Emily's Elixir: You Feel Good Just LOOKING at this Drink!

EMILY'S ELIXIR
a/k/a The Lava Lamp Drink
(You feel good just looking at this drink!)

There is a hug in every glass . . .

Find 3 champagne flutes (glasses. Tall, stemmed, slim tulip shape a/k/a “champagne glasses”) for each person. This shape is necessary for the lava lamp effect.

Have a bottle of Cook's champagne – if it's not cold, that's OK: it will be. This recipe is waste of expensive champagne.

Have some candles of any kind. Or a dim lamp.

Some frozen blueberries. Got to be frozen.

A bottle of Valerian Root extract. (that's liquid.) You find it at a health food store.
A comfortable place to be and to sleep. Perchance a person to be and to sleep with.
A girlfriend to do girl talk with will do.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Fill each glass One Third Full of frozen blueberries.

Pour champagne to near the top. It will fizz, let it be and resume pouring when the fizz gives up.

Carefully float a dropper full – not just “a drop” - onto the top of the bubbly. Do not squirt!

Put the glasses in front of a candle or candles. Relax as the blueberries become 'airborne' and make their way to the top, bump into one another, relieve themselves of the bubbles they have collected, and sink slowly back down. As they wend their way back down, they are a lava lamp and they stir the grape color at the top into the electric violet color at the bottom, making a new color you will never see anywhere else.

The drink stays cold. The blueberries are tasty. The effect is gorgeous.

Valerian root is a muscle relaxant – sore muscles are soothed after you have picked rocks or run the marathon without forethought. So you get that warm and fuzzy feel that normally arrives after too many but comes now after the equivalent of only 1½ drinks because Valerian boosts the relaxant effect of alcohol. (I am saying 1½ because I did pour and measure: the blueberries displace that amount of champagne.)

Furthermore, the relaxed-muscle effect lasts for a day and a half, so if you do this routine every other day there will come the time your brain usually screams to your muscles to “Get ready. The sky is falling!” And this time your muscles say . . . “Uh, brain, I don't be thinking that way... seems okay here to me rat now . . .” The anxiety cycle is broken. You don't tense up because relaxed muscles just don't. It works for most people, even works for grief experiences.

Unless you are in AA, you don't have much to lose: a glass and a half of champagne every other day ain't gonna hurt and may help; and champagne is chemically different from other forms of alcohol – is even prescribed for at least one ailment. And Valerian, I am told, is Europe's leading arthritis remedy.

This recipe is good for:
*anxiety and depression (as explained above)
*insomnia (Honey, you WILL sleep after drinking those three flutes!)
*sore muscles (probably at higher-end doses)
*arthritis, I am told
*romance (Just try it. He can't drive home or shouldn't.)

And if you are in AA or don't like champagne, try this with seltzer water and Valerian root. And if you don't like Valerian root (delicious it is not), substitute kava, tryptophan, passion flower or other herbal relaxant. I have not tried any substitutes.