I pregamed for Margarita Madness by visiting the Cincinnati Public Library, which tells you both how little I belonged at a drinking festival and why CityBeat’s Madeline Fening thought it would be funny to invite me.
I was a D.A.R.E. success story as a teenager. St. James Catholic Church and an unmedicated anxiety disorder made sure of it. The Catholicism wore off in college, but the fear — the irrational, hard-to-articulate conviction that participating in the world would smudge and dent me — didn’t. I postponed my first real taste of noncommunion liquor to age 22, in case an extra year gave me extra purity points. Swallowed with a grimace, I decided the taste was not worth acquiring. My friends got used to me bringing a Coke to the bar.
Lame, right? I think it’s lame — not the act of abstention but the fearful moral grade-grubbing that motivated it. What’s the point of living if not to acquire new tastes? Did I think I was ever going to wow a new acquaintance with lists of all the things I hadn’t done? Hobbies I didn’t have? Perfect purity is lonely and uneventful.
So. Last Friday, I decided I’d try again.
Drunk history
My anxiety about liquor is embarrassing but not historically unique, especially concerning the margarita. The Aztecs were worse.
Every one of the drinks on offer at Margarita Madness was a distant descendant of the Aztec ritual agave wine pulque. This ancestor-drink, derived from the agave plant’s sap rather than the pulped heart that produces tequila, was so strong that only Tenochtitlan’s nobles and priests were permitted to enjoy it regularly. Other elements of the population couldn’t be trusted to behave themselves, except on certain festival days (for ceremonial reasons) and right before getting sacrificed to the gods (as a treat).
One surviving Aztec story says the winged serpent-god Quetzalcoatl, who robbed the underworld, warred with his dog-headed twin Xolotl and sculpted the Earth out of an enemy’s corpse, drank pulque only once. The stuff got him so absolutely twisted that he self-immolated in disgrace rather than face the other gods’ judgment the next day. At the right time of year, astronomers can still catch him — in the form of the planet Venus — smoldering with hungover shame in hours before dawn.
The arrival of European distilling methods saw pulque’s popularity usurped by tequila during the colonial period, and the 20th century produced the margarita. The new drink became a symbol of tropical getaways, the house heraldry of singer Jimmy Buffett and a frequent fixation of the maxi-skirted abstinence advocate Sister Cindy Smock, who accidentally co-wrote a hoe anthem about it last summer.
@nicolconcilio GIVE ME ONE MARGARITA #bridetobe #onemargaritachallenge #bachelorette #bacheloretteparty ♬ One Margarita 5 Margaritas Margarita Song - CasaDi
Drinking margaritas, per many of Smock’s campus sermons, is a gateway to sin. The sole possible outcome is an escalating series of sex acts I can’t describe in this publication.
If only she’d been around to warn Quetzalcoatl.
Salt, please!
And so began CityBeat’s ninth annual salt-rimmed celebration of local restaurants and the patron (Patrón?) drink of summer vacation. On the half-mile span of the Purple People Bridge, the world’s most popular tequila cocktail appeared in a dozen different colors and sporting a variety of plus-ones, including cinnamon, ube, sour gummy worms and handheld sparklers. A robot served a few of them. Hawaiian shirts abounded.
It was an event for enthusiasts. I was finally ready to be one.
Margarita Madness started at 5:30 p.m., and Torchy’s Tacos greeted at the entrance with the most classic margarita on the roster: Triple sec, tequila and lime in a salt-rimmed glass. It tasted like lemonade and felt like nothing.
This was a relief. This was also a little worrisome. I had assumed I’d need to put more effort into enjoying myself. If the rest of them tasted that good, the naan I’d eaten ahead of time would need to put in more work to keep me upright and taking notes.
Reader, the rest of them tasted that good. I don’t actually know how the judges picked a best-of, especially given the way that — I discovered — each margarita makes the next one more delicious. They stack like Elden Ring buffs.
The second margarita came from Mazunte, was thicker on the tongue and tasted more obviously like tequila, but the mango flavor softened the burn. I felt buoyant as I threw the cup away. A group nearby was dancing to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” while two robots watched.
These robots tramped around the event all evening as representatives of El Trompo Mexican Grill, where margaritas are sometimes served in glasses but more often in pineapples and gigantic plastic airplanes. The sparklers came from their tent. The line was already the longest on the bridge.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for that yet,” Madeline told me. We agreed to regroup later.
Third: Somerset’s ube margarita, which combines the soft, savory flavor and rich color of the Filipino sweet potato with pineapple-ginger tequila and a dash of edible glitter. The combined effect recalls either a magical potion or the inside of a lava lamp.
At this point, I noticed that the wind felt really good on my face and the flat, brown Ohio River was maybe the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I grabbed a taco to fortify my link with reality and ducked into the VIP area for a fourth margarita.
Jeremy Harrison, one of Cincinnati's celebrity mixologists, mixed an intriguing and unseasonal blackberry marg for the tent. The card in front said it contained basil and spices; Madeline and I agreed that those must include cinnamon and nutmeg because the taste reminded us both of Christmas.
It was 7 p.m. by now. I’d gone from a lifetime total of zero margaritas to four in the space of 90 minutes, and I felt floaty but none the worse for wear. This would probably have been an ideal place to cut it off, and it’s certainly where my notes became less thorough.
But everything I’d had to drink was only a few ingredients removed from a standard margarita. I wanted something arcane and glamorous.
I wanted what the robots were serving.
What the robots were serving: Margaritas in full drag, almost difficult to sip around the bouquets of gummy worms, fruit wedges and full-sized popsicles that served as garnish. Nearby, fellow diva-ría Mi Cozumel sent frozen drinks down the runway in Teddy bear-shaped containers outfitted with boba straws.
I had both. My note-taking did not withstand the combined assault. The only things written in the notebook after this point are:
- YUUUUUUUGE!
- Face feeling so cool. (Underlined several times.)
- Blue tequila.
I really only know what the last one means, which is that someone was shooting blue tequila out of a skull-topped reliquary and into attendees’ mouths. I accepted a shot for journalism reasons and then realized I needed to sit down very badly.
It was 8 p.m. The event wasn’t done, but I was.
The nicest unadvertised thing about Margarita Madness is that it accommodates the need for a regrouping space afterward. The Purple People Bridge’s proximity to Newport on the Levee meant I could walk a few paces to a restaurant, sit down, and Challengers two quesadillas into my mouth without needing to call an Uber.
I ate and watched the early summer sunset, and I realized again that the Ohio River does look beautiful in the right light.
I watched the remaining celebrants shout and dance like Tenochtitlani proles on holiday and thought about the ten-thousand-year history of agave cultivation I’d read about at the Cincinnati Public Library. Drinking margaritas, even out of Teddy bears, even with ube in them, connected me to that tradition for the first time. It put me in pleasant debt to the jimadores who harvested these plants and the mixologists who played with ratios and flavors until they found something that they wanted to share.
As a kid, I was afraid of being diminished by letting myself touch the world. Growing up and participating in adult life, crossing the old thresholds of vice and risk, felt like an act of surrender.
I didn’t feel like that last Friday. I felt like I understood something I hadn’t before.
And I didn’t wake up with a hangover or any inclination to set myself on fire, so I think Quetzalcoatl’s thing was more about him than about pulque.
Sarah Walsh is a writer and resident of Newport, Kentucky.
