🇺🇸 United States
Oddlets from United States.
Paint Sacred Art
What does a 59-year-old Baptist preacher do when a face appears in a smudge of paint on his fingertip and tells him to start painting?
The Stripper at the Typewriter
What was the headlining stripper at Minsky's doing at the dinner table with Auden, Britten, and McCullers?
Peace
He fed three thousand people in an afternoon, banned the word "hello" because it contained "hell," and quietly let his followers know he was God.
The Man Who Bought the Hotel So He Wouldn't Have to Leave
What does a billionaire do when the hotel manager tries to evict him from the suite he refuses to leave?
The Lady Must Go Home
What kind of master criminal steals a Gainsborough, then sleeps on top of her for twenty-five years?
What For
In 1926 a twenty-year-old swam the English Channel faster than any man alive — and her trainer spent the worst hour of it begging her to quit.
The Man Who Would Not Be Seen
What does the richest man in America do when a photographer finally catches him on the street at age 80?
Ten Hours, Ten Seconds
He calculated that ten hours of punching holes produced ten seconds of music, and he kept punching for forty years.
The Poet Ford Hired
What happens when a car company asks a sixty-seven-year-old Pulitzer poet to name their next sedan?
The Bait Camp Visionary
How does a shrimp seller who couldn't swim, living alone on a sandspit reachable only by boat, end up on Betty Parsons's walls beside Pollock and Rothko?
The Bandit Queen's Funeral
Her husband, her son, and the neighbor all had reasons — and the mourners brought cornbread to the grave.
The Company He Kept
In 1825 an eighteen-year-old from New York couldn't get cast in an American theatre, so he sailed to London and played Oroonoko; thirty years later, what was Prussia giving him a gold medal for?