Le Mixeur Sharky: Nine Stories

(note: this post was written for the blog Le Mixeur, and re-posted here).

It's been over two years since we held a Le Mixeur. And it's been almost that long since I wrote a blog post. That is not a coincidence. This blog was created for the purpose of disseminating information about Le Mixeurs, and continued to be driven by Le Mixeurs over the years. Once the Le Mixeurs dried up, so did the blog.

Time for the comeback.

As many of you may know, my life revolves not around booze or Mixeurs, but around a nine year old boy named Sharky who I am lucky enough to consider my son. As some of you may know, Sharky was diagnosed with Autism about five years ago. And as far fewer of you may know, last August Sharky's insurance company declared that he was no longer eligible for speech therapy coverage. This came on the heels of his insurance company declaring the previous year that he was no longer eligible for physical or occupational therapy. That came on the heels of the state department of social and health services also saying he was not eligible for coverage of speech or physical or occupational therapy. That came on the heels of him never being eligible to receive applied behavioral therapy, or sensory integration therapy, or anything that might actually help him.

Of course, all of that's no big deal. Me and his two mothers raised him without their help. And now he's nine and in my opinion the best person this world ever produced. He's the most amazing person I have ever met. This world, which hasn't offered him much except all the good people in his life, is beyond fortunate for his existence. Every day he is here, he makes the world a better place.

But he does need help. We need help. We need your help. He has the most beautiful way of expressing himself, and many of you have witnessed this through my ad nauseum posts on facebook quoting him. But learning how to express himself more clearly through speech therapy will not only increase his chances of surviving in society as an adult, but will also make him happier in his relationships with the people he meets in life. He won't always need his dad to interpret what he says.

So we're going to throw a Le Mixeur Sharky to raise money to pay for those damn pesky $150/hour speech therapy sessions. And we're going to base this Le Mixeur on the works of J.D. Salinger, who wrote so beautifully on the dreams, ambitions, and qualities of children. He wrote so beautifully, and was appreciated so widely, that it's hard to believe we have still managed to conjure up a world in which the help children need is denied, and in which a child dies of starvation somewhere in the world every three seconds. I think of that fact often, and it never fails to remind me of how unbelievably fortunate I am.

Le Mixeur Sharky: Nine Stories, will feature a menu of nine drinks, each based on one of Salinger's stories from the collection Nine Stories. Each of these drinks will be original creations by some of my favorite Seattle bartenders. Each of these bartenders will be assigned a story. They have the options of a) basing their drink strictly on the title b) basing their drink on the summary and notes I provide them, or c) reading the story and basing the drink on that.

We will hold Le Mixeur Sharky: Nine Stories sometime in March. Details and specific date are yet to be determined. I will be putting up blog posts on each drink for the menu as they come in, with descriptions of the drink, the story, and the bartender.

I will be posting the updates on Le Mixeur Sharky: Nine Stories, here and on the blog I once kept about Sharky. It was a blog that briefly garnered a following and, on one occasion with the assistance of my brother Ben, got over 10,000 hits in one day for this post.

I'd like to officially commence this journey by thanking all of you who have been supportive of Sharky and I over the years, no matter the level. The next few months are going to be emotional and meaningful to me because of this project.

OK. Let's do this.