Heidi Stevens: Susie Lee, co-founder of Early Birds dance parties, dies at age 49. ' The spirit and the soul of the whole thing'

Heidi Stevens, Tribune News Service on Aug 6, 2025

Published in Lifestyles

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There are moments in your life so powerful, so unexpected, so sensory and beautiful in their raw, unfiltered truth, that you know — even in the moment — you’ll never forget them.

I had one Feb. 8. I was standing inside the Park West theater on a frigid Chicago night with 1,000 other women. We were there to dance and sing and laugh and be home by 10:30. It was Early Birds— a club launched by Chicago friends Laura Baginski and Susie Lee in the back room of a Logan Square bar in 2024. The original idea was to rent out a space, invite a bunch of women to dance, kick things off at 6 p.m., close things down at 10 p.m. and get everyone in bed at a reasonable hour.

Tickets started selling out in minutes. They started hosting Early Birds in bigger venues. They started hosting Early Birds in other cities — Boston, New York, Los Angeles.

On Feb. 8, we filled the Park West to celebrate the one-year anniversary of it all. I was there with a group of 13 friends — women who’ve held each other through divorces and deaths and health crises and AP exams and all the stuff of middle age that leaves you exhausted and wistful and ready to belt out Gloria Gaynor with a whole bunch of strangers.

A couple hours in, the music paused. Baginski and Lee came on stage.

Lee was in a wheelchair, and her voice was gone. She had stage 4 cancer, a fact so entirely incomprehensible that some part of you just refuses to process it. Here was a person who built a space for joy and love and community and dancing — a space for all of us to feel alive — and her life was ending.

The place went silent when Lee took the microphone. With notes on her lap, she whispered a message to us about the power of girlfriends and the beauty of sisterhood and the whole point of Early Birds.

We heard her loud and clear.

“Even in times of s— and despair,” she said, “there’s always room for joy and connection.”

That was the last Early Birds that Lee attended. She died on Aug. 3. She was 49. She is survived by her husband and their 14-year-old son.

“She was just magic,” Baginski told me the day after Lee died.

Lee and Baginski met in high school. They were both editors at their school newspaper in Mount Prospect, Illinois.

“She was the coolest girl,” Baginski said. “She didn’t even realize what a light she was. Gorgeous and funny and smart and talented and so stylish. I was in awe of everything she was.”

They stayed in touch after high school — baby showers, wedding showers, Christmas cards. When their 30-year reunion rolled around, Lee asked Baginski if she would mind looking out for her that night. She had been diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in college and then breast cancer while she was pregnant. Cancer and its attendant cruelties were familiar companions by the time that reunion rolled around.

“Saying yes to being her sherpa, her caretaker, her babysitter, whatever we called it that night,” Baginski said, “was the best thing I ever did.”

That’s when they decided to launch Early Birds.

“She literally said to me, ‘I’m living proof that you can’t sit on a good idea. You just have to do it,’” Baginski said. “It was my original idea but she forced me to do it. She named it Early Birds. Donating 10 percent of our ticket proceeds was her idea. She made it what it is. She is the spirit and the soul of the whole thing.”

Baginski plans to continue the parties. She has talked about Lee on stage at every event since Lee had stopped attending. She plans to keep doing that too.

I told Baginski that Lee’s Feb. 8 speech forever changed me. My friends and I still talk about it.

“She was in a lot of pain that night,” Baginski said. "I think about the indignities she suffered. She couldn’t speak, but it didn’t stop her. She couldn’t walk, but it didn’t stop her. She showed up. She showed up for so many people.”

She taught us how to show up too.

“She just believed that she could get better, and I think that’s what kept her going,” Baginski said. “Just the hope and belief that she would get through this. And technically her body didn’t get through it. But her soul did. Her light and her love will always be here.”

Warming and guiding the rest of us. That’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough. She should still be here on Earth with her son and her husband and her friends and all of us who met and were moved by her.

But it is amazing. She was amazing.