It was coming up to be my birthday. Some people don’t like to celebrate their birthdays, but I love to make a big deal out of it.
I was turning 22 or 23 (it doesn’t really matter after 21) and I decided that I was going to have a tea party. I had been doing self-taught calligraphy and buying weird old tea sets from thrift shops in the area. Therefore, I had all the makings for a fancy tea party with fancy invitations.
My band mates, I, and another musician, lived in a tiny house on a tiny street. There were 4 of us total. Each of us had our own room. Mine was the back room with the water heater. It was so small I put up ceiling corner hammocks (normally used for extensive stuffed animal collections) to hold my clean and dirty clothes.
The Lincoln house, as it was called, was a great place to live. It wasn’t unusual for us to be drinking, smoking pot, or jamming (that means playing music). And so this tea party was obviously going to be more than just drinking tea–especially since it was going to be my birthday.
I bought some fancy cards to make the invitations, and did all the invitations by hand with my calligraphy pens. On the back of all of them I splattered ink so that when you put all the invitations on the floor together they would all fit together like a puzzle. I also gathered my European and Japanese tea sets.
I invited. I think, 8-10 people. It wasn’t going to be a big party like we normally had. And I wanted to make sure that people didn’t come that weren’t invited. This gathering was going to be a bit different. It was crucial that I knew exactly who was eating these scones and drinking this tea. Because… I baked hallucinogenic mushrooms into the scones.