Growing up in the conservative, cut-and-dry pine belt of south Mississippi, you might think I didn’t have much access to “weirdness”, but you’d be wrong. There was plenty of oddball culture around–you just had to know where to look.
Apart from basking in the general eccentricity that has made the South a literary staple, I could always scoot over to the mall to pick up the latest copy of Interview magazine. It wasn’t “weird” per se, but back then, it was at least edgy and alternative. The selection was far better on television–my personal fave being a show on USA called Night Flight, where I first saw Breaking Glass and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and countless documentaries about Malcolm McClaren.
And then there was PBS.
PBS was founded, in part, to present arts and educational programming, and over the years, that mission has given PBS license to broadcast some seriously bizarre crap–like Alive from Off-Center, which would’ve given my daddy a conniption fit if he’d ever bothered to flip away from his endless loop of Sanford and Son reruns. Even better was the low-budget, DIY stuff like Hodgepodge Lodge, Vegetable Soup, and a VERY strange high school science program that featured blue-skinned, scantily clad astronauts. The name of that last one escapes me right now, but I’m pretty sure it was put out by nutjobs in my home state.
By far, the weirdest, most fascinating, most WTF program on PBS was Sew What’s New, featuring a fabulous creature named George Trippon. Nattily dressed, sporting half-glasses and a gold (sometimes pearl) safety chain, he taught women (and a few men, I’m guessing), how to sew, while sharing remarkable stories from his Hollywood days–stories, of the “So one day, Tallulah and I were having lunch at the Brown Derby” variety. Here’s the only clip I’ve been able to find of the man in action:
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