Daniel Maurer

The weekends are always pandemonium in the East Village, but it’s rarely the older hippies causing a scene.

And yet on the corner of First Avenue and Second Street last Friday around 8:20 p.m., a gray-haired man wearing a tucked-in tie-dye shirt – and, oddly enough, a Yankees cap – was vehemently stomping the back wheel of someone’s bicycle.

“Hey, don’t do that!” a bystander cried out limply. But the bike basher was already heading across First Avenue for a bite to eat.

Minutes later, he was back to where the bike was chained up, kicking it a couple more times for good measure before storming off with his takeout bag.

Before we could confront the man, he ducked into an apartment building on Second Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. That’s when we popped off the photo you see here.

Meanwhile, back at the scene of the trouncing, a woman accompanied by a pair of dogs was taking photos of her own. Lo and behold: it was Grace Weaver, the “Singing Vegan Lady” who was profiled by DNA Info just last week. Maybe she was documenting the effects of meat rage? Actually, no: it turned out the bicycle was hers, and the man who had assaulted it was her roommate.

In the floaty voice she uses when she tries to convince random East Villagers that vegans have better sex, Ms. Weaver explained that her friend was jealous that she had “met someone” at a bicycle education class and that she owned a helmet (sure enough, there was a helmet locked to the mountain bike’s mangled wheel).

We gave her our phone number in case we needed to serve as a witness. “Saw second bike stomping,” she wrote in a small notebook, next to what she said was our “beautiful” name.

But it seems everything’s back to business as usual. Last night we got a text message from a friend who lives on First Street and is often approached by Ms. Weaver: “vegan lady at the Bean harassing people,” it read. Ms. Weaver, she later said, was “talking to another older man with white/grey hair. He looked bohemian.”