Feb. 1 marks the date of the first dinner party that five political friends and I disrupted- – in a creative way. Was it really 53 years ago?

Couldn’t be.

It was a time when important men brought their Mrs to formal dinners.

It was a time when women wore long gowns and white gloves.

It was a time when iceberg lettuce salads, Thousand Island salad dressing and Parker House rolls ruled.

It was the night of Feb. 1, 1973…

The unionized University of Toronto groundskeepers were picketing because of U of T’s plan to contract out their jobs.  A number of us, in the Canadian Liberation Movement, decided to picket with them in front of U of T’s main administrative building, at 215 Huron Street.  Some of us were students, like Pete, who was at the business school—before it was called Rotman.  Myron, was a social work student. Others, like Larry, my husband, were alumni.  I was neither a student nor a graduate—I was living on UI (the old term for Unemployment Insurance or EI) and working full time for the Canadian Liberation Movement, which was left-wing and pro-Canadian union. CLM was to the left of the Waffle which had been ejected from the NDP because the Waffle had a more radically left-wing agenda than what the NDP could stomach. 

In Nov. 1972 at Queen’s Park, Jack McNie Ontario’s minister of Colleges and Universities tries to address student protesters. The Tory government increased tuition fees by $100 a year. 500 students protested, many came in busloads from outside Toronto (credit: Frank Lennon, The Toronto Star)

The university’s board of governors decided to put an end to the picketing.  They called the campus police who basically encircled us picketers and began to beat us.  A couple of us saw a police phalanx marching up Huron St. so we ran off and hid, but those left behind were punched, kicked and then arrested.

The arrestees were held in police cells at 52 Division on College St – at the time the downtown tough-guy cop shop—at least that’s what we were told. But those arrested were forced into a worrying situation: in an entirely unrelated incident, someone – a real baddie – had killed Toronto a cop that day.  So the police were ‘triggered’ (to use a term from today) to act more viciously toward our people than we had expected. 

Gathering at 4 pm that frigid and snowy day, the rest of us realized the arrested men were still in jail.  52 Division was notorious for being a violent and merciless place.  How serious could the charges be anyway?   We demanded all those arrested released. 

Former downtown Toronto police station, #52 division. Built in 1894, before it was a cop shop it was a men’s athletic club, featuring Toronto’s first indoor swimming pool.

We six women who were left behind made a plan. 

The dinner party at Toronto’s Hyatt in Yorkville

That evening, Jack McNie, Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities had invited all the Ontario university and college presidents (and their wives) to a dinner to celebrate something or other.  Of course what they were celebrating had nothing to do with the round up and arrests at the U of T a few hours earlier.  Few diners had even heard about it– until they got to the dinner. Still the dinner party guests were our targets. 

Floating stairway up to Ballroom. Hotel driveway with valet service

Ballroom minus the white table cloths

In our big winter coats and boots, six of us rode the glittery escalator up to the ballroom on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the first towering hotel in Toronto’s Yorkville. It’s now called the Park Hyatt Toronto.

We wore scarves and mittens.  When we entered the room we women didn’t look like banquet servers; we looked lost or out of place.

One of us, Denise, went to the standing microphone just to the side of the dais.  I saw the amused looks of the diners wondering if this was going to be a stand-up comedy routine, or some college kids playing a prank.

To find out how to set a table for a formal dinner watch this hilarious video

Denise read a long speech, which all six of us had had a hand in writing.  We demanded the men be let out of jail, the charges be dropped and that U of T reverse its decision on contracting out the groundskeeping.

At first we just stood flanking Denise to get our bearings. Then we fanned out into the ballroom, our coats open and hair flying.  We pulled the white linen tablecloths off the round banquet tables like magicians.  But there was no trick – the wine glasses, the half-empty soup bowls, the plates and cutlery went flying – mostly onto the diners’ laps.  Women guests jumped up and screamed when the first course of dinner got dumped in their laps.  But we pressed on.  At one table I saw David Archer, then-president of the Ontario Federation of Labour and his wife, who had a bee-hive hairdo.  They looked scared.  There was the former city mayor— Bill Dennison, the first NDP mayor since 1935, along with his wife.  I also saw my alderman Fred Beavis and his missus.  There were at least 25 tables so we had to work fast. 

Angry men tried to drown out Denise at the microphone.  Some shouted to drown her out—one tried to grapple the mic away. Women in formal wear were crying about their stained dresses—their gloves splotched pink with spilled wine.

The Bouncer was the size of a door…

Finally security came. The half dozen suited men, each as big as a door, grabbed us in their giant paws and half-carried us out through the swinging doors into the kitchen.  Once in the kitchen, we pushed the dozens of individual salads off the trays stored on metal racks; chopped lettuce and quartered tomatoes flew everywhere followed by iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing.

The back door of the kitchen was the door to the fire escape.  The bouncers  pushed us onto the outdoor landing, a couple of us tripped down a few stairs at the top.  The bouncers yelled, “We’re calling the police.”  But they never did.

We marched down the slatted metal stairs to the ground – I remember there being a lot of snow on the ground.  It was still freezing cold.  We laughed and laughed.  We found out the men had been released, but the charges against them were steep. Months of preparation for trials were ahead of us. 

(I’ve published this column before — in February’s gloom, it’s worth reposting with some minor updates. )

Featured image above: The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist American artist Judy Chicago 1974-1979, mixed media. Brooklyn Museum. (photo credit @JudyChicago) The installation depicts place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was first exhibited in 1979. Although initially galleries would not show it, ultimately it toured to 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents to a viewing audience of 15 million. A bit dated now, more recent critics say the place settings reveal too many vaginas, and not enough women’s faces.