Maybe this is it, actor Kevin Farrell thought. Maybe this is where I’m supposed to be. It was 1996 and he had just been cast as the look-alike to David Hyde-Pierce’s character, Niles, in TV’s “Frasier.” So he upped and moved to Hollywood, after studying drama in college in Ohio and working for ten years onstage as part of a theater company in Chicago. He was good. People liked him. Casting directors liked him. Hollywood in general seemed to like him and he began to work steadily. Just not enough. So he started doing what he needed to do to survive, Kevin recounts in his new book, Confessions of a Drag Queen Tupperware Lady (Dee-Lightful Publishing, $14.95), waiting tables, catering, the occasional office job, living the cliché of the starving actor in Hollywood.
Kevin’s likeable personality drew many friends his way, one of whom had an unusual and somewhat outdated occupation, Kevin thought, selling Tupperware. Only thing was that this friend was a guy…and he was making bucket-loads of money selling Tupperware…in a dress! Not me, Kevin said, not if I live to be a hundred will I sell Tupperware in drag. However, after about three years of urging, cajoling and pestering, Kevin relented, just to shut this guy up. Determined not to go out there trying to pass as a woman, Kevin created an outlandish, larger-than-life character named Dee W. Ieye (pronounced “eye,” get it?), a loud, sassy refugee from a trailer park in Tennessee, and he (she?) started to sell, and sell like crazy. In fact, before long, Kevin — as Dee — became Tupperware’s #1 salesperson in North America for four years running.
Readers will enjoy getting to know Dee W. Ieye. She’s brash, honest to a fault, and says things Kevin Farrell would never say! She’s a character, a caricature actually, who gets hit on by men and women alike, adored by most and scorned by a few, who often goes home at night just wanting to be Kevin again. This is his story. Funny, touching, outrageous, irritating moments of parties and hostesses and customers; inspiring stories of a businessman, a son, a brother, an actor.
In short, this ain’t your grandma’s Tupperware party!
