An Argument for Alcohol

Needlepoint? Sure, if that’s your thing. Trampolining? Sounds fun, until you realize you’ve become less flexible since you were 12. Art museum? Whoa, that would probably require a lot of thinking. For all the alternatives to sidling up to a bar and ordering a Manhattan (fall, winter), a Negroni (spring, summer), or a High Life (is it 5?), does anything beat sitting, slowly forgetting about your spreadsheets, and chatting up strangers? That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is no. “Maybe find time for that new activity before work,” says Jim Kearns, bar director for New York’s Happiest Hour ( happiesthournyc .com), which offers free French fries and a $10 beer-and-shot special from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Thursday. (Take that, vegetable preservation class.) If nothing else, says Jeff Decanio, Happiest Hour’s general manager, bars usually have one summer essential you’re not going to find at an outdoor food festival: “air conditioning.”