I spent the day at a wine festival last weekend. I had to attend for work, so I really didn’t feel like sampling any of the featured product.
That didn’t bother me much because I love a good festival. I had time to walk around and look at crafts I would never buy. I ate a pretty good pit turkey sandwich. And, since it was sunny out, I had a refreshing cup of lemonade.
Well, I tried to have a refreshing cup of lemonade, but I couldn’t find one. I tried two stands and walked away disappointed both times.
You see, I can’t claim to be an expert in many fields, but I do know how to make a good cup of fresh-squeezed lemonade. I have very high standards. As Eddie Murphy once said in an impression of Elvis Presley, lemonade is a cool, refreshing drink, but that takes a special touch.
From my junior year of high school to a year after I graduated college, I worked at a place called Oasis at Baltimore’s Harborplace. They specialized in fresh-squeezed lemonade.
Over those six years – I worked summers and every break I had from college – I learned all the secrets about what makes a lemonade taste just right. Sadly, I see most of these rules broken whenever I go to a festival or street fair.
First of all, people take the term “fresh-squeezed” a little too literally. I can’t stand it when people squeeze the lemon right into the cup after I order. That does me no good. You need to put the sugar in the cup, squeeze the lemon in, then let the sugar soak up the juice for a while before you make the drink.
Then you squeezed lemons into all the cups and let them sit for an hour or so before making the lemonade. People would always complain that we didn’t squeeze their lemonade right in front of them. Sometimes I would make one the right way and one the way they wanted me to make it. They always saw the point after that.
Because most people don’t handle the sugar and lemon the right way, they also don’t mix the drink the right way. James Bond didn’t just know how to make a martini. He obviously knew lemonade because this drink also should be shaken, not stirred.
In fact, the shaking makes the drink fun. I learned lots of tricks in my lemonade making days. Remember, I worked around the time that Tom Cruise came out with “Cocktail” so people wanted to see us have some fun.
The shakers attached pretty securely to the cups so I could usually entertain them. My biggest problem was my clumsiness so I only had rudimentary skills. I managed to not spill drinks everywhere most of the time though.
Even though I knew both people making my drink this past weekend didn’t know the secrets, I kept my mouth shut. I really didn’t want to make them feel bad, even if they were ripping me off.
I might have to take matters into my own hands one of these days and set up my own lemonade business. I just hope I haven’t lost my touch after all these years.