Lolbrarian was house sitting for her parents in the suburbs of Chicago, and Vlo Grrl was visiting. They had originally planned to go out to a goth club on Friday night, but there was no suitable event. And so this praxis was born. What could be less alike than... a goth club and a suburban garden party?

Unfortunately, the Chicago Foecakes were all busy or bailed at the last minute, and the non-players invited also could not make it. But this actually made our tea party more gothic (goths have no friends, right?). And fortunately, Lolbrarian was able to uh, "persuade" her younger brother to participate.



Here he is. He's an Anglophile and the tea party was pretty easy to sell him on, but not so much with the goth. He claims not to have any really black clothing (despite being a disreputable thespian type) and refused to wear eyeliner, but his shirt has the opening lines of The Illiad in ancient Greek, which seemed pretty goth to us.

And Vlo Grrl and Lolbrarian make up for it in the black clothing department.

How else to make these vastly disparate things more similar?

-White doilies are traditional tea party accessories, but lace is goth.



-Floral tea sets are for tea parties, and cheery yellow flowers are particularly not goth. This, however, is actually a German coffee set imported by Lolbrarian's grandmother, and so it comes from the land of the original Goths, and also the land of German gothic/industrial music and such.

-Goth clubbing is traditionally an evening affair, but tea time is in in the afternoon. We held our party an hour or so before sunset so as to catch both the un-gothic sunlight and the more gothic dusk.

-Croquet is a fine garden party tradition, but we made it more goth by playing as it got dark (this is a great way to lose your balls) and ignoring all of the rules in an anarchic, Calvinball-like version of croquet which occasionally included fighting with the mallets.



-Candles are gothic AND a proper garden party accessory for keeping bugs away!

-All of this food is not very gothic, particularly the fruits and vegetables which promote health and reduce gothic pallor. But one of our cheeses is Wensleydale, which Lolbrarian once heard author Neil Gaiman (a favorite of many goths) name as his favorite cheese (yes, people ask him questions like this). And the scones are blueberry, and cooked blueberries turn a rather gothic deep purple. Also while making the scones we discovered the dough takes on certain sticky, cephalopod-like (perhaps even Lovecraftian) properties. This is pretty goth.



-Baking in general is a delightful combination of goth and not goth-- flour can turn your face a chalky white, but it can also create unsightly white spots on your black clothing!

-Both goths and the Yuppie types of people whom would attend an upper-class garden party are rather aloof. They each follow and adhere to the norms of their own subcultures. They put on airs and have etiquette which makes little sense to Normal Humans.