Housed in the glass-fronted building that formerly held the Astor Riviera Diner, this Starbucks is the Seattle latte chain's largest New York outpost, and, at least on this evening, it's giving a pretty fair impression of a happening scene, alive with human buzz and diversity. Next to me a young Caucasian couple is locked in an intense exchange, their faces micrometers apart. On the other side, two handsome black men with dreadlocks are examining each other's design portfolios. Behind me, a middle-aged Asian man bounces a baby on his knee.

Then, out of the crowd, a few individuals begin to coalesce in the center of the store, at the natural still point midway between the front door and the espresso bar. Several stand and form a line, swaying and clapping. A black man with Clark Kent glasses starts to play a portable synthesizer, adopting a church-organ idiom. It's a gospel choir! "Free the mermaid!" they sing in joyous praise-the-Lord syncopated rhythm. "Hallelujah!"

Finally, into the store -- late as usual -- rushes a middle-aged white man wearing a priest's collar, a white dinner jacket and a disheveled appearance. He is a mixture of the familiar and the strange: He has the frosted hair and excellent dental work of a no-longer-famous TV personality, but his intense, undisciplined manner belongs more to the territory of Messianic cult leader or deranged street person. The Starbucks staff, recognizing him, has turned up the semihip background music, but this interloper wants to be heard. "Caffeinated children!" he shouts, sprinting from table to table, stretching out his arms in an oddly Nixonian pose. "Starbucks is evil! Their coffee is mind control! They're destroying your neighborhood! Save your souls! Leave now while you still have a chance!"

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"Oh," one man near me says to his date. "This is a Rev. Billy thing."

It is indeed. Rev. Billy, the long-simmering alter ego of writer and actor Bill Talen, has done a lot of things in recent years. He has become a peculiar Manhattan fixture, a hero of the city's activist left and a leading figure in its alternative performance scene. Beginning seven or eight years ago as a parodic televangelist character, Rev. Billy is now something more sincere and more complicated, a political clown in the vein of Abbie Hoffman and Dario Fo who ultimately isn't kidding. His quixotic campaigns against behemoth chain-retail corporations -- principally Starbucks and the Disney Store -- have won him profiles in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. Around the time of the Astor Place invasion, he was being trailed around Manhattan by both a documentary filmmaker and a French television crew.

Rev. Billy's stunts have an element of individual bravado that seems slightly at odds with the crunchy, collective ethos of contemporary anti-corporate activism. (In that sense, he reminds me of Ralph Nader, with his alt-celebrity-fueled presidential campaign.) He once vowed to preach the anti-consumerist gospel of his "Church of Stop Shopping" at each of the city's 110 or so Starbucks franchises within one 24-hour period. (By his own count he made it to 14 or 15.) "I'm trying to reach people," Talen says, "without myself becoming a product. Perhaps an impossible task."

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