The sky is falling, again!

Crap. Another announcement about my health; for the life of me I can't understand why every day something new is going to give me Cancer . Now it's alcohol that can raise the chance of my getting breast Cancer by 10% if I have one or more drinks a day. How did this happen? I no more put down an article about red wine being good for me and pour myself a glass , than I wake up and it's a toxic agent. Are the researchers drunk? Confused? Paid off by a revival group of the "Women's Temperance League?" Why tell me today? If they had told me last Tuesday maybe I wouldn't have bought a case of wine!!! Now what do I do? Give the wine away to men?

I love the cocktail hour! It's a way to mediate the hell I sometimes call my life. It seems so polite, so pleated skirt and cashmere sweater, so drawing room, Greenwich Connecticut, Noel Coward, Nick and Nora Charles, so not how I grew up. Jews don't drink, they just pretend on Passover and even then I never saw anyone actually finish a glass. I think it's the frivolity alcohol could provide. We Jews seem to reject frivolity and substitute the philosophy that it is far more realistic and safer to believe that something bad is going to happen. This begs being alert and ready. Drinking could dull your senses and you could be unprepared for pestilence, plague, or destruction. And just how was I supposed to survive this doomsday unbringing without a drink?

Learning to appreciate the cocktail hour wasn't easy; not given my genes . But when my nerves were jangling because my mortgage payment was nowhere in sight, my biggest client left for Mexico without paying his invoice, my skin was white and pastie from another Chicago winter, I discovered all my precious cashmere sweaters had tiny holes due to a silent but deadly moth infestation and I was seriously thinking of getting a GUN to hunt them down, I bought a bottle of red wine.

Ok, I admit it I loved it. Now what do I do? What happened to those good antioxidents? What about red wine being better for you than white? What about the cocktail hour? What about Noel Coward? I don't want a Dr.Pepper with dinner. Will one of those medical researchers come over here at the end of the day and talk me off the ledge!?!? Probably not, but maybe they'll have a glass of wine with me.