The Mad Tea-Party

A parody freely adapted from chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

(Scene: Alice finds the Hatter and March Hare with Dormouse asleep between them. They sit crowded together near one corner of a very long table set for tea.)

Hare & Hatter: No room! No room!

Alice (sits at the end): There’s plenty of room.

Hare: Have some wine.

Alice (looks around): I don’t see any wine.

Hare: There isn’t any.

Alice: Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it

Hare: It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited.

Alice: Is this your table? It’s laid for a great many more than three.

Hatter: You foreigners always move in.

Alice: What? I’ve never been out of Oxfordshire.

Dormouse (in his sleep): Talk English!

Alice: Exactly so.

Hatter (looks at his watch): What day is it?

Alice: 15 July 1862. Everyone knows that.

Hatter: Wrong! (to Hare): I told you butter would ruin the works of this watch.

Hare (dips watch in tea): I used the best butter.

Alice (looks at watch). It tells the day of the month and not what o’clock it is.

Hatter: Why should it? Does your watch tell the time of day?

Alice: If I had a watch.

Hatter: Just the same as mine.

Alice (politely): I don’t quite understand you.

(Hare pours hot tea on Dormouse’s nose.)

Dormouse (asleep): My remark, too.

Hatter: There’s too much change anyway. We need to go back to the way things were and meant to be.

Alice: As they were when?

Hare: They keep trying to change the Constitution.

Alice: What Constitution?

Hatter: Our rights! Don’t you know?

Alice (recalling school lessons): Certainly. Magna Carta, 1215; the Bill of Rights, 1685. Which time do you want?

Hare: I only wish it were a matter for wishing.

Alice (persisting): But, which?

Hatter: We would keep it 1685 as long as we liked.

Alice: Is that the way you manage time?

Hatter: Not I. It was last March that the Hare went mad.

Hare: He started it, singing in front of the Queen.

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
When you here have gone too far!’

You know the song perhaps?

Alice: I’ve heard something like that.

Hatter: It goes on –

‘Up above the world you fly,
While the tax hits ev’ry guy.’

Dormouse (still sleeping, joins in):

‘Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle ...’

Hatter: I’d hardly finished the first verse, when the Queen bawled, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head.’

Alice: So savage? I can’t imagine the Queen saying that!

Hare: So every since, it’s been 1685 at 6 o’clock.

Alice: So that’s why so many tea things are out here.

Hatter: That’s it. It’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles and whens.

Alice: So you move around as things are used up. What happens when you come to the beginning again?

Hare: Suppose we change the subject. Tell a story.

Alice: I’m afraid I don’t know one.

Hare & Hatter: Then Dormouse shall! Wake up!

Dormouse (drowsily): I’m awake. I am awake. (clears throat) Once there were three sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle well.

Hatter: I want a clean cup. Everyone move on one place.

Alice (looks at the place she would take where the Hare has upset the milk jug into his plate): Mr. Hatter, you are the only one to get any advantage out of this move.

Dormouse (drifts off again; mumbles): From the well they learned to draw everything beginning with an “M,” ... muchness ...

Alice: I don’t think -- .

Hatter: Then you shouldn’t talk.

Alice (in disgust, walks off): I’ll never go there again. It was the most foolish tea party I ever was at.

(Hare & Hatter try to put Dormouse into the teapot as the curtain falls.)
____
© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.

For a review of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, see Read in 10.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.