarf character Gimli, son of Gloin becomes Gimlet, son of Groin. Bilbo becomes Dildo; Frodo, Frito;  Aragorn, Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt, and so on.  Their quest is to cast the ring into the Zazu Pitts.  It is an amusing read for hardcore Tolkien fans such as me.   My daughter's middle name is Lórien, that tells you something.  I sent her birth certificate back because they hadn't put the accent over the ó.  Holly will be 35 this year, so you see how long I've been a fan.  She's fortunate that she was was not stuck with Galadriel as her first name; cooler heads prevailed back in '73.  Luckier still, that we didn't have a son.  I shutter to think what young Frodo would be up to today, other than hating his dad for saddling him with such a goofy appellation.

Since I had been wrestling with this painting for a while, I decided to celebrate its completion by shaking up a restorative gin/lime concoction to drink while I wrote this copy.  The bracing astringency of the cocktail is as refreshing at 2:00 am as the rose' was at dinner earlier this week.   This piece had its share of hoops to jump through (pun intended).  The perfect oval in paint can look contrived and any variance from that perfection looks wrong, even if it is just slightly off true.  So how did I solve this conundrum?   The only option was to stay loose and free and go with the flow.  It is PAINT after all.  If I wanted a photo of a gimlet, a could have grabbed my Nikon instead of my brush.  If ellipsis means to leave out - tomorrow's painting will have an ellipsis of ellipses, I promise you. Calligraphy has always been my nemesis.  Indeed, my everyday handwriting is so illegible that you'd have to take a hastily written note to the local pharmacist to have it deciphered.  Forkner shorthand ruined me.  Thank you, Mrs. Falco.