“I love you, chick!”
This was the line I spoke during a play at my old camp, Pathfinder County Day Camp, in Montauk, New York. It took place during the summer of 1974.
Everyone watching the play was moved by the whole acting cast. My sister Jenn saw it (after Jenn and I got home from camp, she told our mother who then questioned me. Since then, I’ve regretted not telling my parents about the play). The mother of the girl around whom I put my arms was impressed (No, there was nothing sexy or seductive – just a peck on the lips). The counselor who directed the play was pleased with our performances, but I was nonchalant about my performance.
At the end of every summer, each camper would receive a camping certificate of merit. Sometimes, it would come with a sticker of distinction. That type of sticker is like an award. I had gone to Pathfinder for seven summers (1969 to 1975), and sometimes my certificate would exhibit a sticker. Figure 1 shows a camping certificate I received from Pathfinder at the end of that summer. This certificate has two stickers, one of which was a camp award for dramatics. The other sticker was for camp service – I still don’t know why I received it, but I was pleasantly surprised by the dramatics sticker. Perhaps the camp directors thought I deserved it because I was gutsy enough to speak a line during a play in front of everyone.
I look at that camp play not only with nostalgia but also with sadness because two summers after the play, the counselor who directed the play died a few weeks after her car was rear-ended by another car and caught fire. She was only in her early twenties.
The main point is that I was given a speaking role, no matter how brief it would be. You’d say ‘big deal,’ but remember I was born deaf and had taken speech therapy lessons during most of my childhood. Some people continue to have difficulty understanding my speech – hence my ‘deaf’ speech. So it was rather daring that I had a speaking role in a play for the hearing. The camp play was the second of three plays where I had such a role – the other two took place at my public schools. The first one occurred when I was a fourth grader at Public School (PS) 179 in Fresh Meadows and the third time took place when I was a sixth grader at PS 178 in Holliswood. Every time I acted, I had only one line. That’s because many, if not all, of my fellow thespians were concerned that my speech would not start off well and that if it did, it could get worse over the course of the play.
What was as special (if not more so) as my school role was my acting part in a play about the civil rights movement involving Rosa Parks at PS 179. The director was my fellow fourth grader, Susan, the protagonist of one of my earlier blogs.1 My role was that of the bus driver, one of the most important characters in the play. Susan played the central character, Rosa Parks. The line I was supposed to say was “Stand up.” Everyone else in the cast thought it would be easy for me to say these two words. OK, I initially thought. So, we rehearsed several times, and we were all prepared. However, before the play started, I became more self-conscious of the word ‘stand’ because none of its four consonants and one vowel were silent. As time neared, these letters had become so much bigger that I worried that I might flub the word. When it was my time to tell Susan, acting as Rosa, to move to the back of the bus, I improvised by saying “Get up.” The word ‘get’ had only three letters (two consonants and one vowel) and was much easier for me to pronounce at that time. The whole audience understood me and knew what was going to happen next. When the play was over, the audience applauded our performances. We the students and our teacher thanked Susan for her leadership and direction. No one said anything about my improv, and that was totally fine with me.
The third role of mine was at PS 178 during the spring of 1976, the bicentennial year of our nation. It was as a sailor on a ship taking immigrants to the Statue of Liberty in the early 20th Century. It was the most difficult role I had had because it was the longest line I had ever spoken in any play. I had to rehearse that line numerous times with my school speech teacher, yet my mother said after the play that I flubbed one word at the end of my line. I couldn’t care less about that role or even remember what my line was.
I would like to express several thoughts on my acting career. I really appreciate the efforts by everyone to include me in their plays, especially in the mid 1970s – they made me feel as if I was a significant participant in every action in the plays, although they were dominated by people with typical hearing. When I was mainstreamed in the NYC public school system, I got into uncharted territory. School administrators, teachers and/or students at the schools could have left me out because they probably did not know what to do with me and my hearing loss. I am pretty sure they didn’t, and that was a major reason why my school days from PS 179 to Harvard/UPenn were generally positive experiences.
Secondly, I think that this is an appropriate time to tell a story about my involvement in a play on the civil rights movement because police brutality was brought to everyone’s attention in the 1960s and has continued to this day, especially within the past few years during which the Black Lives Matter movement has been brought prominently to our attention.
Thirdly and probably paradoxically, people might object to my taking a role as a person with hearing. In the past several years, there have been numerous complaints by actors of color, ethnicity or disability that their peers have taken roles of characters in spite of differences in color, ethnicity or ability. For example, Alan Arkin, a well-known actor with typical hearing expertly acted as John Singer, a major d/Deaf character in the movie ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.’ If the movie were to be made now instead of 1968, the d/Deaf community would object to Mr. Arkin taking the role of Mr. Singer, and Mr. Arkin would have been forced to reject such a role. Also, I wrote ‘paradoxically’ because d/Deaf people might object to my taking a role of a hearing person because they would argue (1) that’s not who I am, (2) that I may not be a good representative of the d/Deaf community and (3) that my taking such a role might imply that I had not fully accepted my hearing loss and had wished to have normal hearing.
It’s funny to think that some people with typical hearing may argue the same thing, albeit for different reasons. Please forgive me if what I’m going to write may sound (no pun intended) offensive, but here it is: people with hearing may argue that they are superior to those with hearing loss and that a person with hearing, not with hearing loss, ought to take the role of any character with typical hearing.
Even more, I have been a lifelong member of a community whose rights have been constantly suppressed by people with typical hearing, yet I played a white character (e.g., the bus driver) who claimed he had no choice but follow the law.2 That type of law was more like a Jim Crow law whose sole purpose was to suppress the rights of black people in the USA. So although I’m a person whose rights have been suppressed because of disability, I happened to play a character who had suppressed someone else’s rights because of race.
It all comes down to respect for differences, whether they are cultural, racial, ethnic, disabled or whatnot.
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