This is a delicious account from waitress turned author Merritt Tierce of how she received a couple of $2,000 tips from Hate-Talk Radio personality and de facto leader of the Republican Party Rush Limbaugh, but said she felt like it was "Blood Money" and donated most of it to the nonprofit Texas Equal Access Fund that helps fund Abortion services for low income women in Texas.
Local novelist Merritt Tierce turns pain into literary pleasure
By Chris Vognar
So how much of Tierce went into Marie? “The real fiction about fiction is that all of it’s true,” she says. “It does come from a lot of my experiences in Dallas, but it’s not a memoir.”
She pauses.
“I need to find a go-to answer to that question. It’s the first thing people ask not just me, but anyone whose novel is in any way recognizable.”
But she leaves no doubt that life at the steakhouse, where she worked from 2005 to 2011, was completely nuts. Big money flowed from famous clients — twice, Rush Limbaugh left her $2,000 tips. “That’s like blood money to me,” she says.
It’s well-known that she worked at Nick and Sam’s, but she doesn’t want scenes from The Restaurant read as an exposé, or even pinned to a particular place. The culture was ubiquitous, she says. “It’s not unique in Dallas as a scene or a restaurant. At the time I worked there, of the fine-dining steakhouses in Dallas it could have been the raunchiest, most over-the-top, hateful, misogynist hot mess around. I don’t know, because I didn’t work at the other ones.”
She doesn’t live on the edge anymore. To find more time for writing, she recently stepped down from her job as the executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, a nonprofit group that helps low-income women pay for abortions. Remember those Rush Limbaugh tips? A big chunk of them went to the TEA Fund. “Which felt like laundering it, in a good way,” she says.
Now Breitbart is characterizing Tierce as an "Ingrate" for spending the money as she saw fit. Breitbart's Debra Heine also does her best to portray Merritt Tierce as one of Rush's "sluts" by emphasizing some of Tierce's protagonist's sexual encounters from the book in her piece.
I guess accepting a tip from some high-rolling Right Winger means you are obligated to spend it on something patriotic that those twisted elites would approve of, like expensive Cuban Cigars the way Rush does.
Texas Equal Access Fund