Playing with the Counterculture: Shady Sadie’s Tea Room and Beatniks

Members of State's Mates dress as beatniks for the March 1960 program, a skit entitled "Shady Sadie's Tea House."

Members of State's Mates, whether portraying men or women, dressed in a certain way for the skit that they felt portrayed Beat culture.

Props for the skit included candles (like the one seen here), beer cans, and cigarettes.

Gender play was also part of a larger inversion of counterculture undertaken that same year: “Shady Sadie’s Tea Room.”  This program, also put on in 1960, had members of State’s Mates dress up as countercultural beatniks, both male and female, and perform a skit.  Through their representation of a radical counterculture, State’s Mates were able to simultaneously “tame” it and experience it for themselves.

Beatniks were associated with the literary movement of the “Beat Generation,” including authors such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, but some Beat writers were careful to distinguish themselves from the beatniks who claimed inspiration from them.  This distancing had already begun by 1960, to the point that one author claimed that the whole idea of a beatnik movement had been manufactured by the media.  Yet Beat writers and beatniks came from a common cultural ferment that sought to create spaces where individuals could safely challenge the increasingly suffocating conformity of the 1950’s.  The most common form of portrayal of the beatnik was in one of these safe spaces, often coffee or tea houses, where “week-end Bohemians” could assume a different identity.

Shady Sadie’s Tea House was supposed to be a parody of just such a space.  As with the Womanless Wedding, all that remains of the program are photographs.  However, because the program was held in 1960, at a time when Beat authors were already distancing themselves from the movement, beatniks had lost much of their original dangerous edge.  They were safe enough to be parodied by an organization of student wives, and through associating themselves with the beatnik movement, members of State’s Mates were able to make beatniks even safer.  At the same time, as with other inverting cultural practices, State’s Mates were able to participate, even in the most vicarious sense, in a movement that challenged much of what their very organization embodied.

Visit other Exhibits in the Good Wife Diploma.