Amputee fights drugmaker to regain her ‘glow’

While the legal war continues, Levine wages a more personal struggle. Sometimes it's just to roll her left sleeve up or down, file papers, wash dishes or mow the lawn.

"If you were to put your hand in your pocket for a day and not use it, you would pretty much come to the conclusion that there's nothing that's a one-handed activity," she said.

Mostly, the struggle is to continue a life in which songwriting was her gift and the guitar and piano were the tools of her trade.

"My identity was seriously damaged. Not just the musical one, but the physical. I mean, I had lost my glow, the glow was gone," Levine said, recalling her recent performance with a group of women singers. "That's what it's about, it's about getting my glow back."

Levine has had more than a little help from her friends.

"She's determined not to let this setback destroy her music," said singer-songwriter Jon Gailmor, who had collaborated with Levine and her late husband in performances and on recordings. "It's probably given her some new material, made her stronger even. She's an amazing person."

Quoting a musician friend, Levine calls the right hand the "joyous hand" — the one that gets to strum or pick the guitar, finding the rhythm, while the left searches the neck for the right note or chord. On keyboards, the right hand most often finds the improvisational riffs while the left lays down the underlying rhythm and chord changes.

Levine has no joyous hand now.

A piano and guitar player since childhood, she studied chemistry and psychology at the University of Vermont. Levine, who performed under the name Diana Winn, married a blues guitarist David "Crow" Levine, playing bass alongside of him in the Re-Bops, a band that gained a regional following in the 1980s.

Her husband died in 1993, leaving Levine and the couple's daughter, Jessamine, now 25.

Sharing the tune
Now, she's less concerned with the legal arguments than with making music and sharing it, especially with children.

She pays the bills using her monthly disability check from Social Security, Re-Bob Records sales — though she says she's unable to keep up the business as well as she used to — and assistance from her family. "I have help from home. Nobody's going to let me be out in the cold."

Levine sat one recent afternoon at her piano, accompanied by Jessamine on guitar, working out a new tune she hoped to send to actor Dennis Quaid, who is waging a drug labeling fight of his own after his infant twins were given a dose of the blood-thinner Heparin — 1,000 times what was called for.

The twins' birthday is in November, and Levine was writing a song for them.

Plunking out chords with her left hand, Levine asked Jessamine, "What do we go to there? Do you like G? Or should it be D-minor?"

And then she sang a song fragment:

"It's the twinses' birthday, celebrate times two. It's the twinses' birthday, if you only knew. There's been some hard times they've both been through ..."

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