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Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
by Diane Wood Middlebrook
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| Edition: Paperback |
| ISBN: 1402892586 |
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Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (July 1999)
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Dimensions :
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Average Customer Review: Not Yet Rated
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Description : Suits Me is the biography of a jazz musician named Billy Tipton, who grew up as Dorothy Tipton in Oklahoma City and Kansas City but lived as a man from the time she was nineteen until she died at age seventy-four. Billy Tipton's death in Spokane Washington, made news all over the world, not because he was celebrated as a musician but because of the scale of his deception -- he had been "married" to five women and had reared several adopted children -- and the scarcity of ready explanations endowed the skimpy available facts with the aura of myth.
Locked away in Billy's office closet lay the record of a lifetime's achievements: clippings and photographs documenting the transformation of Billy from she to he, and a legacy of annotated comic routines, musical arrangements, and program notes that tell an extraordinary story. These reveal how, night after night, Billy scattered clues and riddles about the drag she wore, including risque gags about homosexuality and jokes that called attention to the disguise. These convey the pride of an artist in his success in achieving a lifetime of deception -- and they wree so bold that they helped conceal Billy's secrets.
Suits Me tells the life story of this brilliant deceiver with brio and pathos. To live at once in two skins, one of each sex, is not an everyday experience, yet we can hear Billy's loves and ambitions through the voices of those who knew him -- his "wives," his family, his musical colleagues, and those who encountered him on the road as he traveled with the Billy Tipton Trio from town to town, bandstand to bandstand, gig to gig, during the jazz decades.
A masterpiece of skillful detection and perceptive storytelling, Suits Me not only casts a warm eye over the spectrum of the sexes but chronicles tanktown show business over a period of fifty years. Illustrated by Billy Tipton's photographs, this book also reveals, in words, music, history, and psychology, any number of secrets, plumbing mysteries about the American family that few of us have dared to face. |
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