V is for Vodka
When two teenagers decide to teach themselves how to drink for the first time, they quickly realize it's not as easy as it looks.

All of us have a story about our first drinking binge. 

Well, ALMOST all. Those who were raised to never touch the stuff are exempted from this woozy tale of woe.

But the rest of us share a common bond; our first experience of consuming alcohol… whether a little or a LOT too much. Getting silly. Then the spins. Capped off by throwing up. 

Ah, good times!  Or, maybe… not so much?

But there’s plenty drama and honesty to be mined from such moments. Both fictionally and in real life.

Take Mark and Juan in Andrew Marshall’s V is for Vodka (nice nod to Vendetta in that title, btw!)

Jumping on a night Mark’s Mom is MIA, the two teens have raided her booze stash to… well, “test it out.”  Neither’s been drunk before, but there’s always gotta be a “first time”. So, why not?

On the counter are a series of opened alcohol containers of different kinds - vodka, rum, whiskey, and gin.

JUAN
Damn dude, is your mom like an alcoholic?
                    
MARK
Shut up. This is a normal amount.
It’s not like she drinks ’em all the time. 
She’s had these for...

JUAN
(interrupting)
Yeah, yeah. I’m just kidding. 
You know I love your mom.

Man, what a way to kickstart the evening… if this is the level of banter between these buds, wait’ll they chug some hard stuff down!

Mark picks Vodka as his first choice, which he picks because it’s LYNDSEY’S favorite. Who’s Lyndsey, pray tell? She’s the girl Mark’s been crushing on. Lyndsey’s kinda the reason he’s conducting this liquid science experiment tonight. Mark doesn’t want to be nervous around her, and hopes drinking might be the magic bullet to cure the butterflies in his stomach.

So he fills that stomach with… what?

Mark takes out two regular drinking glasses and places them on the counter.

JUAN
How do I know how much a shot is?

MARK
I heard it’s like a five second rule.

JUAN
So you pour it for five seconds?

Uh-oh. You know where THIS is going. And when the boys break out the Tequila, things are bound to get even worse.

Mark lays on the bed and Juan lays on the floor staring at the ceiling.

MARK
How do you know if you’re drunk?

JUAN
I dunno. What’s twenty divided by three?

MARK
I suck at math sober. That’s not a good test.

What’s a good test of friendship? Honesty. As they say in Latin, In Vino Veritas: In Wine, there is Truth. And in Vodka, there can be that, too.

By the end of V is for Vodka, Mark and Juan don’t uncover the answers to the universe, or anything even half that profound. But they do share a moment of understated honest emotion that we all can empathize with.. whether we’ve gotten stupid drunk, or not!  

A seven pager in one bedroom with two main characters, “V” is simple. Sweet. And it’ll go down with audiences smoother than any booze in Mark’s Mom’s secret stash!