Whitney and I are back from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle just in time to prepare for a presentation at a library in the Chicago suburbs tomorrow. A description in this week’s Lake Zurich Courier tells me not to plan on saying much!

GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Children and adults are invited to meet author Beth Finke’s guide dog Whitney, a Labrador/golden retriever mix, 2-3 p.m. Sunday, March 2 at Ela Area Public Library, 275 Mohawk Trail, Lake Zurich.

More on our successful trip to Seattle in a future blog post. Stay tuned!

Hello from Seattle! I flew out here with Whitney – our first solo trip since my emergency open-heart surgery last year. This was a major milestone, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was pretty anxious about it before we left. The flight was loooong, and already at takeoff Whitney decided she didn’t like her spot under the seat in front of us. Good thing the passengers next to us loved dogs –Whit was a bit of a sprawler. I was thrilled to hear our Seattle friend Greg calling out my name at baggage claim after we landed, and Whitney was happy to see him, too. She had to go, if you know what I mean.

I brought a Magic 8-Ball as a gift to thank Greg for picking us up, and I almost didn’t get it through security – to many ounces of fluid, doncha know. It got through on a technicality – they regarded it as a snowglobe, and snowglobes recently got approved by the TSA. In exchange for his Magic 8-Ball, Greg treated me to a couple of Seattle micro-brews (Mack & Jack’s lager  – yum!) at the hotel bar before Whit and I settled into our room.

I’m here to attend the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) here in hopes of finding a publisher for my next book

All the snow and ice in Chicago this winter has had one (and probably, only one!) benefit: it provided a lot of time to stay inside and write. I made major progress on the book I’m writing about the memoir classes I lead for Chicago senior citizens, and Whitney and I will spend a lot of time at the AWP book fair going table to table to talk about my new project to anyone who will listen. (By the way, it’s in the 50s, sunny and I’m not wearing snow boots.)T

My author friend Audrey Petty encouraged me to do this, explaining that AWP is the perfect place to come with a writing project that isn’t quite finished. Publishers and other writers I meet might like my idea and give me guidance on how to shape it differently or rework it somehow before it’s entirely finished.

That’s Audrey with Alex Kotlowitz during a presentation last year. (Photo: Janet Smith)

You might remember Audrey from blog posts I’ve written about her before. She started thinking about doing an oral history of people who’d lived in high rise public housing back in 2008, and after McSweeney’s took notice, she spent most of the past three years under their guidance, tracking down former residents of Chicago’s housing projects and interviewing them for High Rise Stories: Voices From Chicago Public Housing, published by McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series late last year.

The conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, and I’ll meet up with Audrey then. She’s invited Whitney and me to come as her guests to the McSweeney’s cocktail party tomorrow night. Before then Whitney and I need to learn our way to the lobby from our room on the 26th floor of this absolutely huge hotel blocks away from the convention center. (Whitney is in front of our floor-to-ceiling windows enjoying the view as I type this blog post.) Once we tackle finding our way through the lobby, we’ll tackle making our way the four blocks to the convention center. I figure if I register before the conference starts they might let me in to figure out the lay of the land ahead of time. That way I’ll feel much more comfortable going table to table at the book fair tomorrow, asking each person there who they are and what they do, and then leaving my business card (it even has my name in Braille on it) to anyone who takes interest. Wish us luck!

This past weekend—a very full one—included a trip to Elmhurst College to root on the North Central College women’s basketball team (the Cardinals) against the evil Elmhurst College Blue Jays. OK, Elmhurst College isn’t evil. And really, we were there more specifically to root on Beth’s great niece, who, as a freshman, gets significant playing time on North Central’s team.

Anita follows through on a jump shot during Saturday’s game.

When we entered the gym I was ready with my $12 — $6.00 each for Beth and me, per the information online. The young woman at the ticket table said, “That’ll be $3.00 each.” I left the ticket table  feeling like we’d gotten lucky. Then Beth whispered, as we walked away, “I think she thought we were seniors.” As in senior citizens. Well now.

I guess I could’ve been miffed. But just walking into the court area reminded me that I have indeed been around for a good while. Because every time I go to one of Anita’s games, or a friend’s daughter’s soccer game, I am reminded that for the growing segment of the population that is younger than I am, these women’s games are no big deal. Commonplace.

But I still marvel at them. Because women competing athletically—hustling, clawing, grunting, and even fighting (did you see the USA-Canada women’s hockey game?)—wasn’t the norm,  wasn’t cool, and for most women wasn’t possible—when I was growing up. That’s all different now. That’s a wonderful thing, and it didn’t happen by accident.

Reasonable people can disagree about the role and the size of government—and that should always be at issue in our democracy. But I gotta say this: Title IX changed things for the better. Period.

By Title IX, I mean Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (there is also a Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Birch Bayh, U.S. Senator from Indiana, co-authored and introduced the legislation that is summarized here:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance… 

The law was renamed in 2002. It’s formal name is now the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act—Mink was the Congresswoman from Hawaii who co-authored the bill, and who introduced it to the House of Representatives.

The law was not focused on athletics—it was intended to ensure equal opportunity in employment and enrollment and educational opportunities at colleges and universities that received support from the federal government.  Here’s what Senator Bayh had to say about it back then:

“We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a ‘man’s place’ on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the ‘weaker sex’ and it is time to change our operating assumptions.”

Title IX has made a huge difference overall, but its impact has been the most visible in athletics. When I was in high school lo these many decades ago, girls playing sports was broadly considered weird (at best, and characterizations of female athletes were often much less charitable than “weird”).

Not so anymore.  Saturday I sat in the bleachers with Beth, Anita’s family, Beth’s sister Cheryl, their mother Flo, and we cheered some really good players as they went at it hard in a very entertaining game. I heard the coaches get on the players, mothers and fathers yelling at the refs, and it was all…normal. I was pleased that it seemed so commonplace. But I will never cease to marvel at it, and I feel privileged to have witnessed this change in my lifetime.

Our friend Carli Karpeyev left a comment to that post I published here Thursday — you know, the one about the blind-dad TV sitcom. Carli doesn’t have a disability herself, yet she was disappointed that NBC didn’t hire a blind actor for the starring role.

I’ve heard this kind of concern before, why didn’t a wheelchair user play the lead in Born on the Fourth of July, why wasn’t a blind actor cast in Scent of a Woman and so on. It’s never been one of my big causes, though. I mean, gee whiz, isn’t that why they call it acting?

But then I watched a Ted Talk by female stand-up comic Maysoon Zayid that Carli had linked to in the comment she left to my post, and it got me thinking. Maysoon Zayid has cerebral palsy. She studied theater at Arizona State University but gave up her dream to become an actress after repeatedly being passed over for roles.

Even when ASU produced And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson, a play about a girl who has physical disabilities growing up in a small (and small-minded) town, Zayid didn’t get the lead. “This is a part I was literally born to play,” she says, lamenting that they cast an able-bodied theatre student instead. “They didn’t think I could do the stunts, but excuse me, if I can’t do the stunts, neither can the character!”

Zayid says she realized very, very quickly that Hollywood wouldn’t have a place for “fluffy ethnic disabled people” like her. The only female stars she could think of who made it to the top without conventional cover girl looks were comediennes. Whoopi Goldberg. Rosie O’Donnell. Roseanne Barr. So she turned to comedy.

Maysoon Zayid is a comedy success story now, but she still advocates for actors with disabilities, asserting in her Ted Talk that if Hollywood won’t hire actors with disabilities for everyday roles, than they ought to stop casting able-bodied actors into roles as people with disabilities. “If a wheelchair user can’t play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can’t play a wheelchair user,” she shrugs.

That’s Teal Sherer.

A lot of disability advocates would agree with Maysoon Zayid. After Blair Underwood got the leading role in last year’s Ironside TV series, Sons of Anarchy star Kurt Yaeger (an actor who lost his left leg after a motorcycle accident) said that casting an actor who can walk for that part is “like being in the ’50s and having a white guy do blackface.”
Teal Sherer says Hollywood’s treatment of her and her fellow actors with disabilities is … lame. Her frustration with Hollywood motivated her to produce her own YouTube show called My Gimpy Life to illustrate the often absurd challenges actors with disabilities face in the entertainment industry. In an NPR interview, Sherer said she doesn’t want roles reserved for her because of her disability — but she does want to get a call to read for parts, including ones not specifically intended for actors with disabilities. “If we lose an opportunity to audition, then we lose an opportunity to move forward in our career,” she said.

A lot of food for thought, huh? And in case you were wondering, the dog playing the guide dog in tonight’s Growing Up Fisher debut is not a guide dog in real life, either. “I don’t want to take a guide dog away from a blind guy,” writer DJ Nash, who grew up with a dad who can’t see, said in an interview promoting the new show.“ It was more important to have a dog that could hit its marks and stop at a construction hole on cue, and not be phased by 167 crew members, than to have that verisimilitudinous touch.”

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who’ve been watching hockey, curling and skiing on NBC the past couple of weeks, no doubt you’ve also seen a commercial for a new TV comedy about a father who is blind – a Deadline Hollywood article says 300 promotional spots for the new show will air before the Winter Olympics closing ceremonies this Sunday night.

“Growing up Fisher” has very talented people like Jason Bateman (executive producer) and David Schwimmer (director) behind it, and J.K. Simmons, a fine actor, plays the dad who is blind. It could be good, but if those commercials are any indication, I worry.

That’s Bob Ringwald at the piano.

I’ve run across plenty of people raised by dads who are blind, and they have interesting stories to tell. Let’s start with
Molly Ringwald.. You know, the one in all those John Hughes movies in the 1980s? Her father is blind. My brother Doug is a professional jazz trombonist, and he introduced me to Molly’s father Bob Ringwald, a talented professional jazz pianist, years ago. Molly has written a few novels, and she was asked about her dad during an NPR interview about her books. She told Scott Simon that as a child she enjoyed sitting with him during movies and plays to describe the action. “I actually think that that informed my writing,” she said. “That’s something that I’ve done for so long, that it’s made me, perhaps, observe things in a different way.”

And then there’s Gore Vidal. After the famous writer and critic died in 2012, Bob Edwards Weekend replayed an interview conducted at Vidal’s home in Los Angeles in 2006. Vidal was raised by his grandfather, a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Sen. Thomas Gore was blind, and Vidal was ten years old when he started reading to him. “I read grown-up books to him: constitutional law, the Congressional Record, American history, poetry,” Vidal said. ”He was extraordinary, he was my education.” Vidal guided his grandfather to Senate hearings, and he said he didn’t dare fall asleep while sitting in the balcony waiting for the session to be over — at any moment his grandfather might give a hand signal to let young Vidal know to skedaddle down the Senate stairs to guide him to the bathroom.

Growing up with a father who is blind can be interesting, and funny, too, at times. A live performance of This American Life opened with Vancouver writer Ryan Knighton telling a story about a walk in the woods he took alone with his young daughter. Knighton is blind, and when she started screaming about a bear, he panicked. After weighing his options, he realized that her frantic cries of “bear!” were only in reaction to dropping her teddy bear on the sidewalk. Knighton’s most recent book C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark is full of funny — and frightening  — stories of his first years as a father. His daughter Tess is seven years old now, and I’m sure she has some very entertaining stories to tell.

My friend Colleen was the first to call and tell me about the ads during the Olympics promoting the new blind dad TV comedy. My husband Mike confirmed that the commercial shows one scene of the father cutting a tree down with a chainsaw, and then another of him driving a car. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are blind who are looking forward to the premiere, I’m just not one of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I do hope Growing Up Fisher  is good, and that the storytelling and substance outweighs the over-the-top driving and chainsaw gimmicks featured in the trailers, but I’m not going to count on it. When I really want to learn about what it’s like to be raised by fathers who can’t see, I’ll turn to the day-to-day stories of the Ringwalds, the Knightons, and the late Gore Vidal.