From: David Pacheco <david_pacheco@lineone.net>
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: My life with Dee Dee Myers
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 14:27:03 -0000
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                         Fiddle, Dee Dee!
                             A Memoir

                         By David Pacheco


The following are excerpts from the forthcoming book, "Fiddle,
Dee Dee!" by David Pacheco (Simon Anschuss Ler, 1999, oil of 
olay on canvas, $12.99). The story of one woman's struggle
against sexism and prejudice in the world of bluegrass music, as
told to her biographer and sometimes lover, David Pacheco. 
Illustrations by the author.  Translated by accident.



"...as we lay in bed, naked, panting, exhausted."
            (p.19)



"...Dee Dee's face fell: all her life she had been used to
rejection, living as she had in a political world dominated by
men.  She had had to work twice as hard as anyone else around her
just to stand still, while men half her age (and not even half as
competent) coasted by on good looks, good connections, the right
friends."

"But this was her arena, the world of banjo, tambourine, bone
castanets, and fiddle: the world of bluegrass.  It was the first
time she had been turned away when the game was being played on
her home turf."

"Dee Dee got home that night, locked the front door behind her,
collapsed and wept like a baby, her Stradivarius thrown into a
corner of the room.  I should have been there to comfort her, to
hold her, but that night fate had dealt us an unlucky hand: three
aces, two kings.  Unfortunately we had been playing blackjack."

"By the time I got home the next morning, bombed out of my skull
on cheap tequila and even cheaper laudanum, she was already
asleep.  I wish I had known she had collapsed behind the front
door, as we could have avoided the hospital bills, not to mention
the concussion and selective memory loss."
             (p. 42)
 

"...Dee Dee spent the rest of the night on the phone with Mike
McCurry, her successor as Press Secretary in the White House. 
She couldn't help but second-guess her decision to leave the
White House, and all the close friends she had made in the
press.  How would history remember her now?  As one of the best
female press secretaries ever to grace a pressroom lectern, the
first ever capable of making Wolf Blitzer blush bright crimson
and leave a press conference to go to the "little boy's room"? 
Or that she had failed as a bluegrass musician?"

"Mike said very little during that seven hour phone call, partly
because he was fast asleep at the time.  But thanks to his
unjudgemental attitude, the next morning Dee Dee had recovered
some of her lost sense of purpose: as usual, it was the last
place she looked, behind one of the cushions on the sofa."
               (p. 108)


"...Dee Dee's idea was to bring together some of the best-known
press secretaries in the world to stage a concert benefiting the
American society of compulsive talkers, 'On and On Anon'.  When I
got home that night, she had it all mapped out on giant sheets of
paper across the living room floor:  Bill Moyers, press secretary
to Lyndon B. Johnson, on the mandolin.  Jerald terHorst, Gerald
Ford's press secretary, would play second banjo.  It was well
known in diplomatic circles that Benjamin Mkapa, press secretary
to Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere, had played folk guitar as
a young boy, singing Indigo Girls' tunes for spare change with
Reagan's press secretary Dana Rohrabacher at coffee shops around
the nation's capital."

"Of course, Dee Dee would play fiddle.  But then she informed me,
with conspiratorial grin, of the coup: Adlai Stevenson, press
secretary to the U.S. delegation to the 1945 United Nations
Charter Conference in San Francisco.  Apparently, his tenor was
so sweet it caused convulsions in diabetics, and he played a mean
five-string banjo too."

"Of course, Adlai was dead by that time.  In fact, he had been
dead for over twenty years.  But I loved her so much, and the
look in her face was so filled with hope... it was the first time
in over eighteen months I had seen her without a noose around her
neck, (ostensibly for 'decoration'), the first time I had arrived
home without having to avoid withering crossfire.  So I said
nothing."

"Later on, when she found out I already knew Adlai had passed on,
she hid behind our bedroom door and, as I unsuspectingly walked
in, stuck my head in a bucket of ammonia for thirty minutes.  To
this day I can't blink both eyes at the same time unless someone
is humming Bill Monroe's 'White House Blues' -- a classic of the
bluegrass genre -- in the background."
          (p. 183)


"...Several weeks after Dee Dee left me, I heard through a mutual
friend that she had moved in with Bob Schaffer, press secretary
to the Republican members of the Colorado Senate in 1985.  I hear
he has an extensive collection of Daniel Decatur Emmett albums. 
I wish them the best of luck, but... I can't help thinking it
won't last."
          (p. 201)


"THE END"
          (p.322)


"This book was printed on 30% post-consumer waste paper.  No
trees were harmed during the production of this book, except
those that were cut down and pulped."
          (p.323)

-dp.