More than 11 years after getting sober, memories of my more disgraceful drunken nights can still make me blush with shame. Waking up in a police cell with no idea how I came to be there was a low point and so was being discovered unconscious in the pouring rain under the shrubs in a neighbour’s garden.
In the mercifully rare moments when I find myself dreaming of a drink, it is the thought of such dark times that helps keep me on the straight and narrow. But of one long drunken night I have only the fondest if admittedly befuddled memories.
It happened in 1996 on a press junket. Disney was opening its new animated film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame not in Paris, but in New Orleans, with its famous French Quarter. The screening was in the Superdome stadium, which later became such a hellish place of refuge for many during Hurricane Katrina, and after going back to the hotel to file our reviews, a colleague and I hit the town.
Bourbon Street seemed like a wonderful late-night carnival and there was an extraordinary tall, blood-red cocktail called a Hurricane on sale, deliciously cold in the hot and steamy night that got you high as a kite.
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