I’m reading a wonderful biography of Joseph Mitchell, a New Yorker writer and one of the great literary journalists of all time. It’s called Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell Of the New Yorker,  it was written by Thomas Kunkel. In 1940, Mitchell wrote one of his most famous profiles, it was a portrait of Jane Barnell, the bearded lady known professionally as Lady Olga. “Barnell,” wrote Mitchell, “has spent almost the entirety of her sixty-nine years barnstorming the country with one circus or another.” But the main point of the story, Kunkel reminds us,  is the effort Lady Olga makes to try to achieve something resembling normal domesticity.

Her greatest desire, related Mitchell, is to work as a stenographer, even as she concedes it probably is not possible. I am a great lover of Mitchell’s work, it has never, in my mind, been surpassed.  His work was a great inspiration to me, even though he stopped writing before I started. The profile of Lady Olga ends in one of the most famous and haunting lines of Mitchell’s glorious writing career:

“If the truth were known,” she told Mitchell, “we’re all freaks together.”

I loved the line, it sent chills up my spine, but it never occurred to me that it was really true, I thought it was a poignant yearning. Day by day, I begin to understand what Barnell meant, and why Mitchell thought it was an important enough thought to end one of his most powerful profiles with.

I used to think I was different from other people, inferior to most, superior to some. I  used to think that I was unique, that my sorrow and suffering, my ups and downs, my losses and triumphs,  belonged only to me.

I have always been obsessed with freaks, I went to every sideshow that I could find, stared at the sword swallowers, the bearded ladies, the goat man, the man-child, the fire-eaters, the world’s tallest man and the world’s shortest, the lizard people, the grandmother with three eyes, the tattoo lady, the mermen and mermaids in their tanks. In our world the sideshows are gone, the freaks are online, writing on their blogs, sending angry messages, celebrating their eccentricities and obsessions. In our Puritan and increasingly Orwellian culture, it is no longer appropriate to pay to see the strange people any more than it is permitted to see the stupid tricks of the elephants.

In the joyless and so-called sensitive world, magic and wonder is forbidden.

I’ve always had a life long and innate connection to the outsiders, the disaffected and the fallen, they always called them freaks, and for many thousands of years, people paid to see them, the world has always been fascinated by them.  I usually paid a dolalr to see them, I remember a bearded lady who winked at me and told me I was good-looking. No one else ever did, I looked for her for years.

Like Mitchell, I always looked at the freaks with love and compassion. I never pitied them or felt sorry for them, nor did they ever feel sorry for themselves. It was always the normal people who banned them and sent them into the normal world.  I always felt I understood them, I was not conscious enough to know I related to them.  I think I have only recently begun to understand why so many people were fascinated by them, and why I was.

Lady Olga understood,  and she told Mitchell why. We are all freaks together, we are them, and they are us.  When we look at them, we see our own reflections, our own faces in the mirror, our worst fears and phobias. Something about the human experience separates us from one another in our minds. It is no longer acceptable or politically correct for the freaks to work in sideshows. Like the elephants and the elephant trainers, they have been banished in the name of being good. Many of them  struggle for work and identity, miss the sideshows. Some loved the community and camaraderie, the sense of belonging. They found the “normal” world was colder and crueler and even more dangerous.

A few years ago I read a memoir of a bearded lady, after the sideshows vanished, she spent her life in a warehouse, working in an office alone, gluing stickers onto cardboard boxes. “The irony was this,” she wrote, “in the sideshows we had jobs, we could live a normal life. In the outside world, we never could.”

Lady Olga loved the life of the freak, even as she yearned for normalcy and romanticized it, just as people sometimes romanticize freaks.

I think most of us yearn for normalcy at times, I used to think I knew what normalcy was, but I don’t think so any longer. There is no normalcy really, life finds its own path, and it sometimes runs right through us.  I suppose I am a freak, I do not yearn for the life that most people have, I do not share the American idea about security – spending much of one’s life in a new kind of slavery so that other people can get rich off of what we are told we must need to be safe and healthy.

I supposed I have always envied and admired the freaks, as hard as I know their lives often were. To be a freak is to be authentic in some ways, and it is to be free. Freaks can have the identity many people struggle so hard to find. Mitchell told an interviewer later in his life that he was certain Lady Olga would have hated the life of the stenographer, been destroyed by it’s mundane routineness, it’s anonymity. She was, for almost all of her sixty-nine years, a star. There are no star stenographers.

Lady Olga always had her own show, Mitchell said, he could not fathom her spending her life writing down the shows and words of other people. I am coming to understand that we are all freaks, and we are all freaks together.

I think the people who lined up to see Lady Olga and the other freaks knew it, why else would they come?To stare at a freak and laugh at one is to elevate  yourself, to feel normal and accepted.

A freak is a person or animal exhibited as an example of a curious or “strange” deviation from nature, who lives outside the normal social system. I define it more broadly. Most of my friends are freaks, even those who look quite normal. A freak in our world can be an outsider, living outside the circle, outside the tent, beyond the pale. I favor the freaks of the world, we tend to understand one another.

Choking on the tyranny of the normal, we gather to stare and laugh and jeer at the freaks. Freaks cannot run for Congress or President, they cannot be on cable news, or give sermons from fancy pulpits, or become CEO’s of giant corporations, or host their own TV shows or sing at Carnegie Hall or run for mayor. They do not make wars or lead armies.

I wouldn’t care to romanticize the freaks, but look who is in Congress, who can run for President, who is on cable news, who preaches from fancy pulpits, or runs giant corporations and tosses workers in the trash like garbage, or hosts TV shows or runs for mayor?

Lady Olga took a defiant pride in her work and she even accepted the labels others applied to her and her sideshow friends. She had a powerful connection to the disaffected and downtrodden, enormous empathy for other human beings. I imagine she might have done very well as a member of Congress, as a preacher with a pulpit, as a commentator on cable news. We might care for the poor and learn something about the true nature of life.

To me, it is a symptom of our time that the freaks are all pushed to the margins, like the animals, and taken out of sight. Perhaps they, like the animals, are the ones we need to see and hear.

Lady Olga was right. We are all freaks together, some of us do not know it yet.

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Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell Of The New Yorker, is written by Thomas Kunkel, and is published by Random House, and is available anywhere books are sold. You can also order it from Battenkill Books, my very wonderful independent and local bookstore, they take Paypal and ship anywhere in the world, and they are awfully nice. You can call them at 518 677-2515 or order the book online.