"I’b biserable," I shnuffled from my sickroom-sweaty side of the bed. Dan didn’t answer. "I’b biserable!" I shouted, then broke into a coughing fit of such violent proportions that, well, I’ll spare you the details – not that I don’t want to describe my mucus with the vividness and color one associates with a great travelogue or restaurant review, but it would be edited out anyway on grounds of revulsion. Dan came rushing in from the living room. I was wiping something yellowy-chartreuse from my upper lip. "You’re a mess, honey," he said, quoting Dietrich in Touch of Evil.

"Da-a-an?" I cooed.

"I know that tone," he said warily. "What do you want now?"

"A hod doddy."

"A what?"

"A hod doddy!" I said before expelling more green stuff from my lungs.

"Oh, a hot toddy. I have no idea how to make one. You’re the cocktails guy."

I wasn’t fond of this aspect of Dan’s personality – the willful ignorance of domestic tasks. Three Harvard degrees, a job that demands brilliance, research grants so plentiful that they remind me of The Producers (50 percent of his time gets charged to this grant, 30 percent to that one, 40 percent to another, a little 20 percent grant to top it off....). And he can’t sew on a button, locate a colander, or bake be a dabbed hod doddy!

"Neber mide," I said. I wrapped myself in a heavy hooded robe that made me look like a Trappist, shuffled into the kitchen, rooted through the liquor cabinet, and promptly knocked over the bottle of herb-infused Absolut I’d made in the fall. "Shid!" I cried after the glass shattered on the merciless tiles. What was left of my Scarborough Fairs spread quickly across the floor. Dan, contrite at forcing me to make my own drink, kindly offered to clean up the mess. When I returned to the kitchen, the only remnant of my delightful autumn tincture was the faint aroma of rosemary.

"Dis id de way de world will end – not wid a whimper but wid a hideous and defeadig crash," I said sadly and snottily. I found the bourbon and gripped it like a barbell dangling over my head.

You can make a hot toddy out of practically any liquor, but the darker ones – whiskey, bourbon, scotch, brandy – are the classics. You can also use hot tea as a base. But I like cocktails to be cocktails and tea and coffee to be just tea and coffee. (There will be no Irish Coffee column, for instance, because it’s repugnant.) And I only drink hot toddies when I’m sick. The combination of those good old-fashioned cold fighters, honey and lemon, with a scientifically proven germ killer, bourbon, works best for me when I’m hacking up thick, slippery blobs of sputum that look like somebody made Jello out of thin, rotten pea soup and.... oh, right. Forget it.

The hot toddy

Boil 1/4 to 1/3 cups of water. Into a mug or heatproof glass, pour enough honey to coat the bottom. Add 1 or 2 teaspoons of lemon juice, and give it a stir. Pour in the amount of bourbon you think will kill enough germs to make the drink seem healthy. (Most recipes call for two tablespoons, but that’s like taking an antibiotic for which the bacteria is thoroughly resistant.) Pour in the boiling water, stir, and enjoy the drink’s curative effects.

Heads in the Clouds: The Aviation

"So, mutatis mutandis, the LGBT community..." Ted was lecturing about marriage equality from his podium on our living room couch.

"What?" I blurted. Cocktail "hour" was pushing 90 minutes. I should have served the lamb stew and couscous already, but I couldn’t get out of the chair.

"The gay community must shift its praxis from the dystopic to the...."

"No, before that. You said ‘mucous mucandies.’ What the hell does that mean?"

"You have a Ph.D. and you don’t know what mutatis mutandis means?" He was appalled.

"Fuck you," I explained.

We’ve been doing this for years. We’re all academics or ex-academics. Dan has three degrees – B.A., MBA, and Ph.D. – all from Harvard. I have a Ph.D. from Columbia; Ted has one from Princeton and teaches at NYU; his partner, Eric, has an M.F.A. from Columbia and taught at Wellesley but now writes screenplays that actually get made into movies. You may have caught the farcical Brainiacs on cable; Eric wrote it. This dinner party demonstrated where he got his material.

We were flying on Aviations. I was in avast liquor emporium on the Upper East Side last week – I rarely go up there, since I’m deathly allergic to cashmere sweaters and simple strands of pearls – and saw Creme de Violette on the shelf with a little printed recipe for the Aviation. Maraschino, was nearby. I bought both.

By Maraschino, I don’t mean the syrup in which innocent cherries are drowned in artificially flavored, carcinogenically colored sugar water so children can have their first drug rushes. I mean the clear cherry liqueur, which Italians make from Marasca cherries and their crushed pits. Et la Creme de Violette? Yes, it’s really made from violets and thus wins the title of The Gayest Liqueur Ever, there being no Creme de Pansy.

I played around with the recipes I found online at the marvelous blog www.sippetysup.com, where I learned that the drink has the reputation of being a 1930s cocktail, but it actually dates from 1916, when only a few people ever saw an airplane, let alone flew in one. In those days, flying into the sky in a technological wonder seemed miraculous. The Aviation celebrates that magic. It has by far the loveliest color of any cocktail I’ve ever seen – watercolor-pale lavender. And it’s extraordinarily luscious. Now that air travel is like taking the bus, except that the bus is on time, the aeroplanes’s early thrill is long gone. Unless, of course, you make yourself and your smarty-pants friends Aviations, in which case you’ll all quickly be even higher than your IQs.

The Aviation (a variation on the classic)

Note: Martini glasses are much larger now than they were in the early 20th century. This recipe fills one 2011 glass or two old-style glasses.

Half-cup of Beefeater gin

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon Maraschino

1-and-a-half teaspoon Creme de Violette

Half-teaspoon "really" simple syrup – mix equal parts sugar and water in a jar and shake until the sugar dissolves

Chill the martini glass(es).

Put all ingredients into a cocktail shaker and chill in the freezer for five or 10 minutes.

Take glass(es) and shaker out, add a few ice cubes to the shaker, and shake as though your life depended on it. Strain into the frosty glass(es) and hope that a few shards of ice rise to the top.

Ed Sikov is the author of Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis and other books about films and filmmakers.