Your evening longread: The very strange tale of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
by Aoife BarryEVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Back in 2016, Michelle Dean wrote about Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a mum and daughter who lived in Missouri. Dee Dee spent years caring for her daughter, who appeared to have suffered through a number of serious illnesses. But when Gypsy hit her teens, the family facade started to unravel. Their story was later told in the TV show The Act.
(Buzzfeed, approx 35 mins reading time)
Their house, like everyone else’s around them, had been built by Habitat for Humanity. It had amenities specially built for Gypsy: a ramp up to the front door, a Jacuzzi tub to help with “my muscles,” Gypsy told a local television station in 2008. Sometimes, on summer nights, Dee Dee would set up a projector to play a movie on the side of her house and the children of the neighborhood, whose parents usually couldn’t afford to send them to a movie theater, came over for a treat. Dee Dee charged for concessions, but it was still cheaper than the local multiplex. The money was to go to Gypsy’s treatments.
Read all of the Evening Longreads here>
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