But that was still a day before my wife's birthday. Whether it would end or not, we weren't sure, but we did manage, in the meantime, to make reservations at a winery about 90 minutes outside of Melbourne, which has a fancy hotel, pool, restaurant, spa, and the place we're staying, a series of five newly outfitted Airstream trailers that also have access to all of the above. We're not staying in all five of them; one is enough (just barely). (They're amazing but oh so small!)
So yeah, spoiler alert, the lockdown did end as only an additional few stray cases directly related to that localized outbreak came through over the remainder of the five days. (And there was probably also pressure to get fans back in the stands for the Australian Open.) My wife had said she wanted to be anywhere on her birthday other than the house where she'd been cooped up most of the past year, and thankfully, that did work out. Whew.
One of the things our fancy Airstream came stocked with was this:
Not for free, mind you, but holidays like this are meant for a little indulgence, and I decided it was worth the $20 to find out about it.
Now, I'm not part of the gin craze so I hadn't actually heard of this, nor did I realize it was even gin-based. But I do have a couple bottles of gin at home acquired as gifts and once to make a martini, so going through this gin a bit faster than we are (which is, not at all) had a benefit to me as well.
I didn't drink it our first night because we hadn't yet made ice. The tray was there but it was empty.
The second night, my wife's actual birthday, we were talking about it over her birthday dinner (steak and yummy vegetables) and she mentioned that Stanley Tucci had become a bit of a sensation (outside of the things that already make him a sensation) early in the pandemic with his viral video of how to make a Negroni. Now it was all circling back in my memory, though I'd never watched the video myself.
It was enough time later, back at the Airstream, that this conversation was no longer at the forefront of my mind. I chucked my Negroni in the freezer for 15 minutes (as the bottle recommends), plucked some ice out of the ice trays and poured. Then it was time to find my movie for the night.
I had decided on two criteria for my movie: Netflix (because you have to choose a streaming service, even if you are just randomly choosing) and horror (because I like watching horror movies when I'm in a camper or other semi-exposed sleeping arrangement). As it was 10:45 already, I imposed a third criterion that it had to be 90 minutes, or only a few minutes over.
The movie that met all three criteria was the exactly 90-minute The Silence, which I remembered hearing about a couple years ago when it first came out. I remembered it was supposed to be some kind of ripoff of Bird Box, and not very good. But who said a horror movie had to be very good in order to watch it?
As I started watching, I remembered that the movie it was supposed to be ripping off was not Bird Box, but A Quiet Place, as the premise is almost exactly the same. I actually liked some things about this better than A Quiet Place, though I suppose ultimately it's the lesser movie.
The next thing I noticed after I started watching?
It stars Stanley Tucci.
You could say something stuck in the back of my brain from our earlier conversation and my impending Negroni, but I don't really think that's true. After all, the movie had to meet three other criteria before whether Stanley Tucci was in it or not could even be a factor in my decision-making.
I ended up enjoying both my Negroni and my movie. As gin is one of only three alcohols in a Negroni -- the others being campari and sweet red vermouth -- the gin taste didn't dominate, and the drink overall had a sort of summery freshness to it. It actually being summer here, that was quite welcome.
And I was surprisingly involved in the movie. I guess it's kind of an addictive premise, even if A Quiet Place already did it a year earlier, but I'm sure A Quiet Place was not the first horror movie in which silence is the only way to prevent your imminent death. (In fact, hiding from serial killers involves silence, meaning the concept goes pretty much back to the beginnings of horror.) One thing I actually liked about it relative to A Quiet Place is that Tucci feels more like a regular guy going through this scenario, a square dad type, rather than man-of-action John Krasinski with his mountain man beard. I'm also a big Kiernan Shipka fan after her work in The Blackcoat's Daughter -- another movie I watched in a camper-type setting that scared me half to death -- and she did not disappoint. (The Silence did not scare me half to death, I should clarify, but the swooping bat-things that are destroying society were creepy and effectively designed, and had me looking over my shoulder at apparent noises, not to mention brushing moths away from my face with extra urgency and vigor.)
In fact the only thing that was a little bit disappointing about the experience was Tucci's Negroni video, which I watched after I finished the movie. I was first of all surprised to see it had only 89,000 and change views on YouTube, a lot less than I was expecting for an apparent phenomenon, though I guess most people watched it on a platform other than YouTube. And though I found the three-minute video charming enough, it isn't the kind of thing that I thought would make headlines, except that it was April of last year, and peering through the windows into celebrities' pandemic homes was very novel right at the start.
I may come back to the video, though, as I liked my Negroni enough to consider making it from scratch for myself in the future. And if they replenish the Negroni I consumed when they bring our eggs and bacon for tomorrow's breakfast, it's entirely possible there will be another one in my future tonight.
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