**REVIEW** Smith & Sinclair Alcoholic Cocktail Gummies

Oh. My. Goodness. I just tried my little 2-pack sample of this that I got courtesy PopSugar Dabble:

That is from Smith and Sinclair and I would have taken photos of the actual candy but I ate them both! Hahaha! They were so good.

Here is the brand's site. Since I just got a taste of 2 flavors, this is going to be a very brief review. I can tell you that I don't normally like gummy-type candies. I have to be in the mood. These, however, have a much different texture from the Haribo candies I pick up at the store. These are much, much softer and they sort of melt as you chew them. 


The candies are rather large - about the size around of a silver dollar and as thick as half a marshmallow. They are coated lightly with sugar crystals and that's the first thing you taste. As soon as you bit into one, the fruit flavor hits and fools you into thinking this is regular candy. Count to three and the booze comes through loud and clear. It's not harsh but more the flavor strength of a mild wine or lady-like cocktail. That is trick number two. Maybe because I am a lightweight drinker, I got quite the buzz from the very first candy - "Mandarin Spritz". Of course, I didn't wait more than 3 minutes before I ate the second one ("Pineapple Bellini") although I ate it in small nibbles. Um, hello and I-luv-you-man. I felt as if I had had at least half a glass of wine.

I wasn't crazy about the very soft texture but these taste so good that I don't care. When I get more, I will probably keep them refrigerated until I'm ready for my treat. Talk about a sugar buzz...

When I ever try more of these, I will let you know how the other flavors are. For now, I can tell you that the Pineapple Bellini is my favorite of the two. It was sweeter than the Mandarin Spritz. I would say that if you like drier wine and drinks, the Mandarin would be for you. I am a sweet wine gal so that Pineapple was perfect.

What an idea, to pair alcohol and candy. Here's the thing: I wasn't joking about these packing a little punch. The alcohol content is 5% by volume. My lips felt slightly numb after eating both of them in rapid succession so, you figure it out.

As I mentioned, I got my sample via Popsugar Dabble, but you can go straight to the source and check out all their offerings. There are the cocktail gummies I tried, mocktail gummies, drink mixers, and gift sets. If you get some, I would make sure to keep them in a place where children don't grab any. They look exactly like candy and would surely be too much for someone young and lightweight.

Peace
--Free

Me and Somebody's Wine

(One of my play nieces told me that it would be cool if I put up a video for each post. Sounded cool. Go support an artist.)

Sing it, Melody. Making me want a cigarette and some bourbon...

So. We all should know by now that I'm not a champion drinker. I am actually the cheapest date on the planet. After a few mixed drinks, I am a fun gal. But if I go just one drink over... That's with mixed drinks - or shots of something I can handle the taste of, like Crown Apple. By the way, that stuff is like Kool-Aid for fools. It's tricky-good. Tasty but dangerous. I've discovered I have a 3 shot minimum on Crown.

Wine, though, turns me into a different kind of fun. Wine generally just makes me feel very mellow. After a moderate glass of sweet wine, I am great company. Not too chatty or hyper, but sober enough to be good company. That's if the wine is not too strong. One decent glass of anything stronger than church wine is better than any sleeping pill my docs know about. As a matter of fact, for a long time, I kept a bottle of wine around just to use as a nightly tonic. Then I worried that maybe I was getting a little too habitual about that.

Once some years back when I was staying with my best friend, her sister treated us to a holiday outing to spend an evening at a ranch turned winery. It was during the Christmas season. The plan was to take a tour of the winery, have some casual eats, then participate in a wine tasting before finishing the evening off with a hayride on horse-drawn wagons. I was excited about the hayride and super-excited to do my first wine tasting.

So.

What had happened was... (and please don't laugh too hard at me) is that I made a rookie mistake. I was swallowing more of the wine than I was spitting out. And, yes, I knew to spit because that was part of the little lesson we were given beforehand. The problem is, I liked some of the wine too much to spit it out. Listen, we tasted a lot of wine. Yes, we did.

I never did make it to the hayride but I made really good friends with some guy at our table who was as drunk as I was and who kept squinting at me while we talked. I think he was trying to figure out which one of me he was talking to. Every now and then, he'd throw back his head and make this crazy cackle-laugh sound. And I wasn't saying anything especially funny. My girlfriend was as drunk as I was but she tends to stay classy and get quiet when she drinks. She only spoke long enough to whisper to me that I was talking with a guy who was probably a retired serial killer. Her poor sister could only shake her head and tell us to try to eat more food while she went on the hayride.

The best thing about having gotten drunk that night was it made the ride home fun. We'd driven probably two and a half hours to get to the ranch in the first place and we'd gotten lost twice on the way there. We didn't realize until someone mentioned it to my friend's sister that we would be driving right through one of those sundown towns on our way back home. There we were, sometime after one in the morning, driving super carefully. My friend's sister was stone-cold sober but worried about her two drunk passengers. She kept giving us instructions on what to do if we got pulled over. Let her do the talking; maybe just pretend to be asleep; and, please try holding our breath because we were damn near making her drunk from the fumes coming off of us. Thankfully, we didn't get stopped but my best friend almost popped her bladder trying to hold her pee the whole way home. That was the one time wine didn't put me to sleep.

Still, I'm not as bad a wine drunk as I am a Mother's Day drunk. Like I said, the most I do with wine is just fall asleep or - only occasionally - think I can sing and want to prove it. There were times during my sister's and my clubbing days when everyone made me stick to wine only. Because they knew what I was like on mixed drinks. A predator wouldn't have to slip me anything stronger than an extra shot of liquor. During those wine nights, I fell asleep at inappropriate times. Once, I fell asleep in a booth at a club. My friends just made a pillow and blanket with their coats for me and partied on. Back in my twenties, I fell asleep in places like Denny's and IHop. It took me a long time to learn my fun-but-not-narcoleptic limit of wine. By then,  was pretty much over it. For the most part.

I'm not proud of my drinking past and I never drank as much as it might sound like. I guess because I never even flirted with drugs, I made up for it with my drinking, such as it was. The only experience I have with drugs is the time I got a contact high and laughed uncontrollably for half an hour straight and the time I ate some weed brownies. Made with Alaskan grown weed. No thank you. Have you ever been to Alaska? This is what an Alaskan grown cabbage looks like.

Yeah, so Anchorage was like stoner heaven. For years, we had friends visit us just because the city was ahead of the game with personal use legalities. And some of the best weed ever. Or so I've been told.

I do think that drinking can be as dangerous as drugs. I'm lucky that I was young and stupid and living in Alaska when it was still a relatively safe place. Very, very lucky. I only went out with family or people I knew really well. It was my sister who left me sleeping in the backseat of the car once. I had apparently passed out into a drunk snooze on the way home and she and my sister-in-law couldn't wake me. They had the nerve to say later that I had been snotty about them trying to wake me. So, they left me in the car, in front of my brother's house, in the middle of winter. I wasn't cold because they had covered me up but I was still a little freaked out when I woke up a few hours later. I got out of the car because I thought I was sober. I wasn't. I got back in the car and went back to sleep. Good times.

Those days are so far behind me now. Thank everything in the heavens.

I was talking to my best friend just recently and she asked if I had plans to do anything special for my upcoming birthday. Other than thanking God that I've made it this far? I told her that I plan to maybe get a mani-pedi and probably just spend a few hours with the family. That's enough excitement for me. I had been kicking around the idea of going out for a drink with my sister-in-law but decided to keep any celebrations on the thankful and adult side. Once alcohol gets involved, who knows, I might have to move to a new town or change my identity.

Peace
--Free

NOTE: I'm going to have to schedule this post for another day along with some other backup posts so... ignore the mention of dates.  

Alcohol Is NOT My Friend

Because I am bad at consuming alcohol I was entertained by Rachel Page's project of captioning these products. As the article says, that's brilliant. And true.

I quit drinking on a (socially) regular basis after being married to (and abused by) an alcoholic. Before all that, I was never a big drinker anyway, but I will never forget my last liquor-fueled wipe out. It happened during a Mother's Day celebration.

The whole plan for that special day was put together by my brothers and their friends. I was included because, even though I'm not a "bio-mom", I put in some time as the working "dad" figure of a couple of my nieces. I take no full credit for the raising of kids and, after that Mother's Day, I take no credit for being able to handle more than my three-drink limit. One, if we are talking Long Island Iced Tea. Or maybe not even a full one of those!

For that Mother's Day, the guys rented a Hummer limo for me, two of my sisters-in-law and about four other women. My sister was lucky enough to miss my antics because she was home sick. I should have missed my antics.

We all started our day with an early wine and champagne type breakfast. That right there should have been our first sign. No one should have liquor for breakfast unless they are filming a porn movie or about to fly on an airplane.

I have to mention that this all took place in and around Phoenix Arizona. Arizona is warm in December. In May, the temps run about the same as those of Hell's play-cousin. I think we hit 150 degrees that day, but I'm told it was more like 115. Same thing.

So, I'm eating nothing for breakfast unless you count the pulp in my mimosa. At damn near 50 years old, I found myself buckling to the peer pressure of being around a bunch of wealthier, prettier women than I. Apparently, despite their glamour, they each had at least one wooden leg I wasn't told about. These gals were tossing back liquor like they were taking shots of Fresca. I stuck to one mimosa and a small hit of moscato. And started sweating like I was in full menopause mode.

The limo arrived so we went outside to take a group photo. I'm glad we took the pic because that's the last time I looked presentable for the occasion. After three minutes in that heat, my hair had transformed to a sort of processed nappy look that all the "sistahs" out there will understand. My one good (and expensive) outfit - that I'd worn to fit in with the Housewives of Phoenix - would have been soaked through with my hormonal sweating. Thank goodness for that blazing "dry heat" I'd heard so much about, right?

Here's something else that amazed me about those Arizona ladies: they don't sweat. Their makeup doesn't run and their hair doesn't look like they just rode a slip and slide through the desert. I couldn't get into the car fast enough. The other ladies probably thought I was just really impressed with my first ride in such a gigantic limo, but I was only crawling around like Ethel Mertz and Lucy because I was trying to find the controls for the air-conditioner.

Forgive me if I don't get the sequence of our ride correct, but I know that we drove from my brother's house in Gilbert to wherever the mall is in Scottsdale. I think we might have ridden through other areas, but someone gave me a wine glass and someone else kept re-filling it. At some point, one of my sister-in-law handed me a Visa gift card and explained that the guys had given each of us one so that we could play a game called "Best Gift".

I was already pretty lit up on all that morning liquor, but I understood the basics of the game. We were going to go into the mall and buy things that would make a cute Mother's Day gift. We'd get back together in an hour and vote on who chose the best gift. The winner would get another Visa gift card.

Okay. Sounded good to me. Of course, tipsy as I was, anything sounded good to me. Curling up on that beautiful leather seat and taking a snooze sounded best to me, but, hey.

I'm all about life lessons. Live and learn, right?

When I stepped outside the cool air of the car and into the heat that is high noon in Scottsdale, I learned that heat maximizes the effects of alcohol. I learned that it's tricky to walk in high heels and a tight skirt when you are drunk, hot and just really, really want to lay down and go to sleep. I also learned that those rich heffas I was spending my Mother's Day with could put down liquor like a rock band on tour.

The other ladies checked their hair and makeup and stepped out of the limo looking red-carpet ready. I stepped out looking like I was ready for rebab. I was drunker than I'd been on my wedding night. When the heat hit me, I was instantly more drunk.

I have no idea how I made it through the shopping part of the game. One of the other ladies paired up with me so we could pool our gift cards. We agreed that we'd split winnings if we won. I was so incredibly wasted that I would've agreed to stripping down right there at the mall and doing a pole dance for the other shoppers.

I don't exactly recall what my shopping partner and I bought, but I do recall that we finished before everyone else. I recall that we decided to wait for the others by having a drink at this little outside bar. I recall this with the clarity that is reserved for all of our deepest, darkest moments. That's because, drunk as I already was, I let my companion order a drink for me. She ordered something called a 'Saki Bomb'.

Right there is when I slipped from merely sloppy drunk to wasted to the point of all-hell-is-going-to-break-loose. And no one saw it coming. (Don't blame me, I couldn't see my twenty fingers in front of my face.)

Have you ever experienced a Saki Bomb? No? Well, it's when you take mug of ice-cold beer and drop in a thimble of that Devil's brew called rice wine. You drop the glass of Saki right into the beer. Yeah. Then you slam the mug hard on the table - you know, to announce to everyone that you are an drunken idiot who is about to be even more drunk and more of an idiot. And you chug all that liquor right down, like the good and obedient girl who is trying to fit in with all the cool kids.

Said the spider to the fly

Except I was too old to be a 'girl' and too old to worry about fitting in!!!

Let me stop and add in a couple of details:

• Our limo driver happened to be a tall, blue-eyed blond guy called Jimmy Hendrix. No lie (or so he said), that was his real name. Nice guy. Gorgeous guy. Or at least I think he was gorgeous. With that much liquor in my system, everyone and everything was gorgeous.
• The mall wasn't the main stop of our day. We still had lunch planned at some restaurant. Which one? I can't remember. Doesn't matter anyway because... Well, you'll see.

Okay. So I'm two Saki Bombers in when the rest of our party shows up to head back to the limo. My shopping/drinking partner maybe realizes at this point that I'm no match for her and the other ladies in the drinking department when our car pulls around and I have trouble standing up. Taking off my shoes made standing up easier but did nothing for the walking part. Jimmy Hendrix comes to the rescue. He picks me up and carries me to the car. Like something out of "The Officer and the Gentleman," except no one watching is clapping and hooting. They are just staring. 

Here is where I have trouble remembering what followed. I know I made it to the limo. I know that Jimmy was a very prepared driver because he had barf bags on hand. I remember that we made it to the restaraunt. I even made it inside. I don't know how I made it inside, but I made it to the bar where we all sat to wait for our table. 

Let's stop again for a moment and ask some questions:

• Question: Did no one in my party realize exactly how drunk I was?
• Answer: Apparently not because someone ordered me a glass of wine.
• Question: How did I end up outside, sitting on the curb with my shoes lost and my dress hiked up around my upper thigh?
• Answer: I don't know but that sun was a bitch.
• Question: How did I make my way into the ladies' room.
• Answer: Again, I don't know, but I do know that those wall tiles were so nice and cool that I wanted to make love to them.

So, I'm in the bathroom. I make it into a stall okay, but can't make my way back out without fighting with the door. I must have beat the crap out of that door because it took both my sisters-in-law to get me off of it. 

While my sisters-in-law helped break up the fight I was having with myself, another member of our party wondered if they shouldn't call an ambulance. Seriously. All those ladies were having a panic attack because they just knew that my brothers were going to kill them for letting me get so messy drunk. Most of them worked for or with my older brother. I think my one SIL was worried about divorce.

I don't remember who was brave enough to do it, but someone called the brother that some of them worked for. I know they did because I remember him coming right into the ladies room, picking me up and tossing me over his shoulder like a sack of drunken potatoes. He carried me out to his car and drove me home.

I was drunk for two days. I'm not kidding. I was so drunk that, when I was able to crawl to the kitchen in the middle of the night for water, I learned another lesson: water re-activates drunkenness. I spent the rest of the night on the kitchen floor.

This was the worst bout of drunkenness I've ever experienced. And, guess what? I was supposed to start my new job at my brother's office that Monday. Didn't make it to work. Barely made it off the kitchen floor and back to bed. 

When I started my job on Tuesday, I walked in to an office full of people giving me a little welcoming standing ovation. How very embarrassing.

I lied when I said that was the last time I was really drunk. There were a couple more times. Once when I had my friend pull over at two in the morning so that I could get on my knees in the snow and throw up in a grocery store parking lot. Another time when I literally slid into a Village Inn to order an after-the-club breakfast and just fell asleep at the table while my companions made excuses for me. 

One thing I can say is that I have never driven drunk. After the third drink, I can't even walk drunk. So, yeah: Alcohol is not my friend so I quit hanging out with it. The most I'll do now is invite it in for one quick glass with dinner. No goodnight kiss and no sleepovers. (Except when I have to fly. Alcohol is my best friend then.)

Peace

--Free