Alcohol doesn’t kill people, people kill alcohol

Nothing should surprise me anymore, but one booth at the recent National Restaurant Association Restaurant Hotel-Motel Show took my breath away. It was promoting Alcohol Killer, for “all those who want to enjoy moments of careless fun (and) don’t want to suffer the unpleasant consequences of excessive alcohol consumption.”

Such as “residualalcohol in their blood.” Hmmm, could we be talking about trying to avoid DUIs on the way home from the bar?

The headline on the front of their flier read: “Waaan allkkahool kilaaa, presse.” The translation for those not familiar with the way a drunk speaks was printed below in parenthesis—(“One Alcohol Killer, Please).

The product is from Austria and imported by a company based in Cleveland. I’ll give you the Web site here, if you promise you’re only logging on out of curiosity, not to order a case or two. Promise? OK, it’s www.alcoholkiller.com. Be sure to click on the British flag if you want to read it in English.


Interviewing Carly

For my very first newspaper story, I had to sit in a police station and interrogate law enforcement officers for hours. I was a 20-year-old college student and my assignment from The Davis Enterprise in Davis, Calif., was to break the story on the dumbest excuses speeders gave officers in an attempt to get out of a ticket. OK, so it doesn’t sound intimidating—actually they were pretty funny, such as the woman who broke the law in order to get home to use her own bathroom—but as the daughter of a career military officer, I had an unhealthy fear of authority figures.

When I first started to cover foodservice in the Twin Cities, Chef Andrew Zimmern intimidated me, and yet today I refer to him as a friend—not to his face, mind you, but certainly behind his back. Especially now that he’s a frequent guest on “The Tonight Show.”

But nothing prepared me for how intimidating Hewlett-Packard’s former CEO Carly Fiorina would be. Fiorina, the keynote speaker at the Women’s Foodservice Forum’s annual leadership conference in Orlando, is someone I admire. I had requested an interview, not thinking she’d agree. But as she finished her panel discussion on negotiations, I was whisked off to wait in a backstage room for my 15 minutes with fame.

She was dressed in a black suit with white piping on the lapels that probably cost more than my youngest child’s education. And she was tiny—working-out-in-the-gym tiny. (I know journalists rarely describe what businessmen have on, but that’s because most of them don’t wear anything interesting.)

I was promised 15 minutes, but because she was running late, she told me she’d give me five. I posed a couple of gender-related questions, and then asked what she disliked being asked. “When we get lazy and ask the gender question,” she replied.

Great, not only was I lazy, I was out of questions. To her credit, after a couple of seconds of dead air, she added, “but, of course, this is a women’s conference...”

The point she was making—if I may be so bold as to speak for Carly Fiorina—was that we shouldn’t be asking about a person’s gender, but rather about his or her contributions. It’s a question of substance, said the woman who sits on 12 boards and left HP with a multi-million-dollar severance package.

I agonized through another four-and-a-half minutes and then mercifully it was over. As she signed a copy of her book for a WFF staffer, I made idle chit-chat with a man who standing around waiting for her—asking if they were going to take in the sights or head straight home. Fiorina looked up from her book and said matter-of-factly, “He’s not my husband.”

I had met her husband while I was waiting for her, and she was right. This man was not her husband. In fact, he looked nothing like him. Fortunately, I hadn’t gotten around to asking him what it was like being married to a powerful woman. I think he would have felt the need to slap me on behalf of Fiorina’s real husband.

As I left the interview, I was awashed with the same feeling I had all those years ago when I interviewed the police officers—I wanted to surrender my fake ID before they asked me for it.