The Muffin Lady was finally busted. As the habitues of a handful of Wicker Park bars know, Shirley Pena–aka Shirley the Muffin Lady, aka the Bread Lady, aka Beverly Spahos–is celebrated less for her all-natural cookies and fruit breads than for her muffins, which sell for five bucks apiece and produce powerful effects on perception and coordination due to a “green leafy substance,” as the police report puts it, incorporated into the batter.
Pena was amazed–not just because she’d baked the muffins with only about an ounce in the batter, a misdemeanor’s worth, but because she’d thought she was operating under the benign neglect of the 13th District. “They’ve always known it,” she says. “I’ve sold my breads in many police stations and many bars. They’d say something like, ‘If you’ve got any banana-chocolate-chip bread I’ll take some of that, but none of that funny stuff because we have to take piss tests.’” Pena says she stopped selling her straight baked goods at police stations because she got tired of all the ribbing cops would give her about the muffins.
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In 1964 she was an overweight 18-year-old who ditched Beloit for the big city. She found work as an office clerk and short-order cook in a 24-hour hamburger joint, but the next year a fellow hash slinger got her pregnant, and she waited out her delivery in a home for unwed mothers. Six months after giving birth to her first daughter, Pena lost her job and her home and had to give the girl up for adoption.
Today Pena is gaunt, almost spectral, but in her youth she loved to cook and eat. After her second divorce she maxed out at 420 pounds, and in 1980 she had gastric-bypass surgery. In those days it was not uncommon to die from the procedure, and she developed a series of bowel complaints–though she dropped 200 pounds in the first eight months. She couldn’t drink alcohol, but she began going out to bars and playing pool for something to do. She also began studying for a degree in criminal justice, hoping to support her children and a string of kids she took in with a job in customs or immigration. It was a police detective, one of her teachers at Lewis University, who suggested she start selling her baked goods for extra cash.
Pena had another side business sewing patchwork quilts and crocheting baby blankets, sweaters, scarves, hats, and afghans, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. She lost her storefront and moved into her middle daughter’s condo in Willowbrook. Though she commuted into the city for late-night bread and blanket sales, business still stank. One night she complained to a doorman at one of her regular stops. “I said, ‘What’s the matter? My breads are the same. Why isn’t anybody buying from me?’” she says. “He was stoned and he goes, ‘Gotta start selling space cakes.’ So I said, ‘Well, what’s that?’”
Pena’s preliminary hearing wasn’t scheduled for nearly a month. She was assigned to a unit for inmates with medical conditions, but since there was no room in the tier reserved for sick prisoners she was given a cell among pregnant but otherwise healthy ones. At her intake physical the doctor told her she’d need to be on a restricted diet–six small meals a day with ice to help her system break them down–but she only got what everyone else did. When she complained to the guards, she says, “they’d say, ‘Then you shouldn’t get arrested.’ That’s what everybody’s response always was.”
She couldn’t recall any of her friends’ telephone numbers, but she convinced a guard to get her the address for Danny’s and sent a letter to Kevin Stacy. He sent back $100 and promised he’d organize a benefit to raise more. Later she got a message to Tuman’s after guessing the address. Heather Stumps made up flyers advertising Pena’s plight, but by the time Stumps found out when visiting day was, guards at the jail said she was no longer there.
