Need a bit of help

So I’ve got this chunk of code in my functions.php file:

function about_page_excerpt() {

	global $wpdb, $tableposts;

		$aboutme = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT post_content FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_name = 'about'");

	echo $aboutme; "<a href=\""; bloginfo(url); echo "Read more...</a>";

}

Basically what I’m trying to do is pull the contents of the About page and display it whenever the `<?php about_page_excerpt(); ?> is called.

Everything works fine, except I can’t figure out hot to keep the formatting. For example, if I have two paragraphs in the About page, what is shown is everything minus the <p>. How do I retain those? Thanks!