Introducing
Surrealist Times Dinners
A Collaborative Endeavor
between myself Tony(a) Lemos & Carlos Uriona , Cultural Strategist at Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield
The Dinners
Beginning Tuesday, January 21st—the day after Trump’s second inauguration—an invitation-only dinner series will quietly unfolded in Conway, Massachusetts. One or two people each week are invited to the Surreal Times Dinners—an intimate evening of shared food, conversation, and collaborative art-making.
Each dinner will center around themes of action, hope, gardens, community, and creativity, with guests invited to take part in a rotating series of surrealist games—Exquisite Corpse, among others. These gatherings are part-performance, part-art project, and part-record—a living archive of this uncanny moment in history.
The dinners will continue weekly, for the duration of Trump’s second term or until no longer necessary.
Every six months, all previous guests will be invited to return for a community meal in nearby Ashfield—a reunion to rekindle dialogue, witness each other’s growth, and continue weaving a collective thread through surreal times.
How to get an Invitation:
Curious to attend? Fill out this google form and you’ll be added to the pool. When your name is drawn, you’ll receive an email with a date—at that point, you may accept or decline.
While I cannot cater to specific dietary preferences, please let me know if you have any serious allergies.and when your name comes up you will receive an email invite with a date. At that point you can accept or decline the invitation.
The Details
Location: Conway, MA (exact address will be provided with your invitation)
When: Tuesday evenings, 6–8 PM
Guests: Two people per week, selected at random
Attire: You are warmly encouraged—but not required—to arrive as your alter ego. Dress up, dress down, come as you wish. Surrealism thrives on the unexpected.
What to bring: Nothing is required. But if you feel moved to, bring something you love: a dessert, a bottle of wine, fresh flowers, or something you’d share with an old friend.
The Why?
Because why not?
In times like these, growing community is not a luxury—it’s vital. These dinners are a quiet, radical act of presence: an attempt to document our lives from the inside, as dominant narratives try to erase or rewrite our stories.
Personal storytelling is a form of cultural survival. It helps us retain our traditions, languages, values—and offers future generations a more complete picture of the world we’ve inhabited. Through these shared meals, we create space to hear overlooked voices, amplify resilience, and build connections that foster empathy, healing, and action.
To sit at a table together is to remember our place in a long lineage of kitchen-table revolutions.
The Harlem Renaissance began with a dinner. On March 21, 1924, an unprecedented interracial gathering brought together W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Carl Van Doren, and emerging writers like Countee Cullen. It was an evening that helped spark a cultural movement.
History often begins in kitchens.
Surrealism as Resistance
The Surreal Times Dinners are also a creative act of resistance and documentation.
Inspired by the collaborative spirit of the Surrealist movement—which thrived not in isolation, but in community—these evenings tap into the power of gathering. Surrealism asks us to look sideways at the world, to find beauty in the absurd, to resist the rationalization of everything, to believe in magic, to play.
It is in the unexpected, the uncanny, and the overlooked that transformation takes root.
The inspiration
This project is deeply inspired by the friendships of three Surrealist women—Remedios Varo, Kati Horna, and Leonora Carrington—who, like myself, were European immigrants living in Mexico City in the 1940s. They lived a “lifestyle of surrealism,” blending the mystical with the mundane. Much of their creativity bloomed around the kitchen table, where they shared meals, discussed feminism, alchemy, art, and played practical jokes.
Their lives remind me how friendship and creativity can become lifelines in surreal times.
Another enduring influence is The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago—a piece that marked my coming of age when I first encountered it as a teenager. I like to imagine two of her guests—Sappho and Aspasia—as spiritual ancestors. My maternal grandmother, also named Aspasia, was from Anatolia. She too was a teacher, a metic—a foreigner in her own land. That resonance lives on in this project.
Did you know Salvador Dali and his wife Gala (Elena Ivanovna Diakonova) began hosting a series known as “Les Dîners” beginning in the 1970s in Paris, they were meant to shock attendees in the most delightful ways. sometimes with absurd presentation, or wacky recipes there was a surrealist twist on every aspect of the evening. (this was the beginning of the Salon movement)
What about the little know secret journal called "De Schone Zakdoek" translated to "the Clean Kerchief" a secret journal published by Gertrude Pape and Theo van Baaren in 1941 during Nazi Occupation of Netherlands. It documents a time through art /literature/ poetry that came about from monday night gatherings in Gertrudes flat where she and her friends engaged in discussions/collab art and occationally seances.
These Surrealist times
History repeats.
The 21st century has been a surreal cascade—contested elections, terrorist attacks, endless wars, economic collapse, glimmers of hope, waves of authoritarianism, a global pandemic, and a million lives lost.
We are living in a time of profound separation—from self, community, nature, and each other.
As a community herbalist and healer for over 25 years, I’ve come to believe that separation may be the most devastating illness of our time. And in this dopamine-driven, screen-soaked culture, we are starving for slow, embodied connection.
So I’m inviting you to sit down at a real table, in real time, for a surreal meal.
Let’s gather.
Let’s remember.
Let’s make something strange and beautiful together.
Curious? Want to receive an invitation—or nominate someone you love?
Other ways to support this (on going) project:
Are you an audiophile or videographer willing to donate your time?
Are you knowledgeable about grants/grant writing and know of the perfect grant for this project
Spread the word, do you have a friend who you think would make a great guest, have then fill out the google doc/
List of Random (thrifted) things I am looking for:
Adult sized wooden chairs (all wood),
Full sized manequins
Full Sized Mannequin legs
Monetary Donations:
One time donations of any amount/ or Become a friend of the Project (be listed as a friend on the website and all final materials and pledge a monthly donation of $5/$10/$20 (venmo/paypal/stripe)
