Stop Playing, Superstore!

 

Superstore is still a cool show, which I like a lot and love to finish the night by watching—Amy still overcompensated trying to get her brother and Mateo together, but she does that sometimes.Like many of us, she is often slow to move once she has an idea in her head.Also, it might mean that the title of this episode might work on multiple levels, hee, hee.(Although neither kind of "pickup" is especially effective, it should be noted.)

 However, in the latest episode that I finished,"Curbside Pickup"  a lot of the comedy was unintentional, as Garrett was depicted as being able to bop right into his coworker Jerry’s apartment with zero prep or extra exertion.  I like Garrett; I don’t want him held back—more than I want *me* held back, obvs- but that doesn’t happen, ever, especially if I’ve not visited your house before. 

 I imagine that it would happen even less in a place like the show’s setting, St. Louis, where snow,and slush are real possibilities, leading to stairs and high thresholds on doorways. St. Louis also doesn’t have an official law calling  for a visitability standard in private-home construction.(Don’t really think Arizona has one, either.  I think I wish we did.) In case you don’t click—but you love my links, right?—visitability means what it sounds like it means—that somebody with a mobility aid could come to your home and have a full-ish experience there.  Maybe even have fruit punch at the baby shower and have a place to pee. Mostly, this doesn’t happen, which is why I meet everyone like they are my promising Match date, whether they are or not.  It’s just simpler.  Note, also, that I didn’t say “simple”

It makes me feel like either a nag who is obscenely grounded in the tiny, frustrating details of life to point this stuff out…almost an admission that I don’t reach for the stars or something Or that I think every comedy is a .brightly-lit documentary—I don’t.

 But I think it’s a problem to have widespread depictions without access barriers in a world with massive access barriers. Because I’m tired of meeting new people and having them look at me blankly.  You know?

 But that’s part of the reason the #Representation and #OwnVoices conversations are so passionate and so intensely misunderstood…including disabled people in society doesn’t often mean we do the same things the same way, just sitting down, in the case of wheelchair users.

 The older I get, the less true I think that is, but I can see why people got so attached to it in the wake of the even-more misguided and dehumanizing take of us as, you know, special little people who live on love and fairy dust and who might actually get offended if someone paid us for our time.  

 I get that, and I even wish I could thank people for writing about it that way(We’re not *completely* different, after all) but just dropping in a wheelchair without thinking the story might change…kind of does us a disservice.  Abled people, too.  They should get to meet the real us, for once.  Also, if people don't take in lack of access as a problem, it won't ever get really fixed.

Crossposted...

From Dreamwidth 

Just some more thoughts about voter-persuasion efforts in NYC. I still haven't had many chances at being persuasive, myself.  So far, I've been pretty cold--politics can be a bit like sports, in how effort sometimes is supplanted by lack of mojo.

Would like to see some connection between my efforts and some success. 

"if Someone Called Me 'Regular,", I'd Jump Off A Building...

 

It’s not fully weird that “In The Dark” Feels like kid stuff—it ran on the CW for years before I stumbled on it on Netflix this week. It’s a little weird for me as Gen X that kid stuff has broadened to include a main character who befriends drug dealers and opens the show having anonymous sex, but it’s a bold choice, especially for disability-inflected TV.(Does she even enjoy these dudes, even momentarily, or are they a big part of the self- destructive trolling project that main character Murphy’s life has turned into? Why doesn’t she use a more- permanent birth-control method? Still trying to keep her options open? I know more about the now almost ubiquitous disability protest of the casting of sighted lead actress with great hair Perry Mattfield than I really know about this protagonist so far, but it’s kind of nice to enjoy a new fictional show that is not secretly designed to be cherished, but just wants to provide a quick hit of emotion or excitement, which it does ably enough. The blind crime witness who isn’t exactly sure what she witnessed is kind of an established trope, but “In the Dark” provides a few modern touches and some softer emotion (coupled with gentle comedy) that’s usually not seen in noir. Also, cute service dogs.  I don’t have a service dog, myself, not exactly familiar with the customs or etiquette, but occasionally they do things on this show that remind me of when Actual Mom used to get annoyed watching them “park” the teams of horses on “Little House on The Prairie” when your Bohemian Crip was but a cripling, who, it would appear, came by certain traits naturally.  “Those horses are a homesteader’s fucking life…they feed the family; they would eat first.”

https://ncdj.org/2019/04/letusplayus-blind-americans-protest-new-cw-television-series-in-the-dark/

Yes, I believe every effort should have been made to find a blind actress with great hair (and I do believe the actually-blind presence on “In the Dark” expands in later seasons, but I’ve not seen this yet, unless junior- high aged Chloe is actually blind.  I suppose protestors-which is a right that I fully support and embrace- have to threaten to cancel shows and have people fired to get attention for their cause, but I also think that’s both a little sick in terms of the need to raise the stakes every time, and a move that would be unlikely to lead to the creation of programs with disability themes.
For now, I like this enough to keep watching it

Maybe we're All The Last Showgirl...

 Only with different American shows that are ending--Capitalism, much? and I have to tell you, about the only soft landing being a disabled woman has ever afforded me is that I'm not messed up trying to navigate my world without my first flush of youthful hotness.(It *might* have helped,maybe only slightly, of course, if she'd picked a more modern accompaniment for her audition dance, the better not to remind anyone that she could have danced that same dance decades before, but the casting guy was pretty harsh.  Maybe it wouldn't.)

In fact, to the extent that there is any hotness, it's more present as I write this than in my most "barely legal" days. It's taken me a long time to bring things together, and still the closest I've ever come to leaving a trail of broken hearts is my own, multiple times.

Frozen Is Crip Culture...

 

The Frozen Musical Is Crip Culture

I know that people may fight me on this, because Elsa is lovely and magical and can actually make stuff happen, which can be things that abled people do not associate with disability. And I I could Let It Gobut, yeah, that’ll happen.  (Even knowing there’s a certain inevitability to writing this, doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a thought to share.  Also, this is a really good time to imagine being cold-record heat and stuff) But think about it: Elsa and Anna start growing up together, but end up with really separate lives for reasons their parents mystify and the girls themselves didn’t really understand.

Elsa feels pressure to hide her true nature. (Does your Bohemian Crip identify, here? Sometimes, although her condition doesn’t allow for real masking.  But it’s hard to be honest about your life when it makes people always express sympathy in ways that make you realize they don’t even understand why you might need some.)

I’m sure there are other groups where it’s “dangerous to dream”, but it’s written into the disability system, hard-core.

Love the non-traditional casting that might turn MAGA as white as their sheets.