Empowering our inner oddballs
A tale of two geeks heads up some summer reading fun
By Ellen Snortland 07/13/2006
While academic books certainly have their place, they suck for summer reading. Two books I’ve just read that were fast, light and yet hearty are the brainchildren of geeks. Remember the odd ducks in school that you just secretly loved but were wacky and you couldn’t quite peg? They’ve been writing books!
The first one, “Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan” by Hillary Carlip, is a romp through the life of a woman unafraid to just lay it all out there. I know Hillary as an acquaintance because she once auditioned for the theater company that I co-founded in Santa Barbara. Called Theater of Process, we were the very first — as far as we knew — all-woman theater company in the US. We were sick of the sexism in traditional theater companies so we started our own.
Theater of Process was featured in one of the first issues of Ms. Magazine in the early ’70s and attracted a bevy of female performers from all over the states. Hillary showed up and ate fire as her audition. She was not only the first woman fire eater I had ever encountered, but the first flame consumer of any gender I’d been up close and personal with. She was really “hot” and, had her schedule worked out, we would have cast her. But alas, she had other fish to fry, quite likely on skewers, during her performance. She could have grilled the whole joint with that act of hers!
Fast forward over the years; she’s been on a career trajectory that included winning the “Gong Show,” hosted by Chuck “I’m a CIA Hit Man in My Spare Time” Barris, delivering singing telegrams, writing screenplays and having her heart broken by non-committal lovers. She is also the author of another book that I’ve recommended, “Girl Power,” which was featured on Oprah.
Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Hillary not only examines her life but entertains herself and her readers with a life not only worth living but one worth sharing. If you have any friends in life who are on the brink of “going for it,” but are incessantly weighing, hemming and hawing, give them “Queen of the Oddballs,” and encourage them. Hillary’s book is fun, inspiring and empowering to the inner oddball in all of us. Reading “Queen of the Oddballs” just makes you want to run out and buy those tap shoes you’ve been dreaming about, or swallow a flaming shish kebob.
If you look at the photo on the book jacket of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” you’ll see why I describe economist Steven D. Levitt as a geek. Levitt and non-geek co-author Stephen J. Dubner have managed what some may consider the impossible: They’ve written a highly accessible, engaging book about economics. While the subtitle’s claim to explore the hidden side of everything is obvious hyperbole, they take on several sensitive hot potatoes through the amoral eyes of men who deal with numbers, not politics. They describe the book’s central theme thusly: “If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.” How I wish they would have taken on oil; maybe their next book.
Consider some of the chapter headings: “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?” “How is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?” “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?” The chapter about the KKK sheds some historical light on the Klan that is eye-opening with regard to the power of ridicule in deflating power. Levitt and Dubner take so-called conventional wisdom and show how many of our opinions, regardless of consensus, are unwise.
I love the political incorrectness of “Freakonomics.” The authors really don’t care whose toes they step on, knowing full well that they are most likely offending liberals and conservatives in equal measure. Straight talk is so important in these times of “spin” and politics by polling.
Probably most apt to rile is the chapter on abortion, entitled “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?” Levitt and Dubner suggest that crime statistics dropped in the ’90s, despite all the hand-wringing and doomsday crime wave predictions of the ’70s and ’80s, in large part because of the constitutional right to have an abortion that was brought about by the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Bottom line: unwanted children are more apt to become criminals. I’ve been saying for years that the death penalty is simply a long-delayed form of cruel contraception. It’s pretty much a no-brainer that the death row inmates are not shining examples of “wanted” children.
I love pop culture. These two books, “Queen of the Oddballs” and “Freakonomics” are great beach or pool side reads. They are fun and they make you smarter. What’s not to like about that?
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT