From donning a Catholic priest's habit to wearing a rabbit costume, PETA veteran activist and party crasher Dan Mathews knows how to steal the headlines for the animal rights cause.The following is an excerpt from chapter 9 of Committed: A Rabble Rouser's Memoir" by Dan Matthews (Atria Books, 2007). Matthews, a long-time activist for PETA, took to sneaking into media attended events and stealing the headlines with his animal rights message. This episode has Mathews telling the story of how he dressed up like a Catholic priest to sneak into a fashion show in Milan.
The Café Odeon is a bustling Art Nouveau hangout around the corner from where the narrow Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich, in the shadow of the Alps. It hasn't changed much since it opened in 1911. The curved wooden bar with brass coat hooks underneath is surrounded by a few tightly arranged rows of polished marble tables around which the efficient servers twist and bend while holding aloft trays of drinks that never seem to spill.
Like most structures in Switzerland, there's a lot going on within a very small space. Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini drank within these ornate walls, as did Mata Hari, the stripper who made exotic dancing socially acceptable in Paris before she was put on trial for espionage during World War I. "Harlot, yes, but traitor, never," she said before being riddled with bullets by the firing squad. During World War II, all sorts of spies met in neutral Switzerland at the famed Odeon to exchange information. Loving a theme, this is where I arranged my Sunday morning rendezvous with the prolific undercover agent behind many of PETA's intercontinental exposés.
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