Drinking coffee elsewhere takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong, from a Girl Scout camp, where a troupe of black girls are confronted with a group of white girls, whose defining feature turns out to be not their race but their disabilities; to the Million Man March on Washington, where a young man must decide where his allegiance to his father lies; and to Japan, where an international group of drifters find themselves starving, unable to find work.