Tea for More than Two

For generations, girls have dressed up in their mothers' old fancy dresses and held parties with friends real or imaginary drinking tea, lemonade, milk, punch or nothing at all from tiny china cups or plastic replicas.

Today, girls can share a cup of tea in a real tea parlor or, perhaps, in an enchanted forest. The girls are participants in a merging of two trends that began late in the last century: English-style tea parlors and themed parties for children.

On a bright spring Saturday, the two trends come together in the Vintage Rose Tea Room in Fresno, Calif.

Thirteen girls anxiously line up outside the dressing-room doors. One by one, each girl steps nervously into the middle of the wood-paneled room. The other members of Brownie Troop 63 from Tollhouse, Calif., giggle excitedly watching each friend from the doorway.

In the room, about a dozen fancy hats hang on the wall. Many are white; some have tulle or flowers.

On a vanity table, pearl necklaces dangle from a jewelry box. Lace gloves lie daintily on the table while fans and umbrellas stand next to the table on the carpeted floor, ready to accessorize.

Eight-year-old Anna Costello stands patiently as tea-room owner Angie Rivera assesses the girl's size. Rivera looks quickly through a rack of about 100 colorful dresses from the early 1900s to the 1980s, then pulls out an off-the-shoulder emerald green number.

Anna puts on the dress and is also adorned with a string of pearls, then a straw hat decorated with tulle. "It was fun seeing how you looked dressed up a whole different way," Anna says at the conclusion of the tea. "It made me feel like a whole different person. It made me feel like a city girl."

Often thought of as a British pastime, tea drinking originated in China as medicinal. Over time, tea gradually took on social and ceremonial roles, writes Sharon O'Connor in Afternoon Tea Serenade (Menus and Music Productions, $30). Tea comes from the top leaves of an evergreen plant, Camellia sinensis, native to northern India, China and Tibet.

Europe got its first taste of tea from Dutch merchants who traveled to Asia in the 1600s. At first, tea was enjoyed mainly by the aristocrats, but by the early 1700s, tea had become the rage in England. The seventh Duchess of Bedford, Anna, invented afternoon tea in England in 1840 as a prelude to late dinners in well-to-do households.

Anna Costello's taste for tea was inherited from watching her mother, Merrilee, whose aunt and cousins also enjoy tea. "I was exposed to tea growing up," says Merrilee Costello, 42, who's a nurse. "I was raised in the (San Francisco) Bay Area, and we drank a lot of tea. It's a little bit of a ritual. I've always enjoyed the ritual of drinking tea."

At another tea room in Fresno on another spring Saturday, a traditional tea for adults and one especially for their children are conducted simultaneously.

While Makenna Bailey celebrates a belated sixth birthday upstairs with her friends, her mother, Brittney Bailey, chats with the other mothers over tea and lunch downstairs at the Just Friends Tea Parlor and Gift House.

"Interest (in) tea is coming back," says Mary Itskoff, 54, Makenna's grandmother and Brittney Bailey's mother. Brittney Bailey, says Itskoff, "takes (Makenna) to the different tea houses in town and out of town. They didn't have little tea parties when we were little . . . but now, it's wonderful."

Every once in a while, Brittney Bailey sneaks up the stairs of the downtown Victorian home and peeks in on Makenna and 11 of her friends giggling, chatting and sipping daintily from English nursery-rhyme cups shaped like baskets, ducks and clocks.

The girls sit in a room decorated to resemble a forest. A recording of birds chirping provides the soundtrack while figurines of elves and fairies in all shapes and sizes work the water mill, guard a treasure chest or hide in the branches of real trees.

One closet has been transformed into the enchanted kingdom of fairies. "There wasn't anything like that for us when we were little," says Brittney Bailey, who remembers playing "imagination tea parties" with her sister as a child.

Rivera and Just Friends Tea Parlor co-owner Sylvia Disney agree that real tea parties have become more popular recently. Both say most of their weekends are pretty full with groups enjoying teas.

"It's been a growing trend, and it's finally hit here," says Rivera, who started her tea business as Huntington House Tea Room about a year before relocating in a house built in 1907.

Summer and Christmas are the busy seasons, she says.

Brittney Bailey agrees children's tea rooms are the latest thing in themed parties for youngsters. A birthday tea party, she believes, is "a fun little way to act adultlike, even though they are still children. It's a fun way to stretch their imaginations."

It cost $30 per child for both parties, which Brittney Bailey describes as "expensive, but . . . well worth it."

Her daughter, Makenna, says she and her friends won't forget their day in the "enchanted forest." "It was good. ... they all had fun. They liked being fairies for a day," she says.

(Visit SHNS on the Web at www.shns.com.)