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Penny Smith was admired in Cottonwood. So when someone besmirched her in a city council meeting, residents sought to lower the temperature.
In many ways, Cottonwood—a Northern Arizona city nestled in the region’s Verde Valley—fits the stereotype many people hold about a rural American small town: charming historic buildings, a slower than normal pace, the sense that everyone knows your name, and typically, a conservative political presence.
Normally, small cities like Cottonwood rarely make the news. But the firebrand of Trumpist conservatism has made its presence known, and made the past two years in Cottonwood markedly volatile:
Religious groups showed up in droves to protest city council decisions that allowed a touring drag company to come to town; Far-right community members packed out the local recreational center for a working meeting on whether or not they should ban drag in public; The Mingus Union School District’s meetings on budgets and resources for students shifted to include discussions on banning certain books; And a local anti-LGBTQ+ church was at the forefront of a mayoral recall.
But last year, a series of heated city council meetings and one major drag show jostled residents of all political stripes and shifted the conversation. The community found common ground, all in the name of one woman—the late Penny Smith.
Hanging inside Cottonwood’s businesses, “Be Like Penny” stickers are emblazoned on door frames.
Ask anyone in town about Smith, and it’s highly likely their response will either begin with tears or, as one resident started our conversation: “What a wonderful woman. Where do I begin?”
According to those who knew her, Smith was more than someone the entire town loved—she was seen as a local saint in that she loved and supported those in the community who were underrepresented or less fortunate.
They said Smith would always host fundraisers to celebrate her birthday that raised money for the Humane Society or helped local families with medical bills. And at Main Stage, a popular bar and music venue, Smith was colloquially deemed “The Bingo Lady” because of her incredibly popular “This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Bingo” show every week. The local paper, Verde News, reported her bingo night “raised $60,000 for various charities that had valuable impacts on the community she cherished.”
And for the queer community in the Verde Valley, Smith was a huge advocate for increasing safe spaces and making everyone feel seen.
According to her friend Christine “Bean” Kramer, Smith was the reason drag performances started showing at Main Stage, where Smith worked regularly and where Kramer serves as the current manager.
“I was her friend for 30 years,” Kramer said through tears. “We would always go to Pride together in Flagstaff, and she always wanted to see more drag here in Cottonwood.”
“She touched a lot of people,” Rebecca Riffel, Main Stage’s co-owner and general manager, told Verde News shortly after Smith’s death in 2021. “By just the way she was. By the way she loved people. The way that she cared about people.”
“If you didn’t like Penny, there was something wrong with you,” said one local Cottonwood parent. “She was such an accepting and welcoming person.”
But last year, when a woman stood up and denounced Smith publicly for supporting the LGBTQ+ community, the mantra of “Be Like Penny” took on a different meaning.
Joseph Darius Jaafari (he/him)
In February 2023, Cottonwood’s City Council met to debate the inclusion of a charity drag show that had rented out a city-owned community space and was requesting a liquor license.
Conservative attendees claimed that hosting a drag show in their city was endorsing “sexual deviance and moral depravity.”
For Cottonwood activists Julie Fernatt and Marianna “Llama” Habern, leaders behind the local progressive politics group Rural Organizing Initiative (ROI), the meeting was the start of a season of public meetings at city hall and school boards for anti-LGBTQ+ speech.
LOOKOUT previously reported on the drag show and the legalities leading up to it, as well as the civil rights claim made against the city afterwards.
When the actual drag show took place in April, people of all ages enjoyed a fun, G-rated performance, with one parent even saying it helped him connect with his son who had just come out to him, according to Fernatt.
But outside the show, Proud Boys and churchgoers congregated en masse and shouted at attendees walking into and out of the show. Fernatt led a group of ROI members in creating a barrier between the Proud Boys and attendees. Molly Heckman, a local parent, was one such member.
“The drag show would have been fine if it were only the church folk counterprotesting,” Heckman told LOOKOUT. “It would have been annoying, but fine—but the fact that there were Proud Boys and people from out of town coming just to bolster their homophobic stance was what made it so dangerous.”
Outrage continued to burn after the show. According to Fernatt, one council member even showed a video of a salacious drag show she found online, falsely claiming it was from the Cottonwood show in order to “prove” the “dangers” of drag for their community. That council member has been recalled in this upcoming November election.
But it was one woman’s comments at an August 2023 meeting that made both pro- and anti-drag supporters go quiet.
Expressing her distaste for the drag show and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole, Judy Cohen–an attendee of a local church–said at an August 15 city council meeting that she “wished Penny could come back from the dead and let us know the decisions that she made, what she stood on, and where God now stands with her.”
The “decision” was how Penny was responsible for bringing drag to Cottonwood to begin with —namely, to Main Stage.
Habern understood Cohen’s statement to say that Smith was punished by God for supporting the LGBTQ+ community.
Cohen’s speech upset the crowd, including conservatives and liberal constituents alike. Once word got out, people took to social media to harass and argue against her.
Joseph Darius Jaafari (he/him)
Cohen could not be reached to comment on this piece.
After the attacks online, Fernatt and Habern activated ROI to get involved and bring back civility to the council meetings.
“ROI was really new when all this started happening,” shared Habern, ROI’s secretary. “There were a lot of quiet people in our community who felt they were alone in wanting to express their distaste and their feelings of pain. We wanted to provide a space where they could be more vocal, because they’re not alone.”
After months of back-and-forth arguing and hours of city council meeting time spent on the subject of not only the drag show, but similar LGBTQ+ representations, the ROI community had decided enough was enough. With everything going on, they hadn’t been dedicating as much time to registering voters or applying themselves to other community activations – which, they realized, is exactly what those outspoken conservative townspeople wanted.
So on Sept. 5, almost a month after the Cohen speech, Fernatt showed up in an orange jacket and an army of people with pennies and ribbons in hand—and spoke.
One by one, supporters marched up to place their penny on the podium and pin a ribbon to the jacket, proclaiming their name and one simple statement: “I’m here because I support the Penny Peace Project.”
Then, with a jacket pinned full of ribbons, Fernatt made the closing speech:
“When we say we support the Penny Peace Project, it means that we support all the members of our community,” Fernatt said to the council. “It means that we believe in working with each other, not against each other.
“We will keep up on what the council is doing, and we will be voting in November. We just won’t participate in this culture war any longer.”
By the end, residents revealed the jacket to be one that Smith used to wear.
Habern said this demonstration with Penny’s jacket served as a statement that they no longer intended to engage in the tit-for-tat arguments and stand-downs. That, like Smith, they would never stop showing up for their community and doing the actual work that needs to be done.
Cristopher Hall, a Tucson-based local drag queen and Executive Director of Miss Nature, LLC which produces the Arizona Pride Tour each year throughout rural Arizona, kept up-to-date with all relevant ROI and city council proceedings after the April show. For him, ROI’s presence alone was an act of peacemaking—one that Smith herself would have undeniably been at the forefront of, he said.
“I have seen this initiative bring members of the community together who thought the fight for equality was over,” Hall continued. “I have seen people find purpose in something bigger than themselves and people from various backgrounds come together – people who may not agree on many forefronts, but agree that fighting is not the way to go.”
And if a jacket has the power to create even one moment of unity in a place like Cottonwood, the city may be at the beginning of a promising and changed future, says Fernatt.
“The jacket symbolizes the community,” Hall elaborated. “It helped ensure people knew that the community as a whole was present at meetings without filling up all the spaces at each meeting, which in the past prevented the council from focusing on other issues important to the community, such as economic development.”
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