I have a great Cambridge story for you.
I had a good friend who was born and raised there. (This is back in the late 1960s.)
Imagine the scene—my friend has long hair, smokes marijuana now and then, has a world class reggae music collection, and lives in a tiny run-down apartment.
So far everything is normal.
But—he has a very unusual hobby. For several years he has collected every single white extremist brochure, magazine, leaflet, whatever, available by mailorder. We are talking Klan, Nazis, and dozens of other groups nobody has ever heard of outside of their own encampments in the woods.
These documents are floor to ceiling for most of one whole room.
It is not that he believes the stuff, but he is totally fascinated, one could say addicted by it.
It is his secret, his “hidden hobby”, and only his very best friends get to find out about it.
Life is sometimes not what it appears to be (and Cambridge has _all kinds_ of strange people).
No doubt. You only have to walk down the street to get that!
A few years back, a conservative friend and I went to Harvard Square in Cambridge.
They had a place outside an Au Bon Pain that was frequented by chess players, and that night, there was a “Poetry Slam” going on, so we stopped, sat down, and watched for a few minutes.
There was a girl, dressed all in black, faintly resembling Ally Sheedy in the movie “The Breakfast Club” reciting a “poem”:
(Spoken in beatnik tones) “...and then he grabbed me and threw me down. And he F***** me. And then again. And...”
We looked at each other with this shared expression of “Can you believe these effing lunatics?” and then, looking at the people sitting next to us watching intently, a guy, stroking his chin and listening as if it were the most profound thing he had ever heard.
As for your friend...people collect all kinds of things-I guess there are people who really like Nazi dinnerware or cutlery (Yes, I did see “American Beauty”!) but...I can see collecting those types of pamphlets and such. I’ll bet those things are a lot more interesting than white supremacist cutlery!