Coffeehouse owners organized an eighty-person protest against fire-code closures

Evidence

After the Gaslight and Bizarre were shuttered for overcrowding, the New York Times reported a “beatnik protest.” Organized by Mitchell and Bizarre owner Rick Allman, leader of the self-serving Coffee House Association, some eighty demonstrators marched through the Village in pouring rain, pelted from the fire escapes with garbage and redundant water balloons. Crossing Sixth Avenue and marching up West Tenth Street, the protestors besieged the local firehouse. There, the Bizarre’s current headliner, international songstress (and schoolteacher) Varda Karni, Israeli by way of Paris, led the group in an improvised version of the Depression-era union anthem “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” that, referring to the fact coffeehouses did not sell alcohol, went “We Don’t Want Your Whiskey, Mister.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 265

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘We Don’t Want Your Whiskey, Mister’ sung to firefighters is a wonderfully odd, tweetable detail.