Absinthe the Green Fairy.

Banned for a century for inspiring madness and murder, absinthe is legal again. So pour yourself a glass and get to know the real Green Fairy.

Perhaps you already have your own absinthe story. You drank it in New Orleans one foggy night, too full of fumes to remember much aside from the cloudy green swirl of the drink as water drip-dropped into the glass. You smuggled a cheap bottle back from Spain and brought it out at cocktail parties like a magic trick. You tried it at a party where someone mixed a batch in the back room, and it was caustic stuff, as mean as moonshine. You sipped it in a gloomy underground Czech bar, where everyone looked like spies, and the bartender lit the sugar cube aflame. Or perhaps you've never even touched absinthe, maybe you just read about it, and became interested in the lore of the Green Fairy -- how it was a muse to the artists of the belle epoque, how it made people mad, made them hallucinate, made them slaves to the drink, how it drove Van Gogh to cut off his ear. Perhaps you don't have a story about absinthe at all.

Well, now would be a good time to get one.

Absinthe is legal in the United States for the first time since 1912, the year it was banned in America.

Evidence of its current chic can be found at Employees Only -- a charming roaring '20s-style bar in New York's West Village -- where a handsome Serbian bartender named Dushan Zaric (who also co-owns the bar) makes a variety of asbinthe cocktails for me. And, much as I do like straight absinthe, I find these mixed drinks easier to sip socially; they demand a little less of my attention. There is my favorite, the Billionaire Cocktail -- 107-proof bourbon, homemade absinthe bitters, lemon juice and homemade grenadine. There is absinthe and champagne, crisp and effervescent, a drink reputed to be a favorite of Ernest Hemingway's. It's hard to imagine absinthe could ever be the next vodka and Red Bull, but if people caught on to how good these drinks taste, it might be more than a mere trend.

Nobody's predicting a drink once fabled for inducing madness will take over the glitzy table-service clubs of L.A. anytime soon. But you know what? If that happened, I would totally start watching "The Hills" again.

Sarah Hepola Everything you know about absinthe is wrong.