The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro

Author:Deborah Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

From The Talking Cure: Selected Interviews, 1967–1992 by Patti Driggs

Around 1990, I thought I might revisit the Jesse Parrish profile I wrote. It had been twelve years since his death and more than eighteen years since I had published what now strikes me as a prickly and perhaps ungenerous, though not inaccurate, portrait. That piece ended with these words about Jesse and his wife, Linda West:

I can’t tell if I’m bringing too much irony to bear on him or not enough. They are both performing something when it comes to their identities. Her Jewishness? His Southernness? By which I mean they are able to turn it on and off. I want to see this as fluid and liberating rather than a con. But I don’t know how. Theirs is a language I can’t quite speak, whose grammar I haven’t mastered. Then again, I have never owned a caftan or purple velvet pants, never known the disappointment of their being at the cleaners.

For the new piece I had in mind, I wanted to hear more from the women who had been in Jesse’s life. There were a number of them. They came across as accessories, in both senses of the word. Supporting players. And yet they each, in their own way, were greater than. I wanted to explore that. I went so far as to track down the reclusive Marion Washington, Jesse’s girlfriend, who survived the car crash that killed him. She wouldn’t speak with me, and ultimately I never followed through with this story. I did, however, conduct some preliminary interviews, including this conversation with Elise Robin, a friend and admirer of Jesse and Linda, a self-described “rock-and-roll muse” and author of the widely read memoir Free Lunch: The Life and Times of a Rock and Roll Muse.

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