PENNY LANE BLUES

The Carnival’s Leaving Town

By Amy Brouillette, 7-18-05

It’s nearing dark on a warm Sunday evening, and a rather somber crowd has descended on Penny Lane. The coffee shop’s final weekend has drawn as diverse and fascinating a crew as ever (and that’s saying something): nose-pierced anarchists with spiked metal belts and bleached-white hair, old hippies with long graying beards, street people with tattered packs and guitars, the enlightened ones with prayer bead necklaces and long white tunics.

I am knee-deep in freaks and loving it. I hear African music coming from the stage inside. I enter and see three new-agey women, the one in the center donning a long dashiki, shaking maracas, beating on wide drums, chanting and dancing wildly to their own beat. They wrap up their set, and the crowd eggs them back on for one more. All the usual suspects are in-house, Penny Lane's lifers my friends and I have over years taken the liberty to name: there’s Red Eye (who looks surprisingly good these days), Fake Einstein, Rich the Junkie (of course), and oh my god—there's Sol, the white South African guy who years ago told me over too much coffee how he once fought a tiger in the jungle with his bare hands. I almost believe him.

Next up, the Penny Lane employee show: this, I'll stick around for. Collette, who is a “storyteller,� mounts the stage. It’s only the second time she’s been on stage here, she tells us nervously, other than the millions of times she’s vacuumed it at the end of her shift. We laugh. She launches into an animated tale about a Navajo goddess or something—its that same kind of West Village coffee shop performance art I used to not understand back when I lived in New York. I’m too engrossed anyhow by the stocky, bearded man wearing a long purple skirt and thick wool-looking boots who just brushed past me. He greets a towering rail-thin man holding a huge stick, a walking stick I presume, and they head out to the patio. This is a Republican’s worst nightmare.

It's night now and the crowd has spilled out Penny Lane's front doors onto the patio, and past that, to the sidewalk where a group of young renegades sit crossed-legged on the pavement sharing smokes. It never was about the coffee here. Nor is it tonight: tonight is about something else entirely—it is a carnival’s last stand, the greatest show in town.

Tomorrow's finale: venerable beat poet Anne Waldeman reads her work one last time before Penny Lane it closes its doors for good. I, for one, will be there.

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