I’ve had it with George Santos and the phony degrees, the big jobs he never had, the income he’s inflated, and there he sits in the United States Congress with Matt Gaetz.
I can take no more.
So I’m here today to make a full confession about my own life — one that I hope will make Santos look like a third-rate Desi Arnaz.
I came here to Maine under the government witness protection system, with She, who had agreed to help me keep my real past in the closet. Well, not that closet.
Unlike Santos, I am a healthy straight adult — so straight, that when I was the head choreographer of the chorus line at Radio City Music Hall I was never without a date.
She (Kay) was one of the famous dancers in the Christmas chorus. In the pictures, she’s one of the dancing Santas.
Now, I think it may interest many of you fans of the Radio City Music Hall, that I was the guy who invented the famous “kick” finale.
But Kay agreed. The time has come to give you the real J.P. Devine.
First of all, that’s not my real name. I got that out of a magazine. I changed it legally when I graduated at the head of my class at Harvard, with a degree in Lebanese literature, when I was only 17.
My real name is Ernest Hemingway. The real Ernest Hemingway was my great-grandfather.
Kay, as she was known then — who came from a solid Republican Maine family and didn’t want them to be embarrassed, especially since her brother, Cyril M. Joly, was the mayor who was getting ready to tear down all the old homes in The Concourse and displace the poor and aged.
You can also see why Ernest Hemingway would have been a problem at Simon & Schuster Inc. where I was hired in the art department, and was quickly promoted co-owner and associate editor in the sports department, at 19.
I got that job because of my work with the New York Yankees earlier, and because of my photographic memory of all the great Italian ball players of the time.
That was, of course, because I grew up in St. Louis with Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola.
I left New York shortly after that, with money I was given from Gloria Vanderbilt for managing her estate. I can’t discuss that, either.
I later moved to Paris so that I could meet and marry Leslie Caron. It didn’t work out. Let’s keep that under your hat.
While in Paris, word got out about my first two best-selling books (now out of print) and I was taken under the wing of Teddy Kennedy, who had heard I was once engaged to Olivia de Havilland, and he wanted her phone number.
When I first met Kay, she was working undercover with the FBI. Her job was to infiltrate Broadway theaters that were suspected of hiring illegal Peruvian ticket scalpers. That’s all I can tell you about that.
After we married, Kay agreed to keep her job in the Better Dresses department at Macy’s, so that I could get my my master’s degree at Columbia University, which I did, in one month. A record.
Kay’s not sure, but she thinks she once sold a pink taffeta dress to Santos, size 18.
Let me ask you: Don’t you think that Marjorie Taylor Greene looks like Sydney Greenstreet, in drag?
I’m just saying.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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