CHEERS.(The Talk of the Town)

It's lucky that dolls can sit still longer than human beings. If a doll bellies up to a bar and orders a beer, she'll have to wait while the bartender puts three drops of resin into a miniature stein, adds a dot of yellow dye and three drops of hardener, and then stirs the mixture sixty times with a toothpick. If the doll wants a convincing head of foam on the glass, it's easy enough for the bartender to make one--all he has to do is flick a little spackling compound on top--but, unless the beer has already hardened for a day, the foam will sink to the bottom of the glass.

There were no actual dolls at the miniature Bar Scene workshop that took place recently in the SoHo suite of the Marriott Marquis hotel, just thirteen amateur miniaturists and their teacher, Barbara Fales. Fales, who lives in Florida and teaches workshops at miniature conventions around the country, is known as a pioneer of miniature-cocktail making. She makes doll-house food as well. "People say I make the best apples they've ever seen," she said. For this workshop, she had brought along acrylic strawberries, cherries, and olives, all packed in the kind of plastic capsules that are generally used for cold medication. Each strawberry was the size of a mouse's eye. The ice for the drinks was the size of pretzel salt, and a cautious taste revealed that it was salt. (You can also make doll's ice from the packets of silicone crystals that you find in shoeboxes.) The drink straws were so tiny that if they fell into your purse--which happened to one student--you would never see them again.

Making a miniature drink basically consists of mixing tiny quantities of two-part epoxy with the appropriate coloring. A doll's Tom Collins needs a drop of pearl or it will look too much like plain water; a doll's Pinot Noir needs a pinhead-size fleck of black added to the red or it will look too much like Hawaiian Punch. It's a finicky process that rewards fine motor skills and a fretful, obsessive attention to detail, and--as is frequently the case with miniature workshops--all the ...