I haven’t yet mentioned my friends’ newest tradition that started this fall—the tradition of Sunday Tea. Hosted weekly at my friends’ Leigh and Tyler’s apartment, everyone shows up at seven p.m. and stays as late as they want. It’s like a party, with a twist: rules. Lots of them.

The rules are simple: No drinking. No drugs, except the occasional cigarette smoked out on the fire escape. No cell phones (not even for texting or Twittering). No music. No television, movies, games, computers, or cameras. Just tea and conversation. (Full disclosure: I had to write some things down on my hipster PDA that I intended to Twitter later, or to respond to in my personal journal. . . and I almost got into trouble for this.)

Leigh and Tyler started Sunday Tea with friends during their freshman year in college. Most of the initial participants were indulging in way more liquor than was safe or healthy (read: they were drunk more nights than they were sober), so this was a voluntary way for people to engage with each other without the aid of liquid courage or pharmaceutical or psychedelic alternatives.

I attended my first one last week, and the second one Sunday night. I made some observations:

It was really weird to be around my friends in the evening without drinking. In my memory, this is the first time any of us had hung out together without a drink in at least one of our hands. My friends drink a lot, and and it’s clear that alcohol is a stronger social glue than any of us ever realized.

Likewise, music is a really easy unifier. When I’ve arrived at a parties in recent weeks, it’s really easy to feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be without actually engaging with anyone. How?I just start shaking my ass to whatever music is playing. Bonus points if the music is notably amazing (which Leigh and Tyler are also good at—hosting parties with amazing music, that is).
But the music, however amazing, keeps you from really communicating during a raging party, except in the interim when you’ve gone to smoke on the roof or freshen your drink or run to the bodega for more beer or a snack. In those cases, your conversation tends to be much more trivial, usually relevant solely to the topic at hand or how you’ve been since you’ve seen them last (or occasionally, later in the evening, how much you’ve imbibed and/or how drunk you’re feeling).

Unlike party conversations, these conversations got way deeper than anything else we’d ever really touched on—pretty fast. Before finishing our first cups of tea, we’d touched on parenting and corporal punishment, the role of fashion in the sign/signifier continuum, where we’re ever possibly going outside of New York, and what comprised our most valuable possessions. These are conversations I’ve never successfully had at a party where music is thumping and you have to scream over it and dodge flying cups of keg beer. And while that’s definitely fun (just ask me what I did last Friday night [hint: it included bed-jumping, paparazzi-ing Misshapes-style photos of everyone present, and screaming lyrics as I ran with my best friends through the streets of Brooklyn]), this was a different kind of fun. Two sides of the coin, two ends of a continuum. You know.

Of course, I’d done this before for school- and work-related stuff, in the form of leadership retreats and training sessions, but those kinds of activities were usually geared toward the completion of a goal: planning an event, learning to make really great marketing materials, getting to know each other better with the express intention of working better together. In this case, though, the conversation was rambling and directionless,which I liked.

Do any of you ever engage in this kind of activity—one in which all the distractions are forcibly removed and the mandatory activity is predominantly conversation and little else?

Related posts:

  1. Throwback Thursday: Reflections on Sunday Tea
  2. Sunday Survey – 1.24.2010