To close out the thread, here's some shell snippets that produce an nginx binary with libdrizzle statically liniked in:

<snip>
curl http://agentzh.org/misc/nginx/ngx_openresty-1.0.9.10.tar.gz | tar -zxvf -
cd ngx_openresty-1.0.9.10
curl http://agentzh.org/misc/nginx/drizzle7-2011.07.21.tar.gz | tar -zxvf -

# build librizzle statically
(cd drizzle7-2011.07.21 && ./configure --without-server --enable-static && make libdrizzle-1.0)
find . -name libdrizzle.a -exec cp {} . \;
export LIBDRIZZLE_INC=`pwd`/drizzle7-2011.07.21/libdrizzle-1.0/
export LIBDRIZZLE_LIB=`pwd`
./configure --prefix=/data/local/nginx-resty-1.0.9.10 --with-http_drizzle_module --add-module=$HOME/src/third-party/nginx-gridfs --add-module=$HOME/src/third-party/nginx_upload_module-2.2.0 --with-ld-opt="-Bstatic"
gmake

[david@dev-3 ngx_openresty-1.0.9.10]$ ldd build/nginx-1.0.9/objs/nginx | grep drizzle
[david@dev-3 ngx_openresty-1.0.9.10]$
</snip>

Huzzah!