(Click to Enlarge)

Harper Lee has been on my mind recently — ever since seeing her portrayed in Capote a few weeks ago.

But tonight she came to mind in an unusually perverse way. I found myself wondering if there was a cocktail called Tequila Mockingbird. There had to be, right?

Turns out there are a bunch of them. They all start out with tequila and lime juice, but the last ingredients vary:

• tomato juice
• green peppermint liqueur
• green creme de menthe (2)
• white creme de menthe (2)
• black currant-flavored liqueur & apple cider
• triple sec, blue curacao, OJ, cranberry juice

That’s not a complete list, I’m sure, but it’s what I pulled from the first page of Google hits. The green and white cremes de menthe each occurred on 2 pages, so I think creme de menthe, generically, wins the competition for genuine recipe.

That image in the upper right is from MAD magazine issue 289, September 1989. Because Google reads PDF files, and because I run Google Desktop on my MacBook, and because I have decades worth of back issues of MAD magazine stored on my hard drive, the top hit for “tequila mockingbird” was for this panel from MAD289.pdf.