Suzette Field.

Suzette Field was born in 1978 in Los Angeles. One of her earliest memories is sitting on Michael Jackson’s lap in his studio while he was recording Thriller. In 1996 she moved to England and rented a derelict 3,000 square foot warehouse on Kingsland Road in Shoreditch which she converted into a cinema with pre-war sofas for seating. In 1998 she bought a five-storey disused Georgian property on Shoreditch High Street at a pre-Hoxton boom price and restored it to its former glory with a 25 seat cinema on the ground floor. The renovated building, Time for Tea, received wide coverage in the style press, including a 10 page spread in The World of Interiors.

Her career as an impresario began in 2000 as a founder of The Modern Times Club, a legendary retro night which Tatler dubbed “the Rolls Royce of cabaret” and launched acts such as the Puppini Sisters and Paloma Faith. In 2007 she brought her expertise to the nascent Last Tuesday Society, a ‘pataphysical organisation devoted to “exploring and furthering the esoteric, literary and artistic aspects of life in London and beyond”, and helped expand it from organising tea parties and lectures to being one of London’s premier promoters. Their events, which range from masquerades to crying parties to seances and nights of jazz age decadence, now attract audiences of up to three thousand revellers. In 2010 Suzette curated the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Renaissance Galleries in 2010 with a masked ball for 12,000 people.

In 2009 The Last Tuesday Society opened its first permanent home: a shop, art gallery and museum on Mare Street in Hackney. Designed in the style of a 17th century Wunderkabinett, the shop sells a wide variety of curiosities including 19th century shrunken heads, taxidermy, narwhal tusks, carnivorous plants and articulated skeletons. This unusual collection has attracted a long list of celebrity clients. In 2010 Jane Goldman, wife of Jonathan Ross, bought a two-headed foetal skeleton from the shop, which achieved nationwide press coverage (and featured as a question on Have I Got News For You). The Society will be opening a pop-up branch of its shop in Covent Garden in November 2012.

The Last Tuesday Society also hosts weekly talks on a wide range of cultural and literary topics as part of the Hendrick’s Lecture Series. Past speakers have included Dan Cruickshank on Sex in 18th Century London, Andrew Graham-Dixon on Caravaggio and John Julius Norwich on Venice.

Suzette Field is also a graphic artist and is the creator of the Society’s online identity and esoteric party invitations. She lives in North London and has a fourteen year old daughter, Tilly, whose list of accomplishments eclipse that of her mother and most of the rest of us.