Between October 9th and 10th, 1968, during the recording sessions that would ultimately create The Beatles’s seminal self-titled LP known to most as The White Album, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr snuck off into Studio One at Abbey Road and laid down the tracks for a song that McCartney had written after seeing a pair of monkeys having sex in the middle of an Indian thruway: a one-minute, 42-second jam called “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.“
Elsewhere on planet Earth those same days, a seven-year-old boy named Thomas Edward Lewis and a five-year-old girl named Penny Marie Snoots were, no doubt, engaged in whatever innocent, precocious activities elementary school-aged children were engaged in during the Sixties: riding bicycles, playing with friends, watching the Tigers beat the Cardinals in the World Series on a crude television the size of a GE gas oven. Perhaps they were even listening to the Beatles on the radio, though it’s doubtful they were able to pick out the nuances of the Lennon/McCartney lyrics at such a tender young age.
While it’s impossible to know the thoughts inside another person’s head, it seems all but certain that neither McCartney, Starr, Lewis, nor Snoots knew that, 51 years later, their destinies would collide in the town of Seminole, Florida—when, according to police, Snoots and Lewis would be caught taking McCartney’s words as gospel and doing it in the road.
More specifically, on the hood of a car, according to police documents obtained by The Smoking Gun in regards to the January 8th arrest of Lewis, now 58 years old, and Snoots, now 56. But that, allegedly, was only after Snoots performed what Bill Clinton would not describe as sexual relations upon Lewis while standing in the middle of the road.
However, contrary to Paul’s Sixties-era free-love words, someone would be watching them: an unnamed witness, who told police he saw both the oral copulation and what Dennis Reynolds might describe as “full penetration” from the road and while pulling into his driveway.
According to the statement of Gulfport Police Department officer Selena Ramos, while she didn’t quite catch them in flagrante delicto, she arrived before they could be caught in flagrante cigarette afterwards; when she rolled up on the duo in the suburban cul-de-sac, she noticed Lewis lifting in his pants and buttoning them up, presumably tucking his own cul-de-sac back in the process.
Snoots and Lewis were taken in on a misdemeanor charge of lewd and lascivious behavior and booked in the Pinellas County jail before being released on bond.
Penny, Tommy: This one’s for you.
