Word: martini
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...Well, to put it honestly and rather unflatteringly, I am one of those people who could really use a drink now and then to smooth out the sharp edges. Always self-conscious and tongue-tied at critical social moments, I imagine that a martini might mitigate my wallflower fate, or at least give me something to do with one of my hands. In addition, I will never have a convenient excuse for questionable judgment. These little advantages that the acetaldehyde dehydrogenase-endowed take for granted are to me like warm rays of social salvation, without which I have become etiolated...
What's more, who's to say that we, like our grandparents and great-grandparents in the Depression, couldn't use a little glamour amidst the gloom? It's worth remembering that Hollywood's tuxedoed, martini-soaked movies about the carefree rich gave people an escape that helped get them through the 1930s. A-Rod and Klum may not be Astaire and Rogers but Miami Beach wants to help us forget our troubles for an hour...
...Fleming's Bond either. The early novels were intended as light entertainments; they inhabited a world in which an überstud with refined tastes (the right car, martini recipe, cigarette) also accessorized by bedding beautiful, willing, duplicitous women; it's no coincidence that 007 and Playboy were the prime male icons of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Bond occasionally engaged in fisticuffs with a brigand, but that was just a different kind of workout. As played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore from the '60s through the '80s, Bond greeted each new threat to his life with an upper-class smile...
...shaken vodka martini era in Bond films lasted almost 25 years, until Daniel Craig took the role of Bond in 2006's Casino Royale. Reverting to the original recipe from Fleming's first Bond book, Craig's 007 ordered a drink he dubbed the Vesper - a hybrid martini that is three parts gin and one part vodka, mixed with a half-ounce of Kina Lillet. Ordering the drink, Bond's words in the film were an exact echo of the dialogue in Fleming's 1953 Casino Royale story...
...Vesper Martini (Casino Royale): Three ounces of Gordon's gin, one ounce of vodka , half-ounce of Lillet Blanc, shake over ice and add a slim slice of lemon peel...