Here's how! or A Cure for the Common Cold

You see before you a cure for the common cold.  In my case I waited too long to avail myself of the cure, and so my cold worsened into bronchitis and continued into pneumonia.  After three visits to the local Emergency Room which I mentioned in passing here, I finally concluded that modern medical science was limited.  In point of fact the sawbones in the Germantown ER told me that I had pneumonia, either bacterial or viral, and he didn't know which.  But, he said, there was hope.  If I had regular old bacterial pneumonia, the antibiotics he prescribed would get me back on my feet in no time.  If not, well... then he could treat the symptoms.  The sawbones reminded me to drink plenty of liquids.  Russel's Reserve is a liquid, as is sweet vermouth. 

Cold Remedies

I lost no time in filling the prescriptions and augmenting the new wonder drugs with a few over the counter remedies, such as the generic night time cough concoction on the far right.  When none of these worked, I fired my sawbones and sought expert medical assistance elsewhere - down on Beale Street.

Tater Red's Lucky Mojo - De Doctore Iz Inn!

I walked in to Tater Red's like I had a roll of long green and Lucy Loo showed me into the back room, where I met a slender, wiry black man dressed in a dark blue suit with a bowler hat who I presumed to be the famous Tater Red.  When I inquired about his sobriquet, he doffed his bowler with a flourish displaying a dome without so much as a single hair on it, then explained, "It's all those women, Jack.  They hug me and snuggle me up right between their torpedoes and commence to pettin' and strokin' my head - and they did it so often that they wore all my fine curly hair away."

While I digested this he produced a pair of dice and made seven straight passes on the counter while he mumbled a chant to Baron Samedi.  Then he looked up.

"Jack," he said, "You get a cocktail shaker and fill it with ice.  You put three dashes of Regans' Orange Bitters No. 6 in there and follow it with one shot of Cinzano sweet vermouth and one shot of Russell's Reserve Rye whiskey.  You shake it until it's cold, then strain it into a martini glass and make sure you drink it all before it gets warm."

"Will that cure what ails me?"  I asked him.

"Sure, Jack!  Sure it will!  But you got to believe... you see now, don't you Jack?"

I saw a sawbuck on the table just before I saw the door.  I'll give old Red credit though, because I felt a lot better after the first one, and the second made me feel almost human again.  I chased it all with Genesee Cream Ale.

And that's the cure.