From an early age, UK
comedian and actress Francesca Martinez learned to use laughter to cut through
everyone’s pity at her cerebral palsy(althoughz herself prefers to
think of it as being “wobbly”, after she heard her listing walk described by a
neighbor’s child.)
I also remember a similarly irrepressible childhood sense of
myself, though I’m not “wobbly” as much as “erratically immobile” and have
seldom been able to pass for non-disabled as Martinez occasionally describes.(My
adult self sometimes feels sad for me as a kid for thinking that sitting in an
ordinary chair made me look like everyone else. Now that I know what to look
for, an impaired body is an impaired body, but at least in my preteen years, it
only bothered me because everyone else harped on it so much.) Today, I’m not
sure if that was denial or early wisdom, but I miss it sometimes.
Not that this refreshingly honest memoir shies away from
more difficult topics such as bullying, a teenaged identity crisis, and “helpers”
who make disabled life worse. Bohemian Crips reading this may also recognize
computer jobs as a common pitch for those of us deemed too gimped-out to make a
go of the arts in the view of unimaginative guidance counselors. Francesca, despite taking a comedy class as research, eventually hit the stand-up circuit in an exceedingly baller defiance of worn-out common wisdom that I could only hope to palely imitate.
In retrospect,
it insults me the most that the people who did this to me didn’t suggest I
might have a gift for it, or even that it was an exploding profession in the
early nineties, both of which might have been compelling, but just that there
would be desk that I might sit at all day, and if I did actually meet a client
or a vendor who stumbled into the cubicles on the way to the bathroom, they
would know not to expect too much.(I’m guessing about some of this…most of the
conscious admonitions stopped with the desk, just as much of the pitch for the
university I attended centered on its wide, flat sidewalks…excited yet?) I
would definitely like to buy Chess a pint or a Coke and mock the norms.
NOTE: Earlier editions of this post used the wrong name for Francesca. I was reading another book during the same time that did feature a Hernandez, but this still does feel like blink-and-you'd-miss-it racism, which is not cool and we need to keep an eye out for it. Apologies. Also, the error does not reflect how memorable the book is.
NOTE: Earlier editions of this post used the wrong name for Francesca. I was reading another book during the same time that did feature a Hernandez, but this still does feel like blink-and-you'd-miss-it racism, which is not cool and we need to keep an eye out for it. Apologies. Also, the error does not reflect how memorable the book is.
WTF is Normal?
