Here’s one last post I prepared before taking off for my residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Baseball season is finally here, and when I asked my friend Bob Ringwald to write a guest post about his love for the game, he willingly agreed.My brother Doug introduced me to Bob Ringwald years ago — they’re both jazz musicians, and they play together from time to time. Bob is blind, and it sounds like he’s looking forward to baseball season as much as – maybe even more than? – I am!

Take me out to the ballgame

by Bob Ringwald

The New York Giants moved to San Francisco In 1958, and that’s when I became a Giants fan. I was at a game at Candlestick park on a day when Willie Mays hit four home runs! But in the 60s and 70s, after Willie Mays left the Giants, I was working 6 and 7-nights a week as a musician. I had no time to follow baseball.

We moved to Los Angeles in 1979. One night I happened to decide to listen to a Giants – Dodgers game on the radio, and that was it: Vince Scully, the amazing Dodger play-by-play announcer, won me over. He is the best I have ever heard, and believe me, I’ve heard a lot of baseball announcers. I became a dyed-in-the wool Dodger fan.

We moved back to Northern California some 18 years ago, but I’m still a Dodger fan. I bleed Dodger Blue. Dodgers games are not heard this far north in Sacramento, but I can listen to the games using my computer on MLB dot com.

That’s Bob–Molly’s dad–announcing the lineups (reading from a Braille lineup card) at Dodger Stadium.

When we were still living in Tinsel Town, the Dodgers had a promotion once where you wrote in which baseball job you’d like to do: hang with the grounds crew, drag the base path during the 7th inning, sit with the sports writers and write your own story, hang out with the umpires, that sort of thing. I wrote a letter saying that I wanted to be the Public Address announcer. I knew someone in the P.R. department, so I handed the letter to him. That way it wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of letters I knew might come in.

On July 27, 1991 I used my Braille skills to announce the lineup for a Los Angeles Dodgers – Montreal Expos game. Guess I passed the audition: they invited me to announce the players as they came up to bat in the bottom of the 3rd inning, too, and when I put a little extra English on my announcement of Darrell Strawberry’s name, the 50,000 people in the stands went crazy. What a sense of power!

Later I was invited to go out onto the field at Dodger Stadium to see what the pitcher’s mound, bases, base path and home plate really felt like. I jumped up against the center field wall like a big league outfielder. I picked up the phone they answer in the bullpen when managers call from the dugout. I sat in the Dodger dugout alongside the famous drinking fountain that angry players have been known to destroy with their bats, and, as if that wasn’t enough, I also had the honor to sit in Vince Scully’s chair in the press box. My tour that day ended in the Dodger exercise room. Legendary Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda was on the treadmill, and we had a very interesting chat.

In the early 80s, my daughter, actress and author Molly Ringwald, sang the National Anthem at several Dodger games. Fernando Valenzuela gave her a signed baseball. Another time she was given a baseball signed by all of the 1981 World Series Championship Dodgers. I proudly display those autographed baseballs in my office.

From time to time people ask me, “If you can’t see the action, why would you want to go to the game when you could just as easily be at home listening to it on the radio?” I sometimes answer by saying “Why would you want to go to the game when you can see the action better, close up, at home on TV?” I do take a portable radio to the game to hear the play by play. But there is something more. There is the electricity of the crowd, the sound of the ball hitting the bat and mitt, the P.A. announcer, the venders selling programs, ice-cream, peanuts and other assorted goodies. And of course at Dodger Stadium there are the famous Dodger Dogs. Dodger Dogs are just regular Farmer John hot dogs. But, once you walk through the turn styles of the ball park, they become a gourmet repast.

Care to guess where I’ll be later today? Yes . . . . we’re traveling 400 miles south from Sacramento to Los Angeles to attend the Dodgers vs. Giants opening day game at Dodger Stadium. Care to take a guess which team I’ll be rooting for???

You can check out more photos of Bob’s baseball days on his web site. Play ball!

Sound the trumpets! Here’s something I never dreamed would happen to me: I’ve been awarded a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts! Mike, Whitney and I take off today for a couple days vacation in Canada, and on Sunday morning Mike will rent a car and drive Whitney and me from Montreal to Johnson, Vermont. Thanks to fellow writer Jeff Flodin, who encouraged me to apply for this fellowship, I’ll be spending the entire month of April with 50 other poets, visual artists and writers at the Vermont Studio Center, where I hope to make some progress on a manuscript I’ve been working on.

That manuscript is about all I’ve learned leading memoir-writing classes for senior citizens here in Chicago, and I got the perfect sendoff yesterday afternoon: Chicago Public Radio aired a piece on All Things Considered featuring the writers in my Wednesday class. WBEZ has been doing a special series on what was going on in people’s lives the year they turned 25: scientific studies have shown that the frontal cortex area—which governs judgment, decision-making and impulse control—doesn’t fully mature until around age 25, which can make that year a transitional one for many people. After hearing a few Chicago celebrities interviewed on WBEZ about their 25th year, I assigned “Being 25” as a topic for my own celebrities, the writers in my classes. From the WBEZ web site:

In this installment of the Year25 series, WBEZ Producer/Reporter Lauren Chooljian visits a memoir writing class for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Their assignment? To write 500 words about where they were at 25.

Lauren stopped by to hear their essays and talk to the students about their stories. She came to find out their teacher, writer Beth Finke, also had quite a story to tell about her 25th year. It was not only the year she was married, but it was the last year she could see. Finke has been completely blind since she was 26 years old.

Wedding day, July 28, 1984, photo by Rick Amodt

If you missed hearing the piece on the radio yesterday, never fear: you can still hear it online. Mike will fly home from Burlington this Sunday after dropping Whitney and me off in Vermont, and he has generously offered to keep up the Safe & Sound blog while I’m away. You’re in good hands.

All for now, folks: we gotta plane to catch!

This week Judy Roth, one of the writers in my Thursday afternoon memoir-writing class, arranged for Whitney and me to visit the school where her grandson Davin goes to kindergarten. My friend Carol drove us to Francis W. Parker School and agreed to write a guest post about our morning together there.

My morning at Francis W. Parker School

by Carol Dorf

The hands flew up in unison.

When I heard Beth was going to speak to kids at Francis W. Parker School, my hand immediately shot up to ask if I could accompany her. Sure, I wanted to experience Beth interacting with kids, but, truth be told, I really wanted to see what kids who attend one of the most prestigious private schools in Chicago are like. From the school Web site:

Colonel Francis W. Parker, influenced by the educational theories of John Dewey, envisioned a school that held the child at its very center. His fundamental belief was that learning could be fun and proved his point, not by theories on child psychology, but with actual classroom demonstrations. Colonel Parker believed that education included the complete development of an individual — mental, physical, and moral. Through the educational journey, students would develop in to lifelong learners and active, democratic citizens.

Colonel Parker believed that these great citizens must use their knowledge to improve the community– to make things better, more fair and pure. Parker students would graduate, not only with vast knowledge, but also with heart and soul.

Francis W. Parker School was, shall I say, quite lush: carpeted hallways, perfectly appointed decorations on the walls, modern desks, fabric lounge chairs. This was the crème de la crème.

The kindergarteners shuffled into the auditorium, and once they found their seats I could see heads bobbing and stretching to get a look at Beth and Whitney. Some kids were literally on the edges of their seats in anticipation of what would come. They waited patiently as Beth did her shpiel, and then, like mini Arnold Horshack’s, two dozen hands went up.

This was the moment I was waiting for. What questions would these “senior kindergarteners” ask: “How do you know the maid has done a good job if you can’t see?” “Who walks the dog for you?” Yes, I admit I was expecting a bunch of precocious kids asking questions that reflected their seemingly privileged lives. I pre-judged, and boy, was I wrong. What I heard instead was exactly what you’d expect from any 5-year-old:

• How do you write if you can’t see?
• Can you tell what I look like?
• If you can find your wallet, How do you know what’s in there?
• How do you make food?
• When you’re doing art, and you have to pick a color, how do you know what it is, you know, if your dog is color blind?

A big thank you to Beth for allowing me to accompany her that morning. Me and the kids at Frances W. Parker School learned a lot that day.

Many of the writers in the Wednesday memoir-writing class I’ve been leading over the years are retired public school teachers. Mary Finnegan is one of them. Mary is devoted to her brother–in-law who has disabilities, and since retiring she has been volunteering regularly at his group home. Here she is with a guest post.

Unrealistic expectations masked as idealism

by Mary Finnegan

I am a retired music teacher, and when I was teaching in the public schools, students with special needs were often mainstreamed into my music classes with no difficulties. Sometimes I had as many as three dozen students in classrooms where there weren’t enough seats for everyone, but with the help of paraprofessionals, I managed.

From time to time, however, I was required to teach self-contained special education classes alone. A self-contained classroom is a full day class at a regular school that’s just for children with disabilities. It’s usually composed of a small number of children who cannot be educated appropriately in an average classroom, and things didn’t always go well when I had to teach a class like that by myself. In one of the self-contained classes I taught, a special needs student suffered a seizure in my room. Another time I had to block the doorway with my cart to prevent a child with a behavior disorder from bolting from the room and leaving the building, which that child had done in another circumstance. These instances occurred in small class sizes.

I cannot even imagine handling larger class sizes of students with varying disabilities grouped together without the help of a paraprofessional, so I was startled to hear that the Illinois State Board of Education plans to allow local school districts to lift class size restrictions on self-contained special education classes at all levels. And that’s not all:, the number of special needs students placed in general education classrooms would no longer be limited, either, and the requirement to hire paraprofessionals would not apply in all circumstances.

Before she died, my mother-in-law often expressed gratitude for the special teachers who enabled her son to become self-sufficient to the point of managing a job in a sheltered workshop as an adult. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for the teachers who worked with him along with his classmates who had even more severe problems. To ask one person, no matter how well trained, to meet the specific needs of students with varying degrees of mental or physical disabilities without help is unrealistic expectations masked as idealism.

This matter is open for public discussion, and you can link to this email generator to let the State Board know your feelings. You DO NOT have to be a teacher or a paraprofessional to give your opinion. In some of the news articles I’ve recently read, I learned that public opinion will be considered through April 22, 2013. Thanks in advance for expressing your opinion on this matter, and thanks to Beth for allowing me to express mine here on her blog.

If you liked that guest post an engineering student wrote for the Safe & Sound blog last month, you’re gonna love this update on what Ebay and his classmates came up with as ways I can keep track of the colors of my clothes. Freshmen in other Design Thinking and Communication class sections were working on other projects for people with disabilities at the same time, and here are some examples

• A man who uses a wheelchair wanted an easier way to fold up the footrests when it came to transferring into a car or a regular chair
• A man with cerebral palsy was looking for a more efficient way to pull his trousers up on his own
• Occupational therapists asked for a device that might encourage their clients with Parkinson’s disease to do finger exercises on-the-go
• The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago hoped a class could figure out a way for clients with visual impairments to know how fast (and at what speed) they were walking on exercise treadmills
• a woman who uses a wheelchair and enjoys outdoor concerts was looking for a way to slide from her chair onto the lawn, then get back into her chair again on her own when the concert was over.

Ebay’s engineering class divided into four different groups to tackle my color identification problem, and Whitney and I traveled to a Design Expo at Northwestern Saturday to hear

A poster from the Fantagstic team’s presentation.

all of the students present their completed projects. Sixteen students had visited our apartment in February with prototypes ranging from carabiners to iron-on tags to QR codes that my talking iPhone could read to me, and seeing (okay, touching) what these four teams had come up with in the end made me glad I’d come out of the closet about my wardrobe woes.

Right now I put a safety pin in the tag of anything I own that is black, and a paper clip on anything white. I wear other colors, too, and I memorize what color those other things are by the feel of the clothing. On their February visit, the students watched me go through my closets and asked lots and lotss of questions. In the end all four teams expanded on my tried and true safety-pin method, each team inventing different things to hang from the pin to correspond to the color of the item.

Ebay’s team came up with acrylic shapes on cloth tags called “Fantagstic!” They reasoned that cloth tags would be lightweight, so I could use two or more at a time to identify multi-colored items. The tags another team came up with were laser-cut acrylic shapes called “Depindables”. The tags all the teams came up with had been tested to withstand high temperatures in the washer and dryer. “Tag Team” was the only team to use traditional Braille code on its tags – the other teams learned from research that a majority of people who are visually impaired do not read Braille. Ebay’s team designed its own palettes of shapes (lines, S’s, C-shaped arrows, dots, corners, and triangles) that they’d tested on me earlier to confirm the shapes were easy to feel and differentiate from each other. The “Code of Many Colors” team used small glass beads on the safety pin: one bead means black, two beads mean white, and so on. Judges from engineering firms were on hand to decide on winners for each proposal, and the winner for mine was…drumroll, please…Tag Team!

The winning “Tag Team” team

The Tag Team system is more than a label to safety-pin onto my clothes. It’s also a way to organize my closet and laundry. Tag Team includes a laundry hamper that holds a number of mesh bags, each bag with a tag attached that corresponds with a single color. They figure doing laundry will be easier if I don’t mix all my clothing in the hamper, only to have to resort it all again when the wash cycle is over. “All you do is put your clothes in the bag it belongs in, take the bag out, tighten the string, and throw the bag in the washing machine.”

What about times I’m too lazy to put dirty clothing into the proper mesh bag, you ask? “No worries,” said Tag Team with pride. With the Tag Team system, everything you wear has a tag pinned inside of it. ”Wake up the next morning, feel the tag on the shirt you wore the night before, and you’ll know which bag to put it in in your Tag Team hamper.”

I had to hand it to ‘em. But if you ask me, all the teams at the design expo were winners. These kids are just freshmen, and not only have they learned about design process, but also how much it can mean to work together to help people with unusual, unique, and unmet needs. I was the biggest winner of all, though: I got to work side-by-side with these talented and thoughtful young people, and when design expo was over Saturday afternoon, I walked out with custom-made prototypes of all the tags!

Folks I talked to Saturday from the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University told me they’re looking for new project proposals from people with disabilities and organizations who work with us. If there’s something you need and you live in the Chicago area, I encourage you to submit a proposal soon.