12 Bottle Bar

By Lesley Jacobs Solmonson

Near, far – whenever you are…

In this, the first official stop in our self-styled Year of the Doctor, we’d be remiss if we didn’t pick one of the juicier points in history to kick things off.  So, here we go:  1912.  Why 1912?  As years go, it was a pretty bang up one.  The Republic of China was established, as were Paramount and Universal Pictures.  Piltdown Man was discovered (only to be, forty years later, revealed as a hoax).  Julia Child, Charles Addams, and Gene Kelly were born.  The Oreo cookie was invented.  T. E. Lawrence was poking around archeological expeditions in the Middle East, quite unaware of how life-changing his knowledge of the area would soon become.  And, of course, let’s not forget the folks over at Downton Abbey, who we first met when they found their lives shifting dramatically as news of the RMS Titanic sinking reached them.

And so, the Titanic.  This year – April 15^th, to be exact – marks the 100^th anniversary of the epic end of the great ocean liner. Rather than rehash that tragic tale, we’ve chosen to celebrate the remarkable ship herself and how she symbolized the Edwardian era itself — a period fat on the rewards of industrialization and fascinated with opulence, yet struggling with social equity.  It is rightly called a second “gilded age”, when the surface of things was exquisitely polished, covering the tarnish beneath.  And, while scholars put the end of the Edwardian era as anywhere between 1910 and 1919, it is not hard to see how the sinking of the Titanic defined a generation and signaled a loss of innocence and a change of seasons to come, much like the Kennedy assassination defined a very different generation. Read More…