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.