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By Marjorie Cohen
FDR–American Experience. PBS 2007. Filmed and Written by David Grubin.
It was the summer of 1921 when Franklin Roosevelt, former undersecretary of the Navy and rising star in the Democratic Party, was stricken. He had visited a boy’s summer camp and left with a strange virus that rendered his legs useless to him. He was finally diagnosed with polio or as it was then called, Infantile Paralysis.
It appeared that Roosevelt’s political career was truly finished. In the 1920s, polio, if not a death sentence, was a scourge on the populace. “Nice families kept their disabled children in a back [...]
A psychological thriller explores the subculture of people who “wannabe” disabled.
By Amy Meisner Threet, MSW
Quid Pro Quo, a new film that opens in select cities this summer, explores a dark side of the disabled world. It’s not a true story, exactly, but it’s not totally fiction, either. In writer-director Carlos Brooks’ debut feature, the fetish world of “wannabes” is exposed. These are non-disabled people who are obsessed with disability to the point, in extreme cases, where they look on the internet for surgeons to perform elective amputations. Less severe physically, yet as injurious psychologically, perhaps, are those who choose to [...]
Book Review: The Autoimmune Epidemic. “It is the kind of book that will scare you. It will make you [...]
The AXIS Dance Company inspires in more ways than one.
Text and Photos by Alice Faye Love
Margaret Cromwell, Alice Sheppard, Lisa Bufano and Rodney Bell of San Francisco’s AXIS Dance Company perform at a public school in Birmingham, Alabama.
Many a dance performance has left me scratching my head wondering what just happened. Even having spent over 25 years as a technician for live performance, I still suffer from these moments. But that’s okay. Modern dance, for me, promotes thinking about what I just saw and digging a little deeper into myself to “get it.”
AXIS Dance [...]
By Amy Meisner Threet
When she was 9 months old, just starting to walk, and living in Caracas, Venezuela, Marla De Fex developed a fever that an American doctor informed her parents was poliomyelitis. At the age of one her father took her to Rusk Institute in New York City. Her father continued to take her there for treatment twice a year until the family relocated to the U.S. and settled in Flushing, Queens.
The middle child between two sisters, neither of whom has a physical disability, De Fex says, “I didn’t realize I was disabled until I was 9 years old and [...]
Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine
Edited by Andrea Pieroni and Lisa Leimer Price Haworth Press, Binghamton, New York. Softcover, 406 pages.
Reviewed by Gil C. Allen, MA, MS, PhD, DC
Eating and Healing:Traditional Food As Medicine is a compilation of articles written by various agricultural researchers who have descended on little known human cultural groups in different parts of the world to determine their indigenous knowledge of foods, plants and herbs used for sustenance and medicinal purposes. The book included charts of plants by botanical name and their uses in society, some black and white pictures of [...]
As persons who have had to adapt to a disability, we may have had to reinvent ourselves. Many of us may, in the process, have found hidden talents we didn’t know we possessed. Luckily, the creative process knows no barriers and is only enriched by our individual experiences.
In my own life, I am grateful for the opportunity to use my prior training and experience, both personal and professional, to lead this organization through its biggest growth process in its 60-year history. The challenges this poses are major, but not insurmountable. I’m fortunate to have at my disposal a dedicated staff and board [...]
When, in our March issue, we asked readers of Action to send us their art, I had no idea what sort of response we would get. I certainly did not expect our invitation to elicit the amazing variety and quality of artwork we did receive. I am very grateful that the six individuals you will find represented in our gallery acted on our request. They have each, in their own unique way, elevated the visual and spiritual quality of this issue.
Seattle-based artist Harriet Sanderson expresses herself on her disability by creating powerful images out of wooden canes, wheelchairs, and other unusual media.
By Lori A. Wood
“When I was three, I was on the couch taking a nap, and when I woke up, I was feverish and couldn’t move my right arm,” says Harriet Sanderson, an artist who lives in Seattle now, but who grew up in her native Indiana. “My parents took me to the hospital. That’s really all I remember.”
The little girl was diagnosed with polio. “It was 1950,” Sanderson says. “Most of the people I know who had polio were [...]
Bill Lasher’s wheelchairs are stunning works of art.
Bill Lasher’s “Chopper Chair” (courtesy of Lasher Sport)
Bill Lasher Jr. makes beautiful custom wheelchairs for his company Lasher Sport (www.lashersport.com) out of a warehouse in Anchorage, Alaska. A United Spinal member, and longtime Alaska resident, Lasher became paralyzed during a skiing accident when he was in high school. Here he talks about how he came to make these unusual creations, and what his vision is as he makes them.
The first time I pondered creating a chair, I was in my first year as an engineering student at Arizona State University [...]
It took an injury for Kitty Lunn to return to her beloved dance
and make it her life.
By Linda A. Cronin
“The dancer inside me doesn’t care about the wheelchair,” says Kitty Lunn, artistic director of Infinity Dance Theater. “She just wanted to keep dancing.” (Photo by Dan Demetriad)
Kitty Lunn always wanted to be a ballet dancer. For years, she lived her dream, successfully pursuing a career in dance. At 15 she danced the role of Swanilda in Coppélia with the New Orleans Civic Ballet and later was a soloist with the Washington Ballet. Lunn danced in such ballets [...]
In March, we asked artists among United Spinal Association’s membership to send us samples of their work along with statements about what effect, if any, their spinal cord injury or disorder has had on their art. We think you will be as impressed as we were by the diversity of real talent among your fellow members on exhibit after the jump.
Two friends from the Bronx rap about living with spinal cord injury.
By Michael Lee
The friendship of Ricardo Velasquez (left) and Norris Namel, formed out of their shared experience as disabled men from the same project in the Bronx, preceded their partnership in music.
Norris Namel, 25, was celebrating his sister’s sweet 16. Namel, then 17, and his cousin were horsing around with guns when his cousin accidentally shot him in the neck. Ricardo Velasquez, now 30, was walking towards his building from a party on the night of June 8, 1996, when he heard gun shots. The [...]
Women liberated by their wheelchairs are celebrated at the annual Rolling with Style Gala during Fashion Week in New York.
By Kelly Rouba
Wendy Crawford, chairwoman and founding member of Discovery through Design, rolls on the red carpet in a chair and outfit designed by Thom Browne.
Last month, seven women made history by becoming fashion “roll models” when they rolled down the runway in their wheelchairs during the peak of Fashion Week in New York City.
“You are truly part of a historic event,” said Marilyn Hamilton, creator of Quickie wheelchairs, as she addressed nearly 600 attendees following the fashion [...]
Photos by Alice Faye Love
Brianna Cranmer (42), Nicole McDonald (30), Bao Yang (23)
and Sarah Binsfield from Arizona reach to take control of the ball
from Illinois’s Kathleen O’Kelly-Kennedy.
Alice Faye Love is an artist and athlete from Birmingham, Alabama, whose photography celebrates the world of women’s wheelchair sports. The photos on these two pages were taken January 13 -15 at the Pioneer Classic at the Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham featuring teams from the University of Illinois, University of Arizona, University of Alabama, and the Dallas Lady Mavericks. A recap of the tournament is available online [...]
If you’re traveling to London in December, please consider including in your itinerary Able Voices – an exhibition of photographs taken by disabled people in Bangladesh, Cameroon and the UK, timed to take place the week following the International Day of Disabled Persons 2006 (December 3rd) at the Hoopers Gallery in Farringdon. The photographs were taken during participatory photography projects run by PhotoVoice in partnership with Healthlink Worldwide and Barchester (UK) Healthcare.
More details are available online at www.photovoice.org/html/exhibitionsandevents/upcoming/bangladeshexhib.html
By Elizabeth M. Treston
A scene from Krankenhaus Blues at the Visible Theatre in New York City.
New York City restaurants and bars are teeming with actors and writers. They all have dreams of making it to Broadway. They call it their “craft.” I find actors to be traveling on a different plane. They are always observing, finding in the mundane a comical scene or dramatic license few of us can envision. They are able to virtually touch emotion. They place their fingertips right on the edge of your heart and make it race or slow down with their ability to bring you [...]
For a puppet troupe dedicated to sensitizing school children (and adults) to people with disabilities, the medium is the message.
By Lori A. Wood
The oldest Kid on the Block was inspired by one of special education teacher Barbara Aiello’s students, Anthony, a wheelchair-user with cerebral palsy.
“At the time, Anthony was being integrated into the neighborhood school,” says Diana Degnan- LaFon, director of Program Development for Kids on the Block, Inc. (www.kotb.com), an educational puppet company headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. “He approached Barbara and said that he wasn’t happy, because the other kids wouldn’t speak to him. She made a [...]
An anthropologist explains what disability studies is-and why he thinks it could be so much more.
By William J. Peace
Disability studies is among the hippest and newest fields in American academia. As a college student would say, disability is cool, worthy of intense academic debate and serious scholarship. In the last decade, disability studies has created its own jargon and graduate programs in the field are popping up across the country.
At the undergraduate level one can major or minor in disability studies. One can also get an MA or PhD in the field at prestigious universities. Disability studies has its [...]
Beth Arnoult, one of the subjects of the film Champions on Wheels,
is now the top women’s wheelchair tennis player in the United States.
(Photo by Grace Shafir)
A new documentary shows how five wheelchair athletes found meaning on the tennis court.
By Lori A. Wood
“I didn’t even know wheelchair tennis existed until the NASDAQ tournament in 2000,” says Grace Shafir, producer and director of the 2005 film Champions on Wheels. “NASDAQ was the first national tournament to have wheelchair tennis. People were playing wheelchair tennis between the matches, and they were so good.”
In April 2002, while [...]
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