Martinus

On their first appearance in May, the Canadian clowns did a 14-minute parody of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar called Rinse the Blood Of My Toga. Wayne, draped in a toga, sidled up to an ancient Roman bistro and said, “Let me have a Martinus.” Shuster, togaed as a bartender, corrected him, “You mean Martini.” Wayne snapped back, “If I want two, I’ll ask for them.” / Overnight, New York bars were calling a single Martini a “Martinus.” And all over the U.S., people were echoing the line of Caesar’s wife, “I told him. I said, ‘Julie, don’t go!’”

An intellectual type we know stopped in at a bar the other day and asked for a martinus. “Don’t you mean a martini?” asked the bartender. Our egghead looked at him coldly. “If I had wanted two,” he said, “I would have asked for them.”

A Harvard freshman stepped into a New York bar and said, “One dry martinus.” / The bartender grinned. “I guess you mean a dry martini, don’t you?” / The freshman shook his head. “If I wanted more than one,” he cracked, “I would have asked for them.”

I cheated on the zucchino. Normally I would say zucchini, but I couldn't bring myself to write that when there was only one of them. (Gimme a martinus!) I should have added, by the way, that this is the vegetable that's called a courgette in England.

> Wouldn't "macaroni" already be plural? One macaronus, many macaroni. / Dunno. I'll have a martinus and think about it.

> ...it's amore! Thank, you, thank you very much. I'll be at the Palace all / > week. Buy that man in the front a martini! / > / > EdB / Thanks, but I'll only have one, that'd be a martinus then, painfully dry.

>That doesn't sound all that bad, but then anything / >would be an inprovement^([sic]) on a martini. But you'd have / >to put enough blueberries in it to kill the taste of / >the gin. / >Kate / i must confess i'm not a martinus drinker either.

If you send me a photograph of a snifter of your brandy, I'll photoshop it into a martinus with a marischino^([sic])-cherry-onna-stick and send it on to Princess O.