Hanni showing off her ear-do.

Seeing Eye dogs are so hip that they all get tattoos. That’s how they roll, dude.

I’m sure you’re assuming that my four Seeing Eye dogs all opted for tattoos of hearts with the letters b-e-t-h inscribed inside.

Wrong.

My Seeing Eye dogs all had tattoos long before I met them. The Seeing Eye uses tattoos — a series of letters and numbers inside their right ear flap — to keep track of the dogs as puppies. The tattoos can prove useful later, too, in identifying working Seeing Eye dogs who might get separated from their blind companions.

I learned about these tattoos 25 years ago, when I was training with my first dog Dora. It’s only recently, however, that I found out that someone famous helped come up with the system for tattooing identification numbers on pets in case they were lost. It’s likely you’ll recognize his name when I tell you who he is. First, some hints:

• He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1925
• He was a WWII co-pilot on a B-24 bomber
• His first post-war job was with a Kansas City film company that made industrial shorts
• He talked President Truman into having one of his dogs tattooed
• He sold his first film script to Hollywood in 1948
• He moved to Hollywood In 1955 and found work directing episodes of shows like Maverick, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Bonanza
• When he was 45 years old, he agreed to direct a film about a group of irreverent, anti-establishment doctors serving in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital on the front lines of the Korean War
• His 14-year-old son Mike wrote the lyrics for the movie’s theme song, “Suicide is Painless”

You got it: Robert Altman! I learned all this last month because I subscribe to Writer’s Almanac, and it was Robert Altman’s birthday February 20. Altman ranks as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in history, but from here on out, I’ll remember him as the man who helped invent and promote a tattooing machine for dogs.

Awhile back I wrote that I was starting an entry-level improv class at IO (formerly ImprovOlympic). Last Saturday I completed my eighth and final session. Of this go-round, anyway—I may take the next level later this year.

It wasn’t what I’d expected, which seems completely logical, come to think of it. I—like probably a lot of you—tended to think of improv as Saturday Night Live bits, Second City live revues.

The late, great Del Close.

But there’s a difference. And it’s something that Del Close (one of IO’s founders) and Bernie Sahlins (of Second City) famously disagreed about. Del Klose believed that improv is, in and of itself, a complete art form. Bernie Sahlins considered improv a tool by which good sketch comedy was created.

Improv, by itself, is not per se about being funny—or finding and saying the funny line. It’s, by my best description, creating a play in real time with your collaborators. That’s not exactly right, but I think it’s pretty close.

If you join your team members with the thought of “I have to be funny” or with an idea that you just must inject into the performance, you will screw things up. If, out of fear or nervousness you react to whoever’s on stage with you as quickly as possible to throw it back to him or her like a hot potato, you’re screwing things up. If you’re only kind of watching your fellow performers while plotting about how you can take what they’re doing somewhere you want it to go, you’re going to kill the flow.

All of which makes this impossibly hard. For me, anyway, but also a little electrifying. Someone throws out an idea, your classmate comes out with some body language and a line that presents a necessarily incomplete picture. It’s your job to take it—as it—whether you like or you think it makes sense. To take it as a gift that you embellish and then pass back.

That means if they said, “I just got back from Mars,” you don’t stop and say—“That can’t be true.”

You can’t think too much. You have to abandon self-consciousness. You can’t have an agenda. You can’t want to be funny. You have to trust that doing the unexpected will be funny, or at least exhilarating to you and the audience, and you have to above all, above all, listen. Listen to your team members carefully, for details. Details are the gifts they give you to respond to. You have to be ready to rescue your teammates if you can tell they’re going flat, and trust that they’ll do the same for you.

In that way, it’s a terrific kind of universal therapy—one I kinda think anyone would benefit from. If you’re in Chicago, I hope you’ll take in some long-form improv performances at IO, and if you’ve ever considered taking a class—do it.

And as far as Del Close and Bernie Sahlins, I don’t think it’s an either question, but both.

Teachers in Mayville, Wisconsin had read my children’s book Hanni and Beth: Safe &Sound  aloud to their students before I arrived there last week, so when I showed up without Hanni, the star of that book, a few of the kids were – quite reasonably– disappointed.

Hmm. Might be good to start my presentation with an explanation. Hanni had retired from guide work, I told them. She lives with friends, she plays in the forest preserve a lot, and she just had a birthday. “Hanni is 15 years old now,” I said. After explaining what dog years are, I asked them to multiply 15 X 7. They were amazed.

From there I described how frightened my next dog Harper became after he heroically saved us from getting hit in Chicago traffic. “He saved us from getting killed,” I said. And for that, he deserved an early retirement.” I sensed them nodding in agreement.

I told them how another pair of friends took Harper in, and I shared stories of how happy Harper is now in a quiet suburb with a big back yard to play in.

Then I introduced them to the dog sitting calmly at my feet. When Whitney heard her name, she sprung up, flipped over and kicked her legs, hoping for a belly rub. The kids laughed and clapped,overwhelmingly approving of this silly new dog.

Whitney loved being off harness, and the kids loved it, too.

While Whitney and the kids started settling down, a hand shot up with a question. “How come you didn’t bring those other dogs with you then, too?” The questions went on from there. Some examples:

• How did you get blind?
• How do you drive?
• How did you get here?
• How does it feel to be blind?
• Do you ever get tired of the color black?
• How do you write books if you can’t see the paper?
• Does your dog ever make a mistake?
• How do you open a door?
• How can you use a key?
• How do you know what year and month and day and time it is?
• Why do you keep your eyes open if you can’t see?
• How can you sit on chairs and not fall off?

Whitney and I had a ball in Wisconsin last week –the temperature was below zero, but the people we met were so warm we hardly noticed. The staff at the Radisson in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin took turns taking Whitney outside for me whenever she needed to “empty.” The thoughtful teacher who picked us up at the hotel to drive us to school had a cup of hot coffee waiting for me in her warm car, and the Mayville students were bright and curious and thoughtful – one girl had painstakingly glued beads onto a sheet the night before to create a Braille note I could read on my own. It all warmed my heart.

Among the least important but most acute annoyances of modern life are the vocal patterns of young people. These patterns include the phenomenon known as vocal fry, where the last word of a sentence just sort of evaporates into the back of the speaker’s mouth. Check out this video for annoying examples.

Worse yet is the thing called uptalk or upward inflection—which can leave every sentence sounding like a question. This one really drives me nuts, as it goes beyond a stylistic annoyance and actually can confuse meaning. As in: This is a car vs. This is a car? Anecdotally, it seems like young women do it more than men, but in either case, for oldsters like me, it really hurts the credibility or authority of the speaker. Plus, the Esther Knezovich in me (my mother the school teacher and eternal internal language enforcer) just wants to choke these people.

It can be infectious, too, as I’ve heard contemporaries with teen and 20-something kids start adopting the mannerisms, as well as college teacher friends (here’s a nice piece on that). It’s a scourge I tell you.

Then again, I heard a This American Life piece on the subject that admonished curmudgeons like me to “Get over it.” Well, sorry Ira Glass, but it’ll take more than a skinny metrosexual to get me over it.

I was talking about all this over the weekend with a contemporary. She’s an architect who regularly employs student interns, and she put her finger on what is probably the larger concern lurking about these youngsters. She said, “Yeah, and you realize, it’s their world now.”

I imagine my parents and countless generations before them coming to the same terrifying conclusion. But there is some comfort. I happen to work with two young women, both hard-working, diligent, intelligent and always learning—an neither exhibits vocal fry or uptalk.

If it’s their world now, I’m perfectly fine.

If you haven’t signed up to follow BlindBeader’s Life Unscripted blog yet, I highly recommend you do. BlindBeader is a gifted young writer who lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband, three cats and guide dog Jenny. She wrote a guest post for our Safe & Sound blog last month with recommendations for visiting New York City, and when I contacted her this week to let her know how much I enjoyed her Life Unscripted post about “inter-marriage” she generously agreed to let me reblog it here for you.

So, Like, he takes care of you!” Or…?

Blogger Blindbeader and guide dog Jenny waiting for a water taxi in NYC.

by Blindbeader

Beyond my blindness, which is fairly visibly obvious, one of the first things people notice about me is the ring on my left ring finger. Many of them will say something about me being married, and the topic comes around to the fact that my husband is sighted.

“Oh, that’s great!”

Are they happy that I am married, happily, to someone who loves me? That I share my life with someone who carries me through dark times as I try and do for him? That we own a house, laugh at the antics of my guide dog and our three cats, cook, clean, bicker, smile, laugh, share hobbies, misunderstand each other, argue over money or sex or in-laws, smile and nod at little quirks that we just accept about each other?

Or are they happy that he can see?

Thankfully, Ben has told me that we don’t often get people staring at us, unless he is walking me into tables and chairs (something he has struggled with since we started dating). There are no noticeably pitying looks, or no outward looks of admiration…

But it is not uncommon for me (and others with sighted partners) to hear comments about how great it is that their mate is there to “take care of them.” Sure, he cooks a mean lasagna and picks up groceries, but I do laundry and clean the bathroom; if that’s taking care of me, then my contributions to our household are obviously considered “lesser” than his. Often times (though this is not unique to my husband), staff at stores or restaurants will ask what “she” would like. Few things annoy me (and him) more, so often times I will assert myself, or he will direct whoever to speak to me directly. Ben says he often gets questions about how I can read, what I do for work, or if I have a dog – questions that are par for the course when people meet or hear about a blind person. What is incredibly disconcerting is that it is assumed that Ben is my friend, and my blind guy friends are my FRIENDS (my emphasis). It has never been said in Ben’s presence so far as I know, but I have gone for coffee or worked out with blind male friends, and it is assumed that they are the giver of the ring on my finger.

My friend Meagan is engaged to Gregg, who is also blind. I have known them for quite a while now, and find them cute. Not CUTE (“Oh, the little blindie couple!”) but cute (two people who care about each other and still make each other smile despite distance, time and any difficulties that come their way). She says people do think they are adorable in the blind-couple sense, but are alternately upset that Meagan and Gregg (Meagan in particular) don’t have someone to take care of them. It’s a double-edged sword, contingent on the idea that a blind person needs someone to watch over them; it is not a matter of finding someone to love, who happens to be blind (or sighted, in my case). My friend Alicia agrees, going one step further: “First time someone learns I was dating, especially if the curious person was a parent or family member, that was the first question out of their mouths. I used to get angry and ask them why that was their first question, now I just answer it and move on. Usually their second is, what caused his blindness,” she says.

Conversely, I do know other blind people who are resistent to the idea of dating someone sighted, and seem to carry a resentment for those of us who have. On one hand, it appears that blind people with sighted partners enjoy a certain elevated status; on the other, it is assumed that we think we’re too good to “stick with our own kind.”

Click here to read the rest of BlindBeader’s original “So, Like, he takes care of you!” Or…? post on Life Unscripted. Be sure to read the comments, too. Her well-written and thought-provoking post received dozens of responses from readers who can see and who are blind, some who are deaf, others who are deaf/blind and from some spouses, too. I haven’t come across any other bloggers who’ve tackled this subject matter, and I commend BlindBeader for taking it on.