NYC: Rev Billy's Theater Festival Inside Starbucks Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - revbilly@revbilly.com Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir hosts The New York Theater Festival Inside Starbucks a part of The National Starbucks Boycott In cooperation with Global Exchange, FairTrade.Org and Organic Consumers Association, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping will host a rally on the first day of the national boycott against the "Enron of the Bean." The boycott coincides with the annual stockholders' meeting of the Starbucks Corporation, scheduled for February 26th in Seattle. COME TO THE BOYCOTT KICK-OFF RALLY! Where: Astor Place, in front of the largest Starbucks in New York City When: Saturday, February 23rd, 2 PM, lasts about an hour Dates of the Starbucks National Boycott: February 23 through March 1 New York Theater Festival Inside Starbucks: During boycott week hundreds of performances will be staged in Starbucks throughout the city. Create your own play or download one of our six comic sketches available this week on REVBILLY.COM... At the Saturday rally deacons of The Church of Stop Shopping will be handing out the scripts, each dramatizing a Starbucks issue. The six issues are: - Use of prison labor during peak sales periods - Failure to market Fair Trade coffee which rewards original coffee growers - Use of genetically altered dairy products in desserts and milk drinks - Aggressive real estate tactics that oust longtime neighborhood independent businesses - Unionbusting and use of plantation labor practices outside the US - Encouragement of monoculture coffee farms drenched with pesticides This initiates a new kind of political resistance. Rather than demonstrating, risking arrest and misrepresentation by conservative media, these Starbucks actions cannot be distinguished from customers getting a bit dramatic. Actors in the short plays are undercover in plain sight and their antics are minutes long. At the conclusion of each play information sheets are distributed throughout the host café. Festival participants are encouraged to videotape their performances. Church officials will award "Fabulous Sainthood" to the best performances in several categories, including "Most Flabbergasting in a Dumbfounding Drama," and "Most Revealing of the Mermaid's Evil," etc. Festival prizes are still being gathered and we welcome donations. Contact: Revbilly.com, or Organicconsumers.Org for more information on the Starbucks National Boycott ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytenv-02.16.02-03:51:54-24031