I inherited my love of whiskey from my father, who came home from work every evening and walked directly from the front door to our kitchen, where he opened the cabinet over the sink, extracted a bottle of whiskey, and poured himself a drink. It was just like in Mad Men, I swear, except with less sparkling dialog.
In fact, my father worked during the tail-end of that era, an era when it wasn’t unusual for people to have bottles of liquor in their desks and to get pretty soaked at random moments at work, or after work, or before work. So when my father came home from an office party one evening with a comically large (ONE GALLON!) bottle of Seagram’s whisky (with a plastic pump on top that dispensed shots) no one was surprised. This was what passed for normal in the 1970s. Here’s a photo of it to prove these things existed:
(avocado for scale)
I’ve lost the plastic pump, and the bottle is clearly in bad shape, as it has moved with me from place to place for more than 30 years now. For a while I kept pennies in it, and trust me when I say getting the pennies out was not easy.
Why do I have it? I don’t know, really. It’s one of exactly three things of my father’s I’ve kept, the other two being a Playboy shot glass and a signet ring he used to wear (like I said, the 1970s, man). Part of it is that this bottle sat in our kitchen for years, eventually filled with other whiskeys, and it formed the cornerstone of my liquor-siphoning adventures as a teenager. Plus the sheer comical nature of it. ONE GALLON of crap whiskey! What a time to be alive.
I don’t recall the bottle being used at any parties we hosted, but it’s the connective thread in many of my memories because it was always there, always comically large, and always filled to some extent with whisky of questionable quality (the only kind my father drank, sadly). Good times came and went, life changed in ways we neither wanted nor approved of, but the Comically Large Seagram’s Bottle was always there, a Constant. Every now and then I glimpse it in the dark corner of our bedroom and I am comforted by its presence.
The Duchess does not find this bottle amusing, and has tolerated it with the same weary tone she tolerates my stuffed Bill the Cat doll: As evidence that I need adult supervision. But I will never relinquish the Comically Large Seagram’s Bottle. I may be buried with it, honestly.
If you want your own Comically Large Seagram’s Bottle, incredibly, you can buy one.