A GOOD MIXER:
A COCKTAIL PARTY IN IMAGE AND VERSE

Thomas March and Valerie Mendelson

A Glimpse, an Overhearing...

A GOOD MIXER is a visual-textual hybrid book and performance project representing a virtual cocktail party to which two curious hosts have invited a volatile mix of 31 guests, for a total of 33 souls in attendance—friends, lovers and strangers. The number of guests honors the year Prohibition ended, 1933, and the drinks have been chosen carefully for each attendee from an obscure bartending guide, A Good Mixer, published that very year by a Midwestern liquor distributor thrilled to be back in business.

The hosts have assigned each guest (and themselves) a cocktail that reflects their personality, either in name or in temperament. Spies and eavesdroppers (i.e., viewers and readers) encounter each of these characters in the form of a painting of the cocktail they’re drinking (by Valerie Mendelson), flanked by two poems (by Thomas March)—one representing their innermost thoughts and another their outward, public self-expression. For added flavor, a list of ingredients is also included, based on the recipes found in 1933’s version of A Good Mixer.

As one moves through the party—whether in a gallery, in printed form, or in a live dramatic reading—the secrets, confessions, unspoken longings, hidden resentments, and unrealized conflicts of these 33 personalities come to life. Each poetry-and-painting combination embodies the tension that exists between the public manifestation of convivial enjoyment and the private experience that one brings to—and has of—a party. By visually representing characters only as the cocktail of their choice, the artists invite you to reflect on the isolation that exists even as one connects with others.

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