National oddball month

06 June 2006

"Rebel, reinvent, creatively express. Commit random acts of oddness, and let your freak flag fly. Do things unaccording to plan."

Bookslut interview Hillary Carlip, Queen of the Oddballs.

To me an oddball is someone who’s on the sunny side of weird. It’s someone who’s an eccentric, a trailblazer, somewhat mistrustful of the tasteful and the restrained. Has an irresistible impulse to gild lilies, act 45 when they’re 13 and 13 when they’re 45, travels off the beaten path. Anyone who’s ever been called a crackpot, an iconoclast, a cock-eyed optimist or a tin-foil-hat-wearing kook. It’s someone who’s not afraid to do things unaccording to plan.

I first realized I was different when I was eight years old and started taking on different personas the way other kids tried on clothes. I wore all black and skulked around the house and school, acting “creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky,” when I was being Wednesday from The Addams Family; hooked on Gerry and the Pacemakers, I sang and spoke only in an English accent for months. Then I was suspended from the third grade for smoking cigarettes on the school playground when I was being Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And although I was suspended from elementary school, this kind of oddball behavior was validated when shortly afterward, I was chosen out of all the students to appear on television on Art Linkletter’s House Party.

More info here.