oddity

The cutesy performance shtick around a shoestring variety show — imagine Pee-wee’s Playhouse without the bewitching oddity — grows wearying.

Now an L.A.-based writer, director and producer, Rose, 41, recalls the Austin store’s eclectic assortment of cult oddities and world cinema.

Every phrase is for him an oddity, as if he had found some weird object in an imaginary world and was figuring out what he might do with it.

I’m lucky I get to enjoy oddities in my life.

But Lee would point to another defining import of that era: the PT Cruiser, Chrysler’s much-mocked oddity that unexpectedly won a cult following in the country.