Have you ever wondered how yesterday’s heroes will move through today’s world?
I’m scattering ten of my one million favorite misfits/heroes of all time.
A new kind of soapbox for the historically thwarty.
Gertrude Stein
Always the hostess, cubist writer, and literary leading lady, turned her Paris home into a Mecca for experimental artists and writers, survived Nazi persecution
Nelson Mandela
Previously serving an indefinite jail sentence for his fight to end apartheid in South Africa, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, first democratically elected South African president
Kurt Cobain
Born in ’67, took adolescent angst and anguish to the bank after birthing the grunge-rock decade, swallowed lead and died at the mythical rock-star age of 27
Mahatma Gandhi
A misfit within today’s hyperactive, reactive, violent, and overactive society, separated himself from the masses through passive resistance and nonviolent force
Salvador Dali
Spanish painter of the surrealist movement, some questioned the soundness of his mind, but I completely think otherwise
Rosa Parks
Known as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” Parks paradoxically made a stand by sitting, refusing to move to the back of the then-segregated Birmingham, Alabama bus
Nina Simone
Musical misfit and diva, cannot be classified in one genre, used anti-racist energy to charge her voice into overdrive
Abbie Hoffman
Frequently rebelled against corporate culture and the Vietnam War, led 50,000 people to surround the Pentagon to try to make it levitate, later arrested for selling cocaine, went on the lam, had plastic surgery to evade capture, wrote a book designed to be stolen
Henry Miller
Author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, plus Sexus, Nexus, Plexus trilogy, his erotic works were banned in the US for nearly 30 years, but eventually hailed for their literary merit
Joe Strummer
Front man of the Clash, brought a political consciousness to punk, fused ska with hard rock, rocked against racism, was the White Man in Hammersmith Palais, will be greatly missed
