Ingredients

2 ounces gin -- London dry gin

1/2 ounce lime juice

1/2 ounce Chambord liqueur

Collins glass

Instructions:

Shake well with 4 to 5 ice cubes in a chilled cocktail shaker, then pour unstrained into a Collins glass and top off with cold ginger ale. For a Florodora Imperial Style, replace the gin with cognac. It's more expensive that way. Chorus girls like that, so they say.

The Wondrich Take:

A brief burst of clicks, pops, and hisses and then the voice: "Sextette from Florodora -- 'Tell Me, Pretty Maiden' -- Columbia Records." Then the sprightly tinkling of a piano and the singing starts. First the men, in close harmony: "Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?" At this, the girls chime in, not without yowling a bit: "There are a few, kind Sir, something girls, and cockatoos." Okay, that last bit might not be quite accurate, but the sonofabitch was recorded a hundred and two years ago, on wax. A relic. And yet, as it plugs along, voices swooping and burbling in and out of comprehensibility, an inkling of a suspicion takes shape. It starts with the men asking just what these something something girlies do. When the ladies get to wondering "how far such fellows can really go," it's more than an inkling. By the end, we know. The girls chirp out, "For I must love some one." The boys ask, "Then why not me?" -- eliciting the reply, "Yes, I must love some one, really, and it might as well be you!" That's right. Free love. Smut.

In 1900, Florodora, a thoroughly silly bit of musical fluff imported from the London stage, opened at New York's Casino Theater. Monster hit. It wasn't the plot, which involved perfume manufacture, phrenology, and a skein of tangled attractions, set half on the fictitious Philippine island of Florodora and half in Wales. (Wales?) It wasn't Leslie Stuart's music, although that was popular enough to make him rich. (He blew it all in the approved manner, on champagne, horses, and chorus girls.) It wasn't the leads, the dancing, or the scenery -- not the fixed scenery, anyway. You see, Cyrus W. Gilfain, who owns the island of Florodora, has a daughter, Angela. And Angela has six friends who go everywhere together. Six well-developed young friends with shapely ankles, who happen to all be brunettes five feet four inches tall, with a penchant for dressing in identical costumes. In an era when sex was sex and public entertainment was most certainly not sex save in the most abstract terms, the "Florodora Sextette" was hot, hot stuff.

The six girlies involved -- Daisy Green, Marjorie Relyea, Vaughn Texsmith, Margaret Walker, Agnes Wayburn, and Marie Wilson -- were catnip to New York's rich young (and not-so-young) sports, and they knew it. Wilson parlayed a stock tip from James R. Keene into a $750k score, and then turned around and married his horse-racing pal Frederick Gebhard. Green caught a Denver financier, Wayburn a South African diamond magnate, and Texsmith a silk manufacturer, all seven-figure men, natch (and this was before income tax, mind you, when a million was a million and no foolin'). Marjorie Relyea won out with a Carnegie, who promptly died and left her a pile. We don't know exactly what happened to Miss Walker, but Broadway legend has it that all six pretty maidens married millionaires; the odds are certainly in her favor.

If ever there was a show that demanded a drink to commemorate it, it was Florodora. Some New York knight-of-the-bar, realizing that, set the bottles dancing to such good effect that we regret deeply history didn't see fit to preserve his name. It's like not knowing who invented vanilla ice cream, or frilly undies. So maybe history's got its priorities wrong -- why do death-merchants like Nobel, Messerschmidt, and Maxim (as in gun, not the fratboy rag) deserve commemoration, and not benefactors like our Florodora man? But we digress. If we don't know who came up with this fragrant, seductive and -- over the long haul -- lethal formula, at least we do know that they were serving it over the bar at the old Waldorf-Astoria, which was to millionaires as Florodora was to cuties.

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