Summertime Blues - The 5 Greatest Oxford Weirdo Pseudo-Celebrities

Oxford has been famously labeled - by which, one means "on t-shirts" - as a drinking town with a football problem.  Other times it is a Greek-laden party town.  To 25DAW and me its where Devin Britton lived for a few months.  But lots of college towns have alcohol problems, frat houses, and sport celebrities.  What really gives a town character are its pseudo-celebrities.  Rack 'Em Willie.  Famed Bear Bryant tattoo canvas Nathan Davis.  These are the great citizens who truly inspire we, current and recent student body, to rise above town and move on to the real world.

Do it like Van Hagar told you to for our tribute to the 5 Greatest Oxford Weirdo Pseudo-Celebs.

#5  Julio.  The former manager of the late, great El Charro (Cafe Mexicana, or whatever second-rate institution lays claim to that building now, might as well be a stucco turd), the current manager of El Milagro, and the pioneer of the P-5, Julio needs no last name, Gringo.  Rumors have flown rapant about Julio's involvement in the trafficking of illicit substances and human beings, but I poo-poo these racially-tinged accusations.  This man is the godfather of the Oxford Mexican Restaurant Industry - probably the greatest industry south of Memphis.

#4 Dent May.  Can't you just picture him now?  Sauntering up to the microphone with jeans he stole off a "life size" Rodeo Barbie with his "magnificent" ukulele (the only thing magnificent about which is that, relative to Dent, it looks like he's turned a viola the wrong way), he pushes the microphone just high enough so that he has to sing, characteristically, on his tip-toes.  Also, we heard he used to have "town-gown" relations with the geriatric Mayor of Taylor.

#3 D.J. Mario.  Right behind hunch punch and an appropriate fraternity bid, nothing has facilitated undergraduate intercourse quite so much as D.J. Mario.  This guy has been at the Library longer than the Dewey decimal system.  Get it?  Sure, he may do nothing more than play Ludacris songs off of his iPod while occasionally incoherently mumbling into a microphone, but hearing the rumbling walls of Oxford's largest watering hole from a few blocks away is a uniquely Rebel experience.

#2 Coco the Tranny.  Remember how you thought that you were some kind of "pillar" of the Chicken on a Stick community?  Get this: you were wrong.  You were a flash in the pan, my friend.  Little more remembered than 98 Degrees.  Hillary Duff to Coco's Brittany Spears - composed and sang, perhaps, but nobody gave a crap about you.  Coco at Chicken on a Stick, freaking people out with her bone-shaking baritone while you were trying to find a t-shirt big enough for last night's mistake.  His Her cafe-au-lait toned makeup, HIV, and affinity for Mountain Dew made Coco a terribly unique human being in an establishment known for its uniquity.  Honorable mention, by the way, to Richard the Asshole - angrily interpreting your drunken junk food orders since [YEAR REDACTED].

#1 Jim Dees.  The grand master of ceremonies of Thacker Mountain Radio, the man with a mouth full of Mississippi, Dees emodies everything we know we could be if we stayed in Oxford for the rest of our lives - flexing literary muscle, listening to good obscure music, and talking about likely non-existent romantic encounters - all while on a perpetual buzz that he began refreshing with breakfast.  Many folks have come-and-gone through Oxford with personal delusions of themselves as kings or queens of the Oxford arts scene, but, at best, they were jesters in the court of Yalobushwacker.  Jim Dees is Oxford, Mississippi; good and bad.