La Cieca isn’t sure how all this sorts out or how it relates to opera, but as she understands it, the show our JJ is working tonight at Splash Bar New York (“Dorothy Bishop: Sexy, Sassy and Starving” at 8:00 PM) leads directly into another event that involves free booze.  

This “other event” is a launch party for Zwack, to be hostessed by Hedda Lettuce. Now, Zwack, for those of you not so in the mixological know, is the American brand name of an herbal liqueur known in its native Hungary as “Unicum.” La Cieca swears she is not making any of this up, and indeed, here is a brief history of the potable as quoted from the Zwack website.

For two hundred years, the Zwack family has been obsessed. Obsessed with a dark brown bittersweet liqueur distilled from herbs called Unicum. The first Zwack, Royal Physician to the Habsburg emperor can only have been obsessed to have invented such a complex recipe. If you take out one spicy ingredient from the over forty herbs it all collapses like a pack of cards. “Das ist ein Unikum!” was the emperor’s comment, thus giving the most popular drink of Hungary its name. The Zwack family comes from the giant middle-European melting pot that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.