To get into the abbey, you have to make it through The Foyer of Follies. What, you ask, is the Foyer of Follies? Why, it’s a deep-steeped high rise of fizzy follies. It’s a bit of a chiller but mostly a sauna. The nuns run hot and cold through this foyer, but they always do it with a cup in hand and a saucer flying high!

The nuns take their follies, their fizzies, and their foyer very seriously, but this is mostly because the Shabby Abbey foyer is a high security TEA ROOM.

Only those with a reverence for the nunhood, a tingling sense of humor, and a devout commitment to “all things tea” are granted permission to sip their way through the folly of this foyerly maze. Think Lewis Carroll meets Sister Act meets All In The Family meets Nabokov meets the Ladies Who Lunch.

There are passwords to get in, of course, and more than that, but entry is determined by the nuns’ collective ability to read your mind: if it’s on tea and it’s loving, you’re in!

Many consider the Tea Foyer a portal with the ability to transport visitors to heavenly realms, but only a love for tea, Readrrr, will land you a place at the Tabernacular Tea Table.

The nuns are not, I repeat: not, tea snobs. They are not into tea snobbery and they are as (n)unladylike as can be when it comes to tea. They do not steep their tea properly, they are firmly against the use of timers, they are always making spills and splashes, and they overdo it to the -nth degree when it comes to sugar and, especially, cream. They do not abide by prim and proper etiquette standards of any kind– they are bombastic but creative vernacularians, and they shove a lot of crude crumpets into one another’s mouths. These are little known facts, however, because the nuns keep it “all in the foyer”, but…enter: me.

I’ve created this cyber tea foyer to tell you about the nuns’ exploits with TEA. The old tea hogs do not want you to know about any of this, but I’m a probationary little nun and an itty bitty spy, and I like a good tea heist. Telling you what the nuns don’t want you to know, in this case about tea, is my job!

I have made it my job because the nuns…the nuns do ALL kinds of things with tea of which you could never even dream, and they do it with flare (literally, sometimes).

To do my job will be to tell you about what the nuns are drinking. Tea. They are always drinking tea. But I will give you more: the goods, and I will fill you, Readrrr, in on the details about the tea finds and even the tea happenstances.

I wish I could tell you about the “leaf of the week” but we’re very poor and very busy here at the Shabby Abbey, so I’ll have to start slowly and tell you, creeping leaf by creeping leaf, about the metaphorical liquid gold that makes its way into the holy blood stream of the tealeaf-loving and -reading nuns. And then I will tell you about the whacky things it causes them to do and the loony circumstances that arise out of the union between the nuns and their tea. It will be fun, as the nuns, even in their saddest, maddest state -which is constant- always have fun! (Which came first: the rhyme or the reality? The nuns love to riddle around with questions like these while they are chugging down the tea.)

This is by way of introduction. As soon as I get my spy gear set up in the foyer, I’ll tell you tall tales and steamy stories about the nuns and the teas!

Oh, and if you’re a tea-toter and you want the nuns to try your tea, I can sneak your leafy wares into the abbey foyer and report back on the reactions and madness it induces, but you’ll need to get a hold of me (easy teasy). Send the password (hint: I just used it) to me here: Top Secret Tea Portal. The nuns will drink ANY kind of tea; they’ll even try tea that tastes like motor oil.

NO HOLDS BARRED, when it comes…to nuns and tea.