The Doom or Destiny of the Ladies Tea Party

Are women more powerful together? Is it punk to have tea parties and collaborations? Did a young man need weeds to disrupt the manicured lawn of religion? Did trauma take a toll? Did the weeds bring life back? Yes.

At the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, London a very curious tea party took place in 1980. The Ladies Tea Party was hosted by Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry. In attendance was Chrissie Hynde, Siouxsie Sioux, Viv Albertine of the Slits, Pauline Black of The Selecter, and Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex. Kate Bush had been invited as well, but couldn’t make it.

Two photographers, Michael Putland and Chris Stein (and former partner to Debbie) documented the iconic tea party photographically.

Besides iconic images, not much is known about the actual discussions over tea, sandwiches, and cakes. In an interview with the Telegraph, Debbie Harry does briefly mention it as one of her happiest memories.

“I really wanted to get together with all the punk females for an afternoon of celebration,” she explained. “It’s a great memory.” If you did that today, I say, you would need more than a hotel room. “I would need a hall!” she says, laughing. “It has changed a lot. It’s really grown, hasn’t it?”

One of my favorite books is Alice in Wonderland. In the Mad Tea Party there are a lot of word games and challenges to Alice at the tea party that is beyond just the silly, but something poignant. The principals that govern and offer order to Alice’s world outside of Wonderland are arbitrary and it is in the disruption that conventions are questioned and discoveries into wonder are made.

Each one of these women were challenging conventions and showing that the music industry’s male dominance was arbitrary and the order needed to be disrupted.

These women laughed and enjoyed each other’s company knowing their very presence was a disruption to order. But it is not the only time Chris Stein and others would capture them in rooms together. Central to most of these other photos were Debbie Harry and Joan Jett.

Iconic images of Debbie Harry and Joan Jett can easily be found from 1977 through 2017. Over 40 years of friendship as they connect. Joan Jett in a radio interview once spoke of their decades long friendship.

“I just loved seeing another woman in rock ‘n’ roll with a strong attitude. She had an edginess, which I could relate to. There was anger, there was tenderness, happiness, all the same things that are in a lot of rock ‘n’ roll music, but I also saw frustration at not being taken seriously.”

They found themselves connected together and their influence and presence would be felt by others. The pictures by photographers over the years tell the tale. These women in photos include not only the members of the famous tea party, but include (but are certainly not limited to) Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, Patti Smith, and even Brooke Shields.

We don’t know all the stories, but I can give you one. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill had Joan Jett reach out to her early in her career which would lead to a decades long friendship. Hanna even flexed her writing muscles co writing some of Joan Jett’s 1994 album, Pure and Simple.

Kathleen Hanna on Joan Jett:

“When you feel like everyone is coming after you and telling you that you’re not the right kind of feminist or you’re feeling like you’re starting to be rejected in the scene because you’re getting too much attention… and also there’s all these male voices telling you that you’re a fake band, you’re a novelty and you can’t sing…Your songs are stupid. To have someone like Joan Jett say, ‘You matter. You fucking matter. I’m going to champion you.’ She championed so many women behind the scenes over the years, you don’t even know. At people’s worst moments, she’s there. It meant everything to me. She was totally willing to show me everything she knew about recording.”

Joan Jett and Debbie Harry were at not only each other’s shows, they were present for the sets and events these other women were at. And these other women of punk and modeling? They were at the events of each other as well. And there was time to have a drink, smoke a joint, or even have a tea party.

This matters. Be it an icon or a friend, that face in the crowd can inspire and give you hope and that inner strength to finish your set even if you do not believe in yourself or the sound if off or crowd energy is low. And then, like Joan Jett and Kathleen Hanna, it can go into the studio and you learn from each other and collaborate.

This sets a tone that changes things and makes a difference. The beat still marches on. Next week’s Fem Friday will feature a Gen Z all girl punk band inspired by the Gen X women of Bikini Kill. Bikini Kill saw them and held space for them as they march forward even younger than Joan Jett and the rest of of the Runaways were when they stormed the stages in the 70’s.

I sometimes hear Joan Jett fans say Blondie sucks or a Souxsie fan call Bikini Kill sell outs or some other combination of vile opining. If you do not groove to the tunes, that is fine, but you are insulting the sisters of your favorite artist. They stood in the trenches together, had tea together, and disrupted the order together. Honor and respect that. Their collaboration is what makes a difference, your snobbery and elitist attitude is part of the problem that holds women back.

Intersection and together is what is needed. These women in music spoke to me. Their fans changed my life and even after they were no longer in my life, the music of the icons remind me of the women I knew. Maybe we did not get to have a large tea party together, but they were all present in my life and my heart together as they are in your hearts now.

Debbie Harry will always be connected to a woman I loved named Cassie. Joan Jett is connected to Sarah. And all the other women I wrote about were connected to this story in the garden of life that comes to an end too soon sometimes.

Summer break from Bible College was when I met Sarah. It was also the Summer I turned 21. She lived in Youngstown Ohio and I was near Chicago. 400 miles apart.

We met at a Joan Jett concert and she took me back to her place and I did not come up for air for five days. She had a hard childhood as the daughter of a pastor and my intent to become one scared the shit out of her. When I came home from Ohio, I hung out with my friend, Catalina, who took me to an early Riot Grrrl event in Chicago inspired by Bikini Kill. With Sarah in my head and meeting the women of early Riot Grrrl and reading the Zines, the spell of my controlling and manipulative religious world was coming undone again.

I had decided to leave Bible College and I wanted to see if there was something more to Sarah and I. It took me weeks, but I finally called her and told her I wanted to go further down this rabbit hole. She did too.

I had told her about the Zines and the concert I went to and Bikini Kill. She knew exactly what I was talking about and said to me, “If Joan Jett had a long lost little sister, it would so fuckin be Kathleen Hanna. They’re sprit animals and Joan was a Riot Grrrl before the term existed.”

She loved talking music with me in our phone calls and letters that started becoming a regular thing. But there was also some important conversations when we weren’t talking about tunes or having phone sex.

As a pastor’s kid of an abusive Assemblies of God pastor, she knew the world I was leaving.

“Those assholes are gonna shame you and some of the shit they’re gonna say will cut deep, Pat. Your gonna wonder if your offending god or risking hell. Have they told you I’m Jezebel planted by Satan to get you off the road yet?” She said in one of our conversation.

“The ministers don’t know, the profs don’t know. But some of my ex friends do and they said that shit. I heard it before a few years ago over a girl.”

“I’m not the only Jezebel to get you off? Tell me about this chick!”

I told her about the girl I dated 3 years ago named Cassie. How we met at the mall we both worked at whenever I got smoothies at Orange Julius. A photoshoot I did for her that went south due to trauma she had. How when we started dating we encountered one of Cassie’s rapists and he turned out to be a powerful and influential man at my church and they tried to silence us by intimidating me.

Then Cassie had a mental health episode and in the wake of that her Aunt prevented us from continuing to see each other again. Then I told her about the events after that where I was manipulated into thinking I was called into ministry.

Sarah listened to all of it for almost two hours (that was an expensive long distance phone bill). I had not told the girlfriend I dated in between Cassie and Sarah any of this, but I wish I had. I told Sarah that as well and how I thought I blew that relationship by being a scary weird Bible boy.

“Fuck…” Sarah said after I was done. There was a long silence.

“Yeah. I said.”

“I get it,” she said.

“You do?” I asked scared out of my mind.

“Yeah. My dad goes to conferences by that pastor that tried to shut you down. He’s as dirty as they come and I’ve heard the backroom discussions my dad and his jag off friends have as they manipulate the masses. I get why you didn’t tell the other girl about Cassie.”

“You do?” I said again.

“Yeah,” She said. “Your secular friends ‘in the world’ don’t know how fucked up church life is. You tell someone not in that world that you pray in tongues and last Sunday 3 demons were cast out at the evening service it ain’t gonna play well and you know that. You also know on some level the shit you are seeing…the rape, the gay hate, and the other shit isn’t normal or right. They trained us to coax people into our world. Pat. Did you try to convert her?”

“Which her?” I asked.

“The chick you dated this year.”

“No.” I said.

“I want you to count to ten and tell me why you didn’t.”

The tears were on the edge as I answered after a 10 count beat. “I was trying to protect her from my world. I didn’t want her to experience anything like Cassie dealt with.”

“You’re not the monster you think you were. They fucked with our heads.”

Before we called it a night in that call, she said one more thing.

“I told you once not to say something when I last saw you. Remember?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You don’t say that shit to someone you only knew for five days. Especially when they’re as confused as you are.” She said.

“I get that, Sarah.” I replied.

“We’re moving fast and the odds of it being happily ever after’s not likely. But I like it now. How about you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You can say it now. I might even say it back if your lucky.” I could hear the red lipstick grin over the phone.

I did. She did too.

I went to the record store my Riot Grrl friend, Catalina, worked at a week before Thanksgiving. Catalina has been getting the play by play of me and Sarah. When I got there she took a 15 minute break and we went to the TCBY by the record store and caught up.

I told her that I was driving to Youngstown to spend Thanksgiving break with Sarah and she was very happy for me.

Then I gave her other good news. I was not just attending the Bible College. I was also going to a local Junior College since in district credits were cheaper than the private school. The counselor and I worked out a plan to take my credits from both schools and apply some lifetime achievement credits for the work I did for a local paper as a photographer. End of this semester I will have what I need for an associates in photojournalism I can take with me to Ohio in Spring.

“I’m so proud of you Pat!” She exclaimed.

“You are?” I asked.

“You’re braver than anyone I know to walk away from those religious nuts! I want all the dirty details when you get back from Ohio!”

“Deal,” I said.

“And I better get comps for one of Sarah’s band’s shows next year!”

We hugged and she went back to work.

I met Heather in the most dramatic of fashions a few years before all of this. She had been kicked out of her house at the mall while I was at work. Her crime was being bisexual. I helped her reconnect with her dad in Madison Wisconsin and we have been friends since. My going to Bible College put a strain on the friendship. She could never understand why I would want to go into that world after what the church we were both connected to did to her and to Cassie.

I did not have the self awareness to explain that it was a trauma response to manipulation after losing Cassie. I had not told her the things I had told Sarah as deeply. But my leaving that world had her feeling safe to be my friend again and for us to close the gaps fall of ’89 though ’91 had created.

I had called her a few days before Thanksgiving and gave her all the updates I gave Catalina.

“How do you feel about Sarah saying this might now work out?” I head concern in Heather’s voice.

“It’s honest and I like it.” I replied.

“Go on.” she demanded after a silence.

“Remember how they told us that when we date we are looking for our future spouse in youth group?”

“I didn’t go as often as you did, but I heard that once and it sounded weird.” She said.

“Well, this is hard to admit, but I bought it hook line and sinker. Every girl I have dated since I was 16 I was thinking of as a possible future wife.”

“That’s creepy, Pat!” Heather said. “You know that’s creepy, right?”

“I do now! But they messed with my head and Sarah was raised that way as a pastor’s kid.” I explained. Then I continued.

“So this is the first time I’m dating a girl and we’re dating. That’s it. And without that pressure I’m just thinking about her. I’m with her now and not projecting this other thing and I like that. Does that make sense?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeah it does.” Then she continued.

“You saved my life when you hardly knew me. You were my hero longer than you know. And right now, you’re my hero again! I’m proud of you.”

The day before Thanksgiving I had a quick good morning call with Sarah. I was going to drive to Youngtown and get there around midnight. She said she was going to hang out with some friends but would make sure she’s home before I got to her apartment. She told me we were going to fuck each other’s brains out, sleep in, and go to her friend’s apartment for thanksgiving dinner. The plan was on.

I loaded a bag in the trunk of my Thunderbird, put my gold Seiko watch on the rear view mirror so I could see the time…and stared at the watch. I remembered my watch on Cassie’s wrist. Her grabbing my wrist to look at the time. A flood of memories from a scant few years ago rushed into my head as I looked at the watch. I knew I had to go to the mall.

Norah was a model friend of mine who worked cosmetics at Marshall Field’s in the mall. She had been a dear friend of mine at the mall when I was dating Cassie, a partner in crime in a side hustle I had with keychain photos, and worked with me to help a model named Jenny who was deaf get the support she needed to get work.

I entered the mall hoping that Norah would be at the cosmetics counter. She was there applying makeup to a woman who had 2 other women with her. She looked up at me and her face lit up. We had not seen each other in over a year. She excused herself and gave me a huge hug.

“Stranger!” she said. “I’ve missed you! Look, I can’t get away, but do you want to grab a drink and talk in a few hours?”

I told her I was on my way to Ohio for Thanksgiving. She said that I have to come back to see her when I get back. As I was getting ready to leave, she gestured for me to look to my left.

The model we had helped, Jenny, was right in front of me. Not her in person. But her face in a backlit cosmetics display for a line of in store cosmetics. “Holy shit!” I exclaimed.

“You helped make that happen, Pat! I’m proud of you!”

I left the department store and decided to get a smoothie at Orange Julius. It was where Cassie used to work. I stared at it. The girl behind the counter was someone I did not know. There would be no banter. No blue eyes. She would not know my order. It would not be the same. It would never be the same.

I felt peace and anger as I thought about her and all the memories. We were kids. We did nothing wrong. Just two teens who were caught up in a horrible dramatic world created by adults who hurt her and manipulated me.

They were wrong to hurt us. I knew that now.

It was time to go to Ohio.

I was proud of myself.

400 miles is a long drive. It is even longer when you have not seen someone you desire in months. I got there by 11 which was an hour earlier than I said I would be there. I was not surprised to not see Sarah’s car in the parking lot of her apartment building in Youngstown. Most of us did not have cell phones back then, so I just waited. It has been a long drive and I feel asleep in my car.

At about 2 in the morning there was a loud knock in my car window as I heard my name being called out. It startled me awake. At my driver’s side window was one of Sarah’s friends. She was a bandmate’s of Sarah’s. Her eye makeup was streaked down her cheeks from tears.

I rolled down the window and asked what was going on.

“Sarah was in a wreck! It’s bad!”

I was not allowed to see Sarah and since me and her friends were not family, we were not getting any information either. I spent Thanksgiving working the staff as best as I could to get someone to give us information.

Her injuries were serious and she was not conscious. That was all we got. No one knew how to contact her family. I told them her dad was an Assemblies of God pastor. One of Sarah’s friends knew what High School Sarah went to. I do not know if that was not enough for them to find her parents or if they did find Sarah’s parents and they just never came.

I never left the waiting room and kept trying to dig for information. At some point I called Heather from a payphone to ask her if she had ideas. She had none and told me she was worried about me and asked what hospital I was at.

The day after Thanksgiving I saw a doctor and 2 nurses talking and one of the nurses kept motioning towards me.

The doctor walked over to me and I stood up. He asked if I was Sarah’s boyfriend. I said I was. I don’t remember his words, but his eyes were kind. He told me that Sarah had died from her injuries. I asked if I could see her. The doctor said that I had been through enough and he didn’t think it would be good for me to see what happened to her.

I felt the world spin and my knees buckle as tunnel vision set in and I collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration in my sleepless and foodless hospital vigil.

I woke up in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm and I felt a hand squeezing mine. Heather was sitting next to my bedside and her dad standing above her. I stared at her and started sobbing and screaming. She held me. I kept crying.

I didn’t want to feel this and I didn’t want my friend to let go.

Then I felt her dad come around the other side of the bed and hold me too. He kept whispering into my ear that it was going to be okay. But it wasn’t okay and this was unbearable.

It was one thing too many and it broke me.

It is hard to say what had happened after that. There was trauma for me and I made the mistake of reaching out to my church for comfort. They gave it with open arms and manipulation that convinced me through pastoral counseling and a Christian “counselor” who was not a state certified clinician that God was trying to get me back. Sarah and the girlfriend before her and Cassie and my love of photography were distractions from God.

I would go on to become a conservative minister and even worse, I would be emotionally broken for decades without the proper resources to regulate and heal. When you already have mental health concerns and you live in a world where mental health issues are merely a God issue and not a science of the mind and emotions issue, you will just keep getting worse and worse and self image with the message that you are nothing without God and so many other things, it was a hard road back.

But I was always inside fighting to come out of this broken shell I was in. I made incremental steps in my beliefs between 2008 and 2013 that would lead to me finally escaping from the toxicity of the streams of religion I was connected to. 2013 through 2019 was freedom from religion but the steps towards emotional healing were not where they needed to be until I made the best worst mistake of my life. A failed suicide attempt would be the trauma rock bottom where I would finally start on the mental health path I needed to be on.

I don’t get to have those decades back and I do not know how many years are left. But I know that each woman I wrote about the last few months were seeds in my life that stayed inside and helped me crawl my back to the surface. Some would say they were weeds.

I do not remember who said it to me, but someone told me Sarah and Cassie and the other girlfriend were weeds in God’s garden. And he is right. They were weeds. They were dandelions!

Dandelions are easily available sources of food for pollinators in Spring that the entire planet requires for life. Bumblebees, honeybees, hoverflies, beetles, butterflies, goldfinches, house sparrows and more.

A dandelion has wide-spreading roots that loosen hard-packed soil and aerates the earth reducing erosion. The deep taproot pulls nutrients such as calcium from deep in the soil and makes them available to other plants. While small minds think they are a lawn killer, dandelions actually fertilize the grass.

Dandelion leaves are used to stimulate the appetite and help digestion. Dandelion flower has antioxidant properties.

I will take all of this over the well manicured lawn that is the religion I came from. They would call these women weeds that need to be pulled and we lose so much beauty and life because of it. The dandelion’s saved my life even when one lost her life.

Do you know what else dandelion’s make?

Tea for a tea party.

Dedicated to Erika

Every Feminist Friday is Dedicated to my friend Erika!

Erika died on Christmas leaving behind a family that has immediate needs.

Click here to read the story of how Erika saved my life when we were teenagers.

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