On it’s final night of operation (at least as the unique and wonderfully dingy place it has been for the past ten years) the Bowery Poetry Club on Bowery and 1st Street, a long-time haven for the starving artists of lower Manhattan, expressed its perfect weirdness in more ways than one.

As an elderly man headed from the bar, drink in hand, donning nothing but his birthday suit and a “What are you looking at?” expression, the people scattered around the venue were unfazed.

We turned to the couple next to us – a petite woman with a pixie cut and a man in a fedora – and blurted, “Is that guy always just naked? And no one cares?”

“He’s just around,” said the guy nonchalantly. He gave a half-eye-roll, half-smirk and continued, “There’s a lot of crazy stuff here.”

Oh, we could tell. Read More