When I first moved to the East Bay in '93, the Big Berkeley Issue of the day was public nudity. A UC student named Andy Martinez had been attending classes and strolling around campus wearing nothing but sandals, and the story had broken nationally and turned into a cause celebre, with Martinez playing his rebel/victim role to the hilt after he got busted for indecent exposure when venturing into the city of Berkeley. A coterie of old hippies, who acted as his support group by joining him in naked demonstrations, contended that nudity was protected free speech, and that since the City of Berkeley had no anti-nudity ordinance, it had no legal right to arrest nekkid people, or even to ask them to dress.
When the public-nakedness movement was at its peak, a character named "Moe the Schmo" made his appearance on the scene. Moe was about sixty years old, rail-thin and sunken-chested, and had the sallow skin and vacant eyes of a man who'd spent a good deal of his life in mental institutions. He did his part for the Body Freedom Movement by standing every day at the corner of Telegraph and Haste, starkers except for old shoes and a baseball cap, and handing out photocopied leaflets filled with the kind of incomprehensible verbal diarrhea familiar to anyone who's ever encountered such paranoid-schizo urban street-crusaders.
Anyway, one Saturday my friend was thumbing through magazines at Cody's, a famous bookstore right in the heart of Berkeley moonbat-land. And who should stride into the crowded store, wearing naught but footwear and a dirty Oakland A's cap, but Moe the Schmo himself? The store manager was on duty behind the desk, and grimly noted the naked loon's entry onto the premises, but did nothing else. (Berkeley's opportunistic public nudists -- mostly old male exhibitionists -- had been increasingly invading private businesses, not content to get their jollies exposing themselve on city streets. Too, in Berkeley, interfering with the antics of a street crazy, even on one's own private property, can often be an invitation to ugly confrontations, public censure and even lawsuits.)
My friend returned to perusing periodicals until about a minute later, when he heard shouting and cursing from the back of the store. He looked up, and saw the manager frog-marching Moe across the floor and out the door, all the while screaming abuse and threats at the bare-assed street person. When Moe had been tossed out on the street, the manager turned to an assistant and continued his rant at maximum volume, and with a full plethora of colorful epithets.
From what my friend overheard, when Moe had walked in, he had made a beeline run straight to the children's books section, which was packed with kids. The manager had probably correctly surmised that even the looniest Berkeley professional activist would never challenge him for 86ing the old pervert, and promptly threw him back onto Telegraph's vomit-slicked sidewalks. According to my pal, it took about 20 minutes before the manager had cooled down enough to speak in a normal tone of voice.
I often wonder if that particular incident, which was witnessed by about 30 or 40 people, did more than any of the other nudist hi-jinks to force the city council to adopt an explicit anti-nudity ordinance, and doom the golden era of clothing-optional Berkeley.
Thanks for making this video I loved it! #santagoals
