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Welcome to Dedicated. I'm your host Doug Brunt. Today we're with Alyssa Wilkinson. She has been a

correspondent for Vox. She's written for Rolling Stone magazine. She has been on the juries for

the Sundance Film Festival and the Hampton's International Film Festival.

And she's a film critic for The New York Times. On top of all that, she has written three books.

Her latest just out is We Tell Ourselves Stories, Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, which I loved.

It's a fascinating look at decades of American history through the medium of film and Joan Didion. Alyssa, welcome. Thank you. I'm so glad to do this. Oh, this is great to have you here. Now, I am also fascinated by your drink choice, the Gibson. Is this actually your favorite drink or is this something you thought we just sort of give it a whirl today? Oh, no, it's my favorite. I don't order it all the time because I've definitely had

bartenders say, oh, yeah, we can make that, and then I see them go back behind the bar and, like, Google the recipe. But it's always been my favorite. And in fact, these are all my favorite versions of the ingredients. So we're in great, great tape here. Hendrix is my choice. Well, it's actually pretty darn simple to make.

It is.

It's just, I don't know, like, when you get to the end of it, do you actually eat the onion?

I don't know. Okay, good. Hendrix is my choice. Well, it's actually pretty darn simple to make. It is.

It's just, I don't know, like, when you get to the end of it, do you actually eat the onion? I do. Yeah. I do so. I'm going to follow your lead on all of this. Yeah, I think it's, you know, sort of like a dirty martini, but with onion instead of olive. All right. Yeah. Not only is it a first for the show

It's a first in my entire life, so I'm excited to...

Amazing. Well...

Do you put, like, you know, with a dirty martini, there's a little olive juice that goes in. Should I be doing that with the onion? You can do that. It depends on who you feel about onions, personally. People have feelings. Well, I'm going to do what you do. Okay, great. Yeah. Just a, yeah. I'm a real believer in, you know, the, the, uh,

martini kind of isn't too vermouthy by the end of it. So you've done it correctly.

Okay. Yeah, I go kind of. The joke about you should just sort of whirl it around the canister.

My dad had this whole joke that I told to someone on the show, and he didn't think it was that funny. But the joke is that some guy goes in the bar and he says, don't put any vermouth in there to the bartender. Just whisper of vermouth over the shaker. Mm-hmm. You know this joke? Yeah, so the guy makes the martini and he says,

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