Welcome to the Midsummer Night’s Tea Party! I’m sharing this post with the PARAYOURNORMAL Blog Party…
Lewis greeted his guests with a Cheshire Cat on his shoulder and a choice of tea “With or without?”
“With or without what?” Alice replied with a whimsical smile.
“With or without consequences and hidden agendas, of course. What else could I mean?”
“Oh. It could have been sugar and milk, or lemon, or a shot of whiskey or…”
“My tea always comes with a shot of whiskey. Without it I cannot write poetry. It comes in handy when hunting Snark—but that’s another tale entirely.”
Alice gulped. She’d dressed for a tea party and now feared that she should have spent her time looking through the looking glass instead of preening at its surface reflections. Life was so complicated and Lewis was turning out to be a challenging host.
“I didn’t know you wrote poetry,” was all she could manage to say as she took her seat. Her mind was racing, popping in and out of bushes like a rabbit. “I thought you were a novelist.”
“I’m the novelist!” A little brown doormouse popped his head out of the top of an empty teacup. “I’m enraptured with the NOVEL—the strange, the peculiar, the original…. So therefore I’m the NOVEL-IST at this soiree. The rest of you…” He sniffed the air. “The rest of you smell of familiar stories told long ago and again and again.”
“Not that again,” the Hatter rolled his eyes. “Original, peculiar, strange…. Me? I like a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
“But how do you know how to end a story?” Alice asked with genuine curiosity.
“You begin at the beginning and go until you get to the end—and then you stop! It’s as easy as that.” Lewis replied for everyone at the table.
When it was time to go, Alice rose to leave, pausing undecided as to which way to go.
“I can’t go back to yesterday, I was a different writer then!”
“Then sit back down; join us for another round—of tea and whiskey and cake. We’ll toast the Solstice and see what kind of writer you’ll make.”
LOVE it, Candy!
This one really resonated. Not only do I think I’m a different novelist as each day (or at least book) passes, but the Victorian era, when Lewis was writing marked the replacement of the poem by the novel as the highest regarded form of literary art.
I did not know that about the Victorians. Thanks for adding to my growing interest in all things Victorian!
Love it! Great post. 🙂
Thanks! Enjoy your tea and stories.
Very whimsical! One of my favorite scenes in Alice in Wonderland is the “mad tea party.” Now I need to get myself some treacle. 🙂
hehehehe… I love the word treacle and it is one of the sweets like “Turkish Delight” that turned up in classic literature when I was a child (“The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe) that when I tried in life, fell short of the excitement the words inspired. All these years later, Turkish delight is delightful, but treacle… maybe I”m due for some too? We are and are not the same people we were then. Lewis was right and not right…. sounds very much like Alice!
Had me smiling from word one. Brilliant! 🙂
Thanks. It’s amazing how much that scene is imbedded in all our imaginations! There seems to be an invitation to do a riff on it.