utnereader:

Katie Haegele on everyday costumes, dressing from the imagination, and Pee-wee Herman.

This old picture of Paul Reubens with Cyndi Lauper rolled past my tumblr dashboard today, prompting me to reflect on him. Reubens lives, in my mind, in the small category of famous people who I really wish I knew. I am not into hero worship. I just think he and I could be friends.

I once listened to an interview he did with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. They talked about his life, and at one point he recalled moving to Florida from upstate New York when he was around nine years old. When his parents told him they were going to Florida he was all excited, thinking they were moving to the tropics. It was important to him to look the part. His mother took him shopping for school clothes and he picked out things that would suit his new look. (Apparently he had more agency in this arena than I did.) He’d be, like, a beachcomber. That’s what you do in Florida, right? Comb beaches? He showed up for the first day of fourth grade wearing clamdiggers and a nautical-themed shirt, “like a total freak.”

Keep reading …

I love both of them. Coming of age in the late 70s/early 80s, there was a whole backlash-against-the-60s thing going on, with the rise of Reagan and groups being marginalized and weird people (which I knew myself to be, even though I tried to pass as normal) being represented as icky.

I didn’t process all this at the time. But I know that having these figures who were willing to be assertively, self-consciously different in ways that subverted the conformist line meant a lot to me. I still feel grateful to them.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/66785458288.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, November 12th, 2013 at 11:19 am and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.