Public speaking comes fairly easy to me. Acting on stage does not. But that’s exactly what I’ll be doing at Victory Gardens Zacek McVay Theater in Chicago this Saturday, August 13 at 2:30 pm.

My class: (Clockwise – Andrew Lund, Beth Finke, Kathleen Guillion, Rukmini Girish, Michele Lee,, Whitney the Seeing Eye Dog, Grishma Shah) Courtesy Neo Futurists.

Some back story. Earlier this year I attended one of two accessible performances of Too Much Light put on by the Neo-Futurists. The Neo-Futurists are a collective of Chicago writers-performers “dedicated to creating honest, unpredictable theatre,” and in Too Much Light productions cast members attempt to perform a perpetually rotating list of two-minute plays in 60 minutes.

After the success of their two accessible performances this year those honest and unpredictable Neo-Futurists took things one step further. They used funds from grants they’d received from The Chicago Community Trust and Alphawood Foundation Chicago, teamed up again with the Victory Gardens Access Project, and offered their popular Intro to Too Much Light playwriting program to a class accessible to performers and writers with and without disabilities. The class was offered free of charge. I couldn’t resist.

The hope was that half of the enrollees would identify as having a disability. The Neo-Futurists achieved their goal. In fact, we outnumber the others: of the seven performers, Two use wheelchairs, I am blind, and one uses a prosthetic arm. .
Over the course of ten three-hour sessions every Saturday (we started on June 4, 2016) the seven of us have:

• explored the process and tools needed to create a two-minute play
• followed the Neo-Futurist tenets of honesty, brevity, audience connection and random chance to write plays from our own life experiences
• examined specific play formulas and styles that are similar to plays performed in Too Much Light
• pitched a few of our plays to teachers to have them performed Saturday

These productions used to be called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. I’m not sure that they took the Blind word out because I am involved, but must say, I prefer the shortened title.

And while we’re mentioning that blindness of mine, I need to tell you that losing my sight some twenty-odd years ago left me with a unique version of paranoia. While I don’t mind people looking at or listening to me when I’m sitting or standing still (like when I’m giving a talk),  the thought that people might be watching me attempt a task — even one as simple as finding a doorknob — fills me with anxiety.

I started waking up Saturdays wondering why the heck I signed up for this thing. The commute to Victory Gardens isn’t easy, days off work are precious, I stink at memorizing lines, and I hate having people watch me perform.

I liked learning about playwriting, though, and every week I grew more fond of our teachers and my classmates. Most of them have acted before. It was a treat to experience their work, and hear it improve from week to week.

I stayed in class, and was determined to keep news of this Saturday’s performance a secret from my friends. But then last Saturday we had our dress rehearsal.

That’s me in the spelling bee piece.

I have speaking parts in a play one classmate wrote about a spelling bee and in one another classmate wrote about a trip overseas. Whitney does not have a speaking part (Seeing Eye dogs are not allowed to bark). She plays a major role in my Dear Boss play, though, so her name is in the program on the cast list.

The four of us with disabilities wrote some plays that address accessibility, and many others that don’t mention it at all. One thing the plays have in common? They’re all pretty good. And so, I’ve changed my mind. Everyone should come this Saturday.

The performance Saturday won’t go any longer than 45 minutes and will feature live captioning and American Sign Language for people who are hard of hearing and audio headphones for people who want the action on stage described. Victory Gardens is wheelchair accessible, and a touch tour of the stage and props will take place ahead of the show for anyone interested.

The play starts at 2:30, so come experience it for yourself on Saturday afternoon, August 13, in Victory Gardens Zacek McVay Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue . No need to RSVP, and no need for tickets, either: It’s free!

The best thing on the radio in my view is an hour-long weekly program on NPR called On the Media, produced by WNYC, and hosted by journalism veterans Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield.

Full disclosure: I’m a journalism grad, a giant consumer of journalism, and I think about what makes good journalism more than the average person. So On the Media (OTM) is right in my wheelhouse.

But while it’s heady, it’s not geeky—and it serves a double purpose: In examining what the press got right and wrong and why over the last week, it provides a really efficient roundup of the big stories. So it’s a nice weekly digest—with the addition of explaining what might have been distorted with a little fact checking. Which is to say, you don’t have to be a journalism geek to enjoy the program.

OTM also takes the time to dive a little deeper into topics that get a high volume but a low quality of coverage.

Last week, it was immigration. One segment looked at perceptions and misperceptions about immigration here in the United States. It featured an interview with Prof. Doug Massey, a sociologist at Princeton.

Massey brought a true social scientist’s approach to the subject: That is, there was no moral pontificating, and no vilification of people who are afraid of immigrants. Instead, there was just a lot of good information, information that helps understand the angst.

For example, when asked about the biggest myth about the state of illegal immigration, Massey had this to say:

In fact, illegal migration ended eight years ago and has been zero or negative since 2008, because migration is a young person’s game. If you don’t migrate between the ages of 15 and 30, you don’t migrate at all, and the average age in Mexico is now 28 years old.

Massey had illuminating and often surprising answers to a lot of other questions—one observation really struck me:

You have to remember that the baby boom grew up in the whitest, most native America that’s ever existed. In 1970, the foreign-born percentage of the United States, for the first and only time in American history, fell below 5 percent. And African-Americans were segregated and out of sight. That’s the America that people look back and think that that’s normal. And that’s all changed.

It certainly has changed.

He went on to explain that no matter what we do—even if we shut off all immigration, the America of 1970 isn’t coming back.

“That world is gone for good,” said Massey, “and there’s nothing you can do about it, except adapt and make it work for you.”

The good news, of course, is that humans can and do change. I know this from personal experience.

I didn’t know a single black person until I was 17–that’s when I met a black girl at Sears, where we both worked. I didn’t know a gay person until… and I could reel off a dozen more. Experience and personal relationships opened my eyes. But it never stops.

Even when we first moved to the city, there were characters on the street who would give me pause and make me wary. Some of that is healthy. But some is borne of ignorance. The first times I was in the distinct minority on a subway car, I was self-conscious and if not afraid, I was nervous.

Now, I don’t even notice. I don’t think my old self would recognize the new.

I’d like to tell you I don’t have a racist, bigoted, frightened bone in my body. Except that’d be a patent lie, because, well, I’m a human being.

And I don’t necessarily like change.

But in the end, change has always been good for me.

You can listen to the recording of the interview, as well as read a transcript. I hope you will.

Mike and I are privileged to have friendships with some of the most thoughtful, kind, intelligent, talented and funny people on this earth. We were just reminded of this in a most touching and uplifting way.

Mike has written here about our friends Pick and Hank. And Hank has posted here as a guest blogger, describing what it was like leading me around on a vacation together in New Orleans and the nuances of his volunteer work helping blind people in the D.C. area, where he and Pick live.

Hank visited Arlington National Cemetery after hearing Capt. Humayun Khan’s father speak at the Democratic National Convention last week. Hank’s hardly an attention seeker, but his visit to Capt. Khan’s gravesite deserves the attention it received in a recent article by CBC/Radio Canada.

Please give the story a read.

And join me and Mike in saying, “Thanks, Hank. We couldn’t have said it or done it better.”

Here’s my Thursday afternoon cast of criminals.

“Of Course it was Illegal” is one of the many, many writing prompts I’ve assigned over the years out of pure curiosity, and lucky you: generous writers in my memoir classes have given me permission to share some of their confessions here on the Safe & Sound blog.

A number of writers came back with essays about stealing gum or candy from stores, and these shoplifters seemed to remember the scenes of their crimes pretty vividly. Hugh was no exception, but his quest was a little different. “I was seven and Dean was ten and we were deeply involved in casting lead soldiers,” Hugh wrote, pointing out that the lead he and his big brother needed to cast soldiers back in the 1930s was the same lead in the fishing sinkers sold at the neighborhood Sears store on 79th Street on Chicago’s South Side. “They were about two or three inches long,,,and slipped easily into a pocket.”

Darlene’s pre-teen crime took place at the Eckerd’s Drug Store on the corner of Florida Avenue and Bearrs in Tampa, where her family was living at the time. “Money was extremely tight for us with a very big family to care for,” she wrote, describing a 1966 fashion-statement-wooden-tigers-eye ring a friend had bought there. “I wanted a ring like that, too!” I’m not gonna fink, ahem, on Darlene. I’ll let you guess the rest.

Marijuana was illegal when my writers were young adults, but that didn’t stop some of them from smoking pot, and, in some cases, trying other drugs, too. A co-worker Bruce described as “attractive and a little edgy” invited him to relax and tuck a small disc of LSD under his tongue during a drive to see Alice in Wonderland at the movie theater. “She had access to the drug and she agreed to join me in the experiment,” he wrote. “I worried that my starchy life style would stifle the effects of chemical.” He needn’t have worried.

Some confessions were quite serious. Early in her marriage Regan discovered her then-husband had walked out with their joint checkbook. Knowing he would drain the account, she climbed into her 1963 Volkswagen bus and pursued him. Regan crashed into his 1970 Ford Mustang every time it slowed down. “Eventually I was able to get up enough steam to bulldoze him off the road and cram him into a tree,” she wrote.

Regan posts her essays on her own BackStory Essays blog, and you can link to her entire The Secret Years post to hear the rest. I will tell you this, though: her ex-husband survived.

Other stories involved international intrigue. Brigitte grew up in Germany, and when she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Vassar in 1961, she came on an exchange visitor visa. She married an American, they had a son, and she didn’t bother applying for citizenship until 10+ years later in 1974.

“The real truth about my past life: I was… hmmm, I was… an illegal alien,” she wrote, insisting it never occurred to her at the time. Nor did it bother anybody else in charge. “I suppose coming from a Western European country didn’t hurt, either.”

Another story of international intrigue came from Mary. Her husband had traveled from America to West Berlin with a church group before he and Mary were married. It was 1954. He was 17. He crossed the border from West Berlin to East Berlin illegally.

Getting east was relatively easy. Not so on the way back. Police wanted his papers, and when they saw the American passport, they arrested him.

Mary and her husband recently celebrated their 80th birthdays, and she beamed in class while reading about him spinning a tale to his captors 60+ years ago about having come to the Russian sector looking for books by Engels, Marx and Lenin. “He said he’d been prevented from learning about socialism in America,” she wrote, describing his captors returning with a “scuffed carboard suitcase” filled with English language editions of Engels, Marx and Lenin and sending him on his way back to West Berlin.

A few of the essays were downright educational. Jim’s piece about his career in the airlines taught us how the decision-making between a flight dispatcher and a pilot can be reviewed later to determine which decisions are legal–or not.

Lorraine’s piece taught us something about underage drinking. She was only 11 when her relatives routinely asked her to head to the corner store to buy groceries — including liquor. While doing research for her essay she discovered that from 1872 until 1961, as long as you had “parental permission,” it was legal in Illinois for children to buy drink and be around alcohol. She sounded a bit disappointed to discover that some of her childhood “hooliganism” really wasn’t illegal after all.” I grew up thinking drinking was part of our religion,” she sighed. “And that it was illegal.”

And who knew that it is illegal to possess a migratory bird, even a dead one, without a wildlife permit? Pat did — she’s an avid Birdwatcher.

So years ago, when she came downstairs to find that a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker had died after crashing into her apartment building, she knew she shouldn’t have put the migratory bird into a shoebox to store in her freezer. “The truth is, I really wanted to see the guy who was the Collections Manager for Birds at the Field Museum,” she confessed. “That sapsucker was going to be my excuse.” Pat had met the collections manager briefly a couple times before. She noticed he didn’t wear a ring, but she thought that was probably because he spent most of his day cleaning the innards out of bird carcasses. “But he seemed single,” she wrote. “There was a boyishness to him that gave me hope.”

After six weeks breaking the law, Pat finally decided it was time to act. Here from her essay :

The next morning I took the shoebox out of the freezer and set off on foot for the Field Museum. It occurred to me that the shoebox could reveal my extravagance in spending $120 for a pair of Mephisto sneakers and my unattractively large shoe size. Well, it was too late to find another woodpecker coffin now.

And so, did Pat ever meet her dream man at the Field Museum? I’ll let you decide……

Overshadowed by speeches by Bernie, Bill and Michelle at the Democratic Convention this week came a quick and quiet talk by former Senator Tom harkin to celebrate the 26th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act yesterday.

Harkin, who was taught sign language by his brother Frank, taught everyone in the audience the sign for “America”: put your palms together, he said, continuing by instructing the crowd of delegates to make a huge circle in front of them while their hands were together like that. “Think about it,” he said. “We are all together, no one is left out in this constant circle of life .”

Click on the image to see Sen. Harkin in action.

The Americans with Disabilities Act hadn’t been passed yet when I started losing my eyesight in 1984. I was 25 years old then, and along with the obvious fear of going blind came the underlying fear of being left out of society if and when that happened. I went as long as I could without using a white cane or a guide dog. I quit driving or riding my bike, but I could still see well enough to walk to my job as the Assistant Director of the Study Abroad Office at a Big Ten university.

Most of my work back then involved counseling college students on study abroad options — I could have done that with my eyes closed!

As my eyesight got worse, though, I started making mistakes in the office. I still remember spilling grounds all over the floor on my way to make the morning coffee. I had to sit close to my computer screen to see the words. I ran into tabletops.

At some point my boss took me aside and told me I wouldn’t be going to the annual convention with my colleagues. “You’ll embarrass the office,” she said. Months later, my contract was terminated.

I celebrated the 26th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) yesterday right along with Sen. Harkin. The landmark federal legislation was passed five years after I lost that job. Designed to improve access to services and employment opportunities, it was intended to eliminate illegal discrimination and level the playing field for people like me who live with disabilities.

I am totally blind now, and I use speech software for my part-time job moderating a blog for easterseals. I’ve had two books published, and have another one on the way. I record pieces for public radio from time to time, and I lead four different memoir-writing classes for older adults in Chicago every week.

It’s true we have a long, long way to go before hiring practices are totally fair to those of us who can’t see, use wheelchairs, or have a myriad of other disabilities. Things are moving in the right direction, though, and thanks to the wisdom and determination of Sen. Harkin and the many people who banded together to get the ADA passed 26 years ago, we have the law on our side.