June, 2015 - Pat Benatar - Long Island Iced Tea

Pat Benatar

Patricia Mae Andrzejewski (born January 10, 1953 in Greenpoint but then the family moved to Lindenhurst, Long Island), known professionally as Pat Benatar, is an American singersongwriter
and four-time Grammy Award winner. She has had considerable commercial success, particularly in the United States and Canada. During the 1980s, Benatar had two Multi-Platinum albums, five Platinum albums, three Gold albums, and 15 Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits, "Hit Me with Your Best Shot", "Love Is a Battlefield", "We Belong" and "Invincible". Other popular singles include "Heartbreaker", "Treat Me Right", "Fire and Ice", "Promises in the Dark", "Shadows of the Night", and "All Fired Up". Benatar was the first female artist to be played on MTV; the video for "You Better Run“ came on right after “Video Killed the Radio Star”. The Benatar video was specifically chosen by MTV to echo the message to the radio industry contained in "Video Killed the Radio Star", that things were going to change.

 Training as a coloratura with plans to attend the Juilliard School, Benatar surprised family, friends and teachers by deciding a classical career was not for her and pursued health education at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. At 19, after one year at Stony Brook, she dropped out to marry her first husband, high school sweetheart Dennis Benatar, an army draftee; Pat worked as a bank teller near Richmond, Virginia.

 In 1973, Benatar quit her job as a bank teller to pursue a singing career after being inspired by a Liza Minnelli concert she saw in Richmond. She got a job as a singing waitress at a flapperesque nightclub named The Roaring Twenties and got a gig singing in lounge band Coxon's Army, a regular at Sam Miller's basement club. Her big break came in 1975 at an amateur night at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star in New York. Her rendition of Judy Garland's "Rock-aBye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" earned her a call back by club owner Rick Newman, who would become her manager. Catch a Rising Star was not the only break Benatar got in 1975. She landed the part of Zephyr in Harry Chapin's futuristic rock musical, The Zinger. The production, which debuted on March 19, 1976, at the Performing Arts Foundation's (PAF) Playhouse in Huntington Station, Long Island, ran for a month and also featured Beverly D'Angelo and Christine Lahti.

 In June 2010, Benatar's memoir, Between a Heart and a Rock Place was released. It touches on her battles with her record company Chrysalis, the difficulties her career caused in her personal life, and feminism. In the memoir, she is quoted as saying, "For every day since I was old enough to think, I've considered myself a feminist … It's empowering to watch and to know that, perhaps in some way, I made the hard path [women] have to walk just a little bit easier."The book went on to become a New York Times Bestseller.  

The Drink

Long Island Iced Tea

1 oz vodka
1 oz gin
1 oz rum
1 oz tequila
½ oz triple sec
2 tablespoons lemon juice
½ cup cola
Shake the liquors and lemon juice with ice, pour into a glass and top with the cola.

Drinkability:  3
Drunkability:  4.5
Taxic Diversity:  1.5
Accessibility:  3.5
Priority for Conservation:  3

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From "Women of Long Island" hosted by Fluffy Ruffle