Reid My Mind

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
What is your politics around disability?

Raven:
I think most people who have disabilities should be put on an island.

Riana:
Silly Laughter

Raven:
Away from us normal people! (Laughs)

Riana:
Girl! I agree. (Laughter continues….)

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Ok, this is the way I’m going to open the show.

Raven:
)Loud laughter)

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Nobody’s gonna know you’re playing.

Riana:
My sister’s opinions do not …

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
(Loud Laughter)

Raven:
Hey! I thought we were in this together.

(Group laughing fades out!)

TR:
Maybe not an island.
But let’s say Andrew Leland’s country of the Blind were indeed a real place, what would be the requirements for citizenship?
Is it based solely on acuity or must you have additional qualifications?
What would be some of those qualifications?
What actually makes you Blind?

Visual Accuity?
Orientation and mobility skills?
What if you have multiple disabilities?

These questions, well sort of, have been on my mind ever since my conversation with Andrew, featured in the last episode. the actual questions I’ve been thinking about are more related to topics like ableism, and what categorizes something as disability art or a part of disability culture.

Today, continuing with my self portrait, I’ll see where these topics take me. That is, with the help of those two you heard at the top of this episode.

Riana:
My name is Riana Reid. I’m a 26 year old woman. I’m brown skin. I wear rectangular glasses. I currently have my hair and a pineapple meaning My curls are on the top of my head and like a ponytail. I have a bright smile. And high cheekbones, kinda. (giggles)
People tell me I look like my mommy. (Giggles)

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
You look like your father.

Riana:
(Giggles) Okay!

Raven:
Riana’s pronouns are she her hers.

Hi, everyone. My name is Raven. I’m a 20 year old woman. I have dark skin and big curly fluffy hair with almond shaped eyes and big smile and my pronouns are she her hers.

TR:
I’m Thomas Reid. If this by chance is your first time listening, I’m the host and producer of this here podcast. And more importantly, I’m the father of these two young ladies.
That’s right, Daddy Daughter Day in full effect! Let’s go!

— Reid My Mind Radio Intro

TR:
During my conversation with Andrew, we got into a discussion about what categorizes something disability culture. What makes someone a disabled artist.

TR in Conversation with Andrew: 56:24
If they’re in the mainstream, I don’t consider that disability culture. That’s just me.
Are they making the art from a disability perspective? I think that’s the way I draw that line.

Andrew: 56:57
My book is a mainstream book, it’s with a commercial publisher.

I don’t want to put you on the spot. But like, does that mean that what I’m doing is not from a disability perspective?

TR in Conversation with Andrew: 57:08
No.

When you mentioned the blind music artists, like, everybody knows Stevie.

to me, it’s a little different.

Andrew: 57:28
It’s interesting, he has like an album called Talking Book.

He’s not singing about blindness in every song.

It’s kind of a bigger question about identity.
Does your work fall under the category of the identity just by virtue of your having the identity?
Or does the work have to be about the identity for it to be included?
I think it’s kind of a spectrum.

TR:
Before we get to the question of what categorizes something as disability art specifically, let’s talk about identity.

A few years ago, I submitted Reid My Mind Radio to a Black podcast collective. They were looking for Black podcasts to amplify. Based on the fact that I never received a response, I assumed my podcast wasn’t Black enough for them.

But I’m Black!

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
How do you define black?

Raven:
From African descent?

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Okay.

Riana:
There are some people who have some African descent and are not Black. Clarence Thomas, I guess he black technically? Well, he probably (Said in a deep mimicking voice ) “I’m not black I’m dark complexion. I’m the same race as my wife.”

Raven:
We had a speaker in this club that I was in. And I just remember her saying that she doesn’t use the term black anymore because someone found it offensive and she’s African American. And I don’t know if I lost my mind in the moment. But every time I think about it, I lose my mind. Black people are all around the world. And I think whoever said she was offended by the term Black has her own personal issue.

Riana:
At the friggin schools, they’re always like Black or African American. I’m like this school district is blessed with such a beautiful black diaspora. Half these kids do not identify as African American, but they definitely black.

Raven:
I’ve had friends before be like, Oh, I’m not black then because I’m not African American. I’m like girl.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Cause they’re from the Caribbean…

Raven:
That’s what they’re taught.

TR:
Could I have been rejected from that Black podcast network because I’m Blind?
Stevie’s Blind, Ray was Blind and they’re Black!

— Do the Right Thing on He’s Black but he’s not Black!
Mookie (Spike Lee):
Can I talk to you for a second?

Pino: ():
What?

Mookie:
Pino, who’s your favorite basketball player?

Pino:
Magic Johnson.

Who’s your favorite movie star?

Pino:
Eddie Murphy.

… Magic, Eddie Murphy, Prince, there not Black. I mean….
Let me explain myself. They’re not really Black, I mean they’re Black but they’re not really Black. They’re more than Black. It’s different.

Mookie:
It’s different?

Pino:
Yeh, to me it’s different.
End of Clip

TR:
When I listen back to this podcast, I think it sounds Black. Not just because I’m on it, not because of the music beds or the references throughout that I know those who know, know. It’s a vibe that is in everything I do.

Police see me as Black.
My teachers and authority figures saw me as Black.
But then again, if your perception of Black is based in stereotypes then ok, maybe my podcast and I don’t fit.

But, I’m Blac!

— Song “I’m Black” from the Parody film CB4

Andrew: 58:30
So there’s a writer named Jim Knipfel who wrote the first book about blindness I ever read, which is a RP memoir called slack jaw that came out in the 90s. He and I have become friends. He’s sort of like a blind writing mentor for me. One day, he paid me a really big compliment, he was like, Andrew, be a writer, don’t be a blind writer, you’re too good of a writer to be a blind writer.
And it was a compliment, but it was also like I’m kind of psyched to be a blind writer.

TR:
Without knowing the exact intent behind that message, it reminds me of someone telling me I don’t look or act Blind. Which is actually less about me and more about someone’s perception of Blind.

Andrew:
John Lee Clark, the deaf blind poet, he had an interview in Word Gathering, the disability arts journal, where he kind of said the opposite. He was like, don’t hide it. That’s a perspective that is going to set your work apart. It’s a perspective to really draw from, I want to write everything from a deafblind perspective.

I kind of feel the tug of both of those approaches to being an artist.

TR:
Could it be more about who is doing the defining?

Andrew:
I was getting a ride from a friend of mine, honestly at the end of the ride, I was like, why are you a friend of mine?

He said to me, in no uncertain terms, so now that you’ve written this book, you got to know your audience, people really respond to hearing the story of you losing your vision, that’s what you need to write now. Just stay in your lane basically.

Write another book that’s about losing more vision. I was like you knew about my career that I had before I wrote this book now all you can see is blindness and like this kind of emotional aspect of vision loss that you see as the moneymaker.

I think that’s what Jim meant by being a blind writer, as opposed to just being a writer. People could only understand you through this experience. And so to me, that’s the pitfall. That’s, that’s where I agree with Jim. But then the next book, I want to write, it doesn’t even have to be about vision loss, but it can be sort of, from a blind perspective. And using blindness in that way that I find really positive.

TR in Conversation with Andrew: 1:00:45
Yeah, I totally get it. It’s how you’re being perceived as one way, and how you present yourself.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem to even matter, you’re being pigeon holed, which is not your goal.
When I started podcasts, I had this whole thing, I don’t have to do everything about blindness.
That wasn’t my intention. But along the way, I was like, wow, there’s nothing wrong with me doing things about blindness and then it broadened out to disability in general, I like this. And I can talk about everything and anything within the disability community or from a disability perspective.
I’m making that decision, it’s not someone putting that on me. But at the same time, when someone wants to limit me and say, This is the only thing you can do, that’s what I have a problem with. Because I can do whatever the hell I want to do!

Andrew: 1:02:37
That’s the question that I’ve been wrestling with really through the whole process of writing the book and figuring out my own identity as a blind person.

Is it supposed to be central? Or is it supposed to be incidental? When is it Central? When is it incidental?

Raven:
You know what blows my mind.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
What?

Raven:
When I don’t mention that you’re blind? And it’s like, (Mimicking voice)”Oh my God, how did I not know? Why didn’t you tell me, oh my we’ve been friends for so long, you didn’t tell me.”
(Laughter)

What’s it gonna come up for?
“Yeah, my Dad didn’t see today!”
(Laughter)
What the hell do you want me to talk about?
(Laughter)
I don’t know!

Riana:
it’s the same thing with me. They’re always like, shocked that I didn’t share and I said why would I

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
I mean you can understand why people would find that….

Raven:
Not really.

Riana:
No! They think it’s like me sharing like a like a trauma

Raven:
exactly! That’s what it feels like.

Riana:
(Mimicking) “Why didn’t you tell me?”
And that’s weird.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
If you go back everything that you learn about disability in the in the world and how it’s perceived and all of that stuff, it makes sense that people will respond like that.

Raven:
Yeah but it’s stupid!

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
It is stupid. (Laughs)

Riana:
And I also don’t like it sometimes because especially older generations if I tell someone that my father is blind, probably because it contributed to a conversation. They’re like, Oh, I’m so sorry.

Raven:
You knock his eyes out?

TR:
When it comes to being Black or Blind, I never had a choice.
I’m totally Blind. No eyes Blind! Like, I can win a Blind contest

— Timpani Drum roll “And the winner is”

TR:
Years ago my intention was to bridge this gap between the Blind community and others. It feels like a natural thing to consider especially as someone becoming Blind as an adult.

Today, considering all of my identities, I’m just not interested in trying to convince others to se my humanity.
I want to live a life with others who choose to recognize and appreciate people as they are in full.
I want to be seen with all of my identities not just those we happen to share. I want to do the same for others.

On the question of what makes something a part of disability culture, I think it’s about intention.
Who is the art made for?

I think disabled artist create for disabled people. Of course, others can appreciate, find inspiration in and interpret based on their own lived experiences, it’s art. But, in my mind and my interpretation, it was made for us.

— “Hold Up!” (Nate Dogg Sample)
Music begins: A crescendo leads into a bouncy up tempo beat!

TR:
Hey y’all! Quick update.
Shout out to all of the R double M Radio family out there who continue to put in that work.

Justice Shorter, who joined us during our Young Gifted Black and Disabled2022 season, along with SeededGround, recently launched the Disaster Justice Guide Book

“This guidebook is a collection of disaster-oriented lessons, lived experiences and learned expertise concerning people of color with disabilities. Based on six interviews conducted during the summer of 2023, each section is curated using the contributions of profoundly insightful individuals of color who are all well-versed in their respective areas of focus.”

You can find the downloadable guidebook along with accompanying interviews at JusticeShorter.com.

Big shout out to Ajani AJ Murray who launched his podcast Acting Up with AJ & Crew.

The podcast focuses on disability and pop culture. From movie analysis and reviews to some of the latest media happenings in the disability community, AJ’s got you covered.

I’ll link to both of these in this episode’s blog post over at ReidMyMind.com.

And now, back to the episode!

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
What is ableism?

Raven:
Ableism

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
(Laughs)

Raven:
(Spelling out the word) A B L… (Laughs)

Riana:
ableism to me is pretty much society today where it’s just it’s set up for able bodied people with the lack of acknowledgement for people with disabilities,
I guess that’s discrimination.

Raven:
I feel like a lot of the isms and all of that come from just the belief that there’s a normal like boy and girl that and if you stripped from that in any way you need to be fixed. In terms of disabilities to I think that’s what the feeling bad comes from because they’re not living the normal life that we deemed as a society as good and easy. Even though you can live happily with whatever cards you’re dealt.

Riana:
Yeah, we just need to adjust society

Raven:
Yeah!

Riana:
… to be more inclusive.

TR:
I can’t recall hearing the word ableism prior to becoming Blind.
In fact, it wasn’t until I eventually began reading about disability in general that I came across this word and concept.
That is, the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that
typical abilities are superior.
It defines people by their disability and is applicable both to an individual and system.

Like my girls said, society views disability as something requiring fixing.
It’s evident throughout our culture. Art, politics, religion.

Andrew: 52:10
The refrain that the poem says over and over again, is fall to your knees. And thank God for your eyesight.

TR:
This poem Andrew refers to in his book, was read during a service in a synagogue.

Andrew:
You just sort of have to sit there with your family, as a whole room of people just sort of appreciates that they aren’t blind.
It was kind of wild to me that Lily was offended or found it annoying and it wasn’t just me.

— Theme from Love boat!

TR:
My family and I were on a cruise taking in one of the family friendly comedy shows held in one of the ship’s smaller theaters. It’s still amazing how incredibly large these ships are. But they still get tossed around during stormy weather.

When attending any sort of comedy show, I specifically do not sit in the front row. I don’t want to be visible to the comedian. I’m there to be entertained, not part of the entertainment.

— Music begins: A dark, menacing violin repeats over a mid tempo beat.

We weren’t in the front row but it wasn’t a large theater and I was sitting in the aisle seat.

There was this one “comedian”, I say that in quotes because there wasn’t much about his comedy at all that was funny.
I could tell he was pacing from one side of the stage to the other.
He then stopped in front of the aisle that I was sitting in. He took a few moments and then walked back off to the right side of the stage.
I could just feel it, a Blind joke was coming.

It did. And it sucked!

He was struggling to make something up on the fly. It was some corny, basic joke that involved Stevie, probably the most famous Blind person on the planet. In fact, I didn’t even tell you which Stevie and you know who I’m talking about.

TR in Conversation with Riana and Raven:
Anyway, do y’all remember that? Do you have any recollection of that?

Raven:
I have about 10% recollection. And I am afraid that 9% of it is because you’ve told me the story three times this week.

TR in Conversation with Riana and Raven:
(Laughs)

Riana:
Literally the only thing I remember is daddy’s story. I don’t remember that happening at all.

TR in Conversation with Riana and Raven:
Really, y’all don’t remember that?

Raven:
Kind of?

Riana:
You’re saying that he saw you in the audience. And then he made a joke because he made the assumption you were blind.

TR in Conversation with Riana and Raven:
I’m telling you. It was like there was an energy thing something was going on. But it was like, it was as though we were making eye contact.

Raven:
Maybe you had a dream.

TR in Conversation with Riana and Raven:
Oh my god! )Said incredulously)

Raven:
(Laughs)
TR in Conversation with Riana and Raven:
It’s like, you know when you just go somewhere and you just want to be. You know what I’m saying? You just kind of want to just do your thing. You don’t necessarily need to interact. You just want to be there.

Riana:
definitely every day. I can see what Daddy is saying. When we go out, he has his cane or if you’re holding on to somebody’s arm people are going to look especially when Daddy had his eyepatch. Everybody was staring there was no just being like blending in the crowd. We stood out for sure.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Sometimes as a family we don’t necessarily always get that and that was one of those times for me that we don’t get to just be

Raven:
(Sympathetically) Augh!

Riana:
Does mommy remember that?

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
She did. She remembers it like I remember it she just says it was a different cruise which I don’t care that’s fine. And it was just it was a weird thing

Raven:
I remember a comedian saying a Blind joke and it not being funny on a cruise.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
This was that guy! (Mumbling incredulously)
Laughter

Raven:
But I don’t know what you want me to tell you.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Did it make you feel any sort of way?

Raven:
I was probably very upset, annoyed.
But you have similar experiences that are all the same thing.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Again, we talked about it goes into that just being, okay, we’re just hear we just want to have a good time like everybody and then all of a sudden, boop! Spotlight! You see what I’m saying. And not the good spotlight where you know I’m rocking the crowd “hey what’s going on” (finger snaps… “Uh, Uh!” as if dancing)

(Silence….)
Hello?

Riana:
Laughs….

Raven:
That makes me sad.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Why does it make you sad?

Raven:
Because I don’t want you to think that it’s like, hard to go out and be a family, with your family?

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
No, no, no, I’m not I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s nothing that we do wrong, it’s not our fault. My thing is that I want to know how it impacts you or do you all recognize that and I know you do now, Riana has come a long way in terms of it doesn’t you know, she knows what it is, it doesn’t bother her. So I really feel like she’s gonna be better for that. She’s a better person…

Raven:
What? (Giggles) I thought you meant better than me.

TR In Conversation with Riana & Raven:
No, no, no! (Laughs)
I’m just saying like, she’s gonna be better for that. And I think the same is true for you. At the end of the day, we’re just goin’ do are thing!

Raven:.
That’s always been my thing.

TR:
And that’s exactly what we were doing during that trip and in that theater.

The rest of the audience around me, I could sense was aware of my presence, they seem to be looking for my reaction.

— Music stops.

In this case, there was none. Because I didn’t find it funny.
I don’t think they did either.
Although I’ll never know if that’s because they are aware of me being there or if as in this case, the joke just isn’t funny.

But, that uncomfort felt by the non Blind folks, a reluctance to laugh as they await my reaction as though if I find it funny absolves them of the “sin” of laughing at a blind joke…

— (An evil, menacing laugh….) “That actually is, (coughing) pretty funny!”, The Joker.

TR:
I was extremely aware of racial discrimination at a very young age.
But, I knew nothing about ableism.
I know I didn’t harbor any sort of hatred toward disabled people. I didn’t have an ableist bone in my body! (Sarcastic giggle)

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Do you ever notice any of your own internal ableism?

Raven:
Yeah,

Riana:
For sure.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
I know, Raven should be really good.
(They all laugh)

Raven’s like, “And, what’s the problem!” (Laughs)

Raven:
I think I noticed more of internal ableism with more intellectual disabilities because I’ve been exposed to it less.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
that affects you in a certain way? Is that what you’re saying?

Raven:
Yeah.(Pause)
Riana didn’t give any…

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
I’m going back. This was all about an intervention for you. (Laughs)

Raven:
That’s what it feels like. (Laughing)

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
I remember growing up, it felt like when you saw someone with a disability, you were supposed to feel bad. And sorry, and sad. Right.
The tel-a -thons. Y’all don’t know about the tel-a-thons.

Riana:
I don’t feel bad at all.

Raven:
We do know about the tel-a-thons.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Oh, ok! That was a thing.

Raven:
Did you hear Riana?

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
What she say.

Raven:
(Overly sarcastic and in vocal fry) “I don’t feel bad at all”

(They all laugh)

Riana:
I don’t. The only time I do is if like, if they’re not being accommodated.

Raven:
Yeh, yeh!

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Riana, , what about you anything around the internal ableism?

Raven:
Yeh, anything for you? (Laughs)

Riana:
Right now I see like ableism in the way that like I approach, neurodevelopmental disabilities or disorders. Sometimes I need to remind myself that we don’t need to, like, fix it. But especially with like a kid with like ADHD, because you get into this mindset, especially at the school, and I’m definitely not going to name drop that school, but they’re very ableist, in the sense of every behavior needs to be addressed. And they have to display the behavior in a certain way. And that’s where I see myself, making sure that I step back and be like, we don’t need to change this child. The curriculum needs to be adapted towards it. And school psych is pushing towards that message anyway. But I see myself being like, (Mocking voice that sounds a lot like Elvis Presley impression, LOL)
oh, yeah, we gotta do this and check in check out, behavioral modification…

(TR and Raven laugh hysterically)
Riana:
For real, I see it. Or like a kid with autism, we were just doing like, trying to figure out an intervention for them. And I just had to sit back and be like, Okay, we’re not trying to fix this child. We’re not going to try to change this child.

TR:
Another message around disability was, inspiration. As in, “Damn, if they can do it what’s my problem?”

— “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this special news bulletin.”

That’s not inspiration. That’s just looking at someone as less than yourself.

No one ever gave me reason to question that way of thinking.

In my episode with Andrew, we talked about an early experience he had at a NFB chapter meeting.
That really brought back some memories for me, both as someone new to that environment and as someone who used to chair meetings of a local blindness organization.

In the latter, I had many opportunities to observe the uncomfort of those attending a meeting for the first time. These folks assumed we were a support group even though everything advertised about us was clear that we were a community advocacy organization working to increase access and opportunities for people with vision loss. That was literally what I’d say to not mention the word Blind because it scared folks away.

But when those unfamiliar with disability read “people with vision loss or blind”, I think their interpretation is, “Of course it’s a support group? What else do those people need?”

During these meetings, we’re talking about the business of advocacy. Meanwhile, those new to blindness are there in search of resources, maybe comfort, encouragement?

I don’t care if you’re personally impacted or a family member or friend, there’s something quite shocking when first encountering white canes, telescopic lenses and anything else associated with blindness.
Of course, there’s nothing shocking about these things, but when you are in this position where you’re facing a new normal; it’s a lot to take in.

Over time, I could recognize those who would return and those who were outta there.

Occasionally I think about them. the ones who ran away. I hope they found what they were looking for.

I’m not necessarily saying it was internal ableism that stopped them from connecting with our group. I just know that my internal ableism could have stopped me from connecting with people who truly made a difference in my life.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Have you ever witnessed ableism, in the real world …

Raven:
Are you kidding me?

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
… that’s outside of anything to do with your father?

Raven:
Oh my god. Yeah.

Riana:
Girl, yes! (Laughs) What?

Raven:
Are you joking? (Laughs)

Riana:
Yeh, everyday.

Raven:
Number one, Villanova. That place man…

Riana:
Yeh, Villanova.

Raven:
Not the place but

Riana:
No the actual place is not accessible.

Raven:
(Ugh!) Ok, hold on. So the first thing I’m going to say is that a lot of the places on the campus, obviously they make accommodations but a lot of the places on the campus have like the disability stalls but there’s only stairs to get in it.

Another thing that drives me nuts is the people who think that they are so woke .
I was telling a story once something about going into the big stall somewhere and they were like, (In a British accent for some reason. LOL)”Oh I don’t use those stalls cause I realize those stalls are not for me”

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
(Laughing)

Raven:
And I’m like… (laughs) it pisses me off because I’m like, (yelling) “How are they gonna get inside of the place if that’s what you’re talking about.” It pisses me off because it’s this one dimensional viewpoint here it’s like don’t say a slur to someone but it’s so much more than that.

Riana:
I’ve been around people with disabilities for a while so I see it, institutional heavily like Raven was mentioning. Daily conversations. I’m thinking of things in like recreational therapy too.

The Rec therapist is coming in and trying to make something accessible. So you’re seeing how it’s not accessible for everybody. Just a lot of times you go into a space, and they’re like, Oh, this is what you can use. And it’s like, well, we’re going to need contractors because the people are not going to even be able to come in. If you take two seconds and put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Even like a YMCA we went to and it wasn’t accessible. Every day living, we just had to create things, at least in my experience. And maybe that was just because we were students. So they weren’t really taking us seriously, but you had to be very creative. It puts you in a mindset of like, wow, people who are just not included. You have to be so creative, just to make sure that you’re able to do what you need to do.

In school psych. It’s always like, wow, my child looks normal, they seem normal.
And I’m like, you know who’s not normal? You

Raven:
I think also in a casual way, I notice it more. I think as a society we’re starting to work on our language

Riana:
Yeh!

Raven:
But I notice that it’s a little less with ability language.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Hmm! Riana let me ask you this. What’s the language that’s used when it comes to disability in your line of work?

Riana:
In School Psychology?

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Yeh! Do they used differently abled, special needs, do they use disability?

Riana:
No, we say disability. That’s my huge argument over semantics. Everybody’s like don’t get caught up with semantics but that’s extremely important. If you describe a disability in a certain way it can put a picture in a parent’s brain and sometimes you just have to let that parent or teacher or whoever is uncomfortable, be uncomfortable because it is what that child is period.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
It sounds like you’re in the camp of no we’re gonna use the word disability, we’re not gonna change the language we’re gonna use those words.

Riana:
No!
Riana:
I’m not making you comfortable with anything, especially when I’m making you comfortable within ignorance. I’m not doing that. I’m gonna tell you your child has Autism cause there’s nothing wrong with Autism.
The DSM 5 says what it is and it is what it is.

Raven:
I just noticed this thing because I’m taking Psycho Pathology and I’ve noticed a lot of the names of things have changed.

Riana:
Yeh, like Sociopath is anti social personality.

Raven:
There’s like a lot that I realized have changed.
Riana:
Yeh! And that’s because of culture though. The way that semantics comes into play and the way they become derogatory and then we have to be sensitive. And that makes perfect sense, you know what I mean.

Raven:
Yeh!

Riana:
The “R” word. It makes perfect sense, I’m not going to use it.There’s some things though like obviously school psych’s aren’t going to test if a child has “gender dysphoria”, but I wouldn’t approach a situation where a child says they’re non conforming . I’m not going to say you have gender dysphoria. Like, that’s so stupid. That’s something that’s becoming a little derogatory too. That’s when I might change my wording, but that’s because of a cultural aspect.

— From George Carlin Stand Up Comedy:
“Sometime toilet paper became bathroom tissue. Sneakers became running shoes. Information became directory assistance. Car crashes became automobile accidents. Used cars became previously owned transportation.” (Audience laughter.) “Room service became guest room dining. And constipation became occasional irregularity.” (Audience laughter fades out)

— Music begins: A very bright, fun mid tempo beat.

TR:
Now, thinking about the requirements for citizenship in the country of the Blind, the truth is I don’t know that we have an immigration issue at all.
I don’t know anyone lining up trying to get in.

The country of the blind, just like this podcast, has fully open borders.

That being said, it is an opportunity to examine and challenge the way we move through the world to really figure out what blindness is and isn’t. What disability is and isn’t.

Even more of an opportunity if you have people in your life who you love and love you back to share in the experience.
Yes, these conversations can produce a range of emotions, but if you’re lucky, it can just lead to strengthening those bonds as opposed to breaking them.

(Sounds of laughter and conversation between Raven, Riana and Daddy!)

Blindness, disability is all a normal part of the human experience. Which I think works better when we’re all in it together!
Raven, Riana and Daddy:
(The conversation continues and leads into a hysterical laugh from the three!)

Big shout out to Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind, remember, available on the NLS BARD for digital download and Book share as well as all the other places you can purchase books.

Riana and Raven, AKA, Daddy’s babies!
Hanging out with them, is one of the biggest blessings of my life.
Daddy loves you!

Reid My Mind Radio, daddy loves you too! (Silly laughter)

Reid My Mind Radio is available wherever you get podcasts.
Transcripts and more are at ReidMyMind.com.
The only way to get there is by spelling it right!
Riana and Raven:
R to the E I D!
— Sample: “D! And that’s me in the place to be.” Slick Rick

TR, Riana and Raven:
Like my last name.

— Reid My Mind Radio Outro
Peace!

Riana:
Can we do shout outs!

Raven:
Can we say bye?

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
You just said bye!

Raven:
Not really.

TR in Conversation with Riana & Raven:
Go ahead, say bye!

Raven:
Bye, guys! Thank you for having us on Reid My Mind Radioooooo! Peace!

Riana:
Peace! (In a deep voice)

(In her television announcer voice)
Thank you everybody for listening to Reid My Mind Radio. I’m Riana Reid with my co-host Raven Reid, taking over for this episode. Please follow us on Instagram. Mine is @RianaGeorgette. Raven what’s yours?

Raven:
I’m @Raven22 .

Riana:
We love you, thanks for listening, see you next week.

Raven:
I liked it, that was awesome!

Raven (at about 5 years old)
Woh! Heavy breathing. That was awesome, that was awesome!d

Hide the transcript

TR in Conversation with Andrew
sort of a silly question. But I guess you know, you could go somewhere with this. If blindness were really a country, who are you voting for President.

Andrew
You’ve got my vote Thomas.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
Oh, no, I don’t want that.

TR
That’s the last time I ask a silly question. My guest today is Andrew Leland.

Andrew
Writer, Editor, Producer, Teacher, my pronouns are he him, I am a white guy with glasses, short brown hair, wearing a sweatshirt.

There’s certainly people who I think would nominate themselves. You want me to name like a particular human being?

TR in Conversation with Andrew
You don’t have to if you don’t want to. What are the qualifications that you would think would make a good president of The Country of the Blind.

Andrew
the people that I’m drawn to, generally speaking, these are people who probably don’t want to be politicians, and wouldn’t take the job. But, you know, I really love blind people who are creative and who aren’t rejecting their blindness, but they’re also not really defined by it. And they’re sort of using it as this sort of creative aspect of themselves. So it’s sort of like, not for it, not against it. But like with it.

I can pick out a number of people who I write about in the book too.

TR
Well, you’re going to have to read the book, The Country of the Blind, to find out who else can get Andrew’s vote.
I’m Thomas Reid, this is Reid My Mind Radio, and I approve this message.

— Reid My Mind Radio Intro

TR
Whether you’re blind or disabled, or in any way, identify as someone in a marginalized group, chances are you thought about what life would be like in a place where you are accepted, and your needs are centered. Maybe even just considered?

Andrew Leland’s first book, The Country of the Blind isn’t a fictional place, but rather, it’s about something much more real.

Andrew
I have a degenerative retinal condition called RP, retinitis pigmentosa. I knew that I was going blind since I was a teenager. But for a really long time, it felt abstract, distant and not worth thinking about. Another way to say not worth thinking about might be like I was sort of in denial, as I think a lot of people are with our P is very easy to be in denial about it, because it’s like, well, sure, I might be going blind. But I’m like driving a car and scoring the winning goal over here. There’s no blindness anywhere near here. And then it caught up with me.

TR
Over the years of doing this podcast, and even prior, I’ve spoken to a lot of people experiencing blindness, low vision, vision loss, no matter what you call it.
or , the reason for the loss, denial is commonplace. And so too, is the fact that it will catch up.

Andrew
I’m about to turn 43 And I would say was about 8, 10 years ago that I really started noticing blindness, intruding into my life, into my day to day in a way that I couldn’t ignore. It was around that time that I started using a white cane full time in public. As soon as I started using the white cane in front of my partner, in front of colleagues, walking down the street in front of strangers, It made me blind in the eyes of other people. It forced me to think of myself as blind. And that was really the beginning of the writing process for me.

TR
He began first exploring blindness as a journalist

— Audio clips of Andrew hosting or reporting from The Organist” and “Radio Lab” respectively.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
Can you talk about the art of writing in general, and maybe how important it is and has been in your life?
Andrew
It’s one of the most important things in my life. There’s this phrase that I think about sometimes, which we usually think about in terms of like technology, which is a word processor. Microsoft word is a word processor, the computer is helping you process words, there’s something in that idea that you’re processing and kind of a lot of different ways when you’re writing emotional processing. I use the word metabolizing a lot too. There’s something that happens like an experience and the experience is a little bit just like this meal that you just swallow down but like, you’ve got to digest it. For me like writing is such a crucial part of that process of metabolizing what it is that I’m feeling and experiencing in the world.

TR:
This probably sounds familiar to those who journal and not only gives you an opportunity to purge all of the things running through your mind But literally, it enables you to process those thoughts and emotions.

Andrew
I had some ideas about what blindness meant to me. But now that I’ve written the book, I’ve kind of given myself a little bit of a map to my own feelings and my own thoughts about it that I would never have arrived at without the work of writing.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
To be a good writer, you have to be a reader. And I’m assuming you’re a big reader.

Andrew
Yes, I love reading. So when I started writing the book in 2019, I still was kind of hanging tough with print, I couldn’t even imagine a life after print is such a deep part of my life. And I was very, very unwilling to let go of it. The tricky thing about RP is it’s not like you just wake up one day, you can’t read print anymore. It’s the kind of thing where literally, it will happen over the course of a decade. And at a certain point, you have to just sort of decide like, Okay, this is actually more trouble than it’s worth

TR:
a decision, each individual has to make for themselves. Yet, there are some real world things to consider as a guideline,

Andrew
I had a Kindle, and I just like kept on cranking size up and up and up, had started to meet enough blind people and talk to enough blind people, the writing was on the wall. They were like, text-to-speech, man, it’s where it’s at. You’ve just got to listen. I just sort of went all in and kind of made it like a project for myself. Like I’m going to learn how to read text to speech. It took me a while until I found Voice Dream Reader. That app was a game changer for me. And Bookshare, which is a online library for blind and print disabled folks, which has millions of titles, those two tools in unison. That’s the power combo for me. Over the course of the last three years, while I was writing the book, I was also kind of training myself to be a blind reader.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
What about Braille? You mentioned that in the book you were headed that direction?

Andrew
Yep. Yeah, I’m holding tough with Braille. I mean, it’s incredibly frustrating to be so slow, after so many years, I think I started in 2020, maybe, or 2019. Even. It’s been a journey.

TR:
In the book, Andrew discusses first learning Braille with a sighted instructor, then a season Braille reader gave him some strong advice,

Andrew
that guy’s teaching you bad habits, like get rid of him. And I was like, Oh, right. Blind people know how to read Braille, like that guy was sighted. And I don’t think he knew what he was doing. And then I found the Hadley Institute, amazing service. It’s a free mail order correspondence course, for Braille. If you hang with it, do everything they tell you to do, you’ll come out the other side with Braille. I’m still super slow. I tried to touch Braille at least once a day just to like, keep it in circulation. Last night, I tried to read a book to my kid, my father’s Dragon is a great kids book that we’ve read before. I’ve read that book a bunch of times with him already. So I sort of know the sentences, but still, I just sound like, (reading very slowly)then… he… said, hey… guys…, how long can I expect my son who’s 11 Now to like, roll with me on that. And he’s sort of like patient because he knows I’m like trying to get better. But it’s a struggle.

TR:
Every aspect of our lives are affected by disability. Jobs or our careers. Our real concern, is the way we make money, feel a sense of purpose. For many, it’s how we identify, it’s often the first thing we ask when meeting someone new, “So what do you do? ”

Prior to reading The Country of the Blind, I assumed a writer experiencing blindness would have an easier time moving forward in their career, magnification of screen reading software, along with word processes and access to the internet, chances are they can perform the work. But actually being able to perform the work is only part of the struggle

Andrew
for the kind of writing that I like to do most, which is going out into the world hanging out with people that I want to write about taking notes, and then doing research, reading articles, and so on. The heart of it is that reporting process where you’re out on the scene, long form narrative nonfiction, you gather facts, but you also gather sensory data, like any creative writer has to have sensory impressions. If you think about literature, or the novel, it’s all about these visual descriptions of people. And those are sort of these windows into their character. And so I think about that a lot, both on the level of like, just being an artist and having artful sensory descriptions that convey this kind of mood that I want, but also as a journalist, am I going to be reporting somewhere and miss the story because I can’t see it.

TR:
That’s understandable, especially if you’re new to disability and unfamiliar with an adaptive way of thinking or creating accommodations, but this is 2024. And there are lessons to be learned from those who blazed trails before we ever set foot on a new path. Andrew tells us about one such example.

Andrew
Ved Mehta, who moved to the United States from India when he was a kid. He ended up becoming a staff writer at The New Yorker, which is one of the premier places to publish that kind of narrative nonfiction. He was there during the celebrated William Sean era, writing nonfiction was one of the greatest nonfiction editors of all time.

TR:
Mehta, who was totally blind and on staff still had to deal with questioning around aspects of his Writing,

Andrew
he would write these dispatches from different places where he would talk about his subjects twinkling wintry eyes set against the mahogany Brown of his study and so on. He would have an assistant often with him, met who was doing the interview and, and he was doing the writing, but he might say to the assistant, describe his eyes for me, and use that.

TR:
precede just about any occupation with the word blind. And I’m pretty sure a version of this conversation exists, questioning the blind person’s accommodation, blind accountant, blind programmer, blind orientation and mobility instructor, blind, audio description Narrator or writer. Hmm,

Andrew
maybe if I’m using the Be My Eyes, virtual volunteer five years from now, if I’m reporting and I use that to gather some details about somebody’s pronounced cheekbones or their tousled hair, I think that that’s a totally legitimate way to report, you can look at that as an accommodation. Ved Mehta needs an assistant in some context to fully do the reporting he needs where I might need Be My Eyes to finish the job. People look at that as like almost a disqualification. You didn’t run the race unassisted, you had this help.

TR:
The unfairness, the hypocrisy, makes my blood boil.

Andrew
But, I think if you take a step back and you look at technology, or even just like tools, in general, we’re all getting assistance all the time, from each other from other people and from technology. disability might mean you need different kinds of tool, different kinds of technology, different kinds of personal assistance, but it’s not categorically different. If you think about any journalist, any writer, if they’re sighted, don’t need assistance in gathering visual details. But they certainly are reporting things that they haven’t seen with their own eyes, almost any piece of nonfiction writing will have a reconstruction. If I’m writing a story, and I want to talk about when you first became a podcaster, I might interview you and say, okay, describe the scene for me, where were you? What was the day like, what were you wearing? Tell me all of it. And then I write that scene as though I were there even though it was 20 years ago, and I was 100 miles away.

TR:
The same people questioning accommodations, go gaga for AI.
Ableism is real.
Ableism isn’t just an external thing done to those who are disabled. In The Country of the Blind. Andrew bravely shares an experience where he attends a local chapter meeting of the NFB in Missouri. Here’s an excerpt from the book with Andrew narrating.

— Andrew as Narrator
I had noticed the blind woman in a wheelchair using a strange device that looked like it somehow converted the text on a laptop screen into metallic Braille. I had noticed the other people with multiple disabilities and the modest scale at which the group was operating, arguing over how to spend their tiny publicity budget. If I had gone to the meeting to find other blind people whom I might commiserate with, or learn from or befriend, the first impression was more off putting than I had expected. Part of it was surely just geographical culture shock, but a greater part was a different kind of culture shock, or discomfort with disability.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
What do you think your experience would be like? Now knowing what you know and feeling how you feel? If you went to that meeting for the first time? How do you think it would be different?

Andrew
Just to preface, it’s me being super open about the, I guess you could call it internalized ableism that I felt where I’m just looking at this group of blind people, like, what do I have in common with any of these people, like, get me out of here,

TR
Andrew receive some real criticism from blind people about this part of the book.

Andrew:
Today, in retrospect, going to that meeting now, like I know, Gary wonder was there. He’s the editor of the Braille monitor, somebody who is more engaged with blind intellectual life, which is something I’m deeply interested in, then like, most people in the in the world, that guy alone is somebody I should have, like, grabbed and had a long conversation with, but at the time, all I could see was a group of disabled people who felt very different from my image of myself. So having the patience to spend longer than I did spend at that meetup, having the courage to actually like, talk to people as people rather than just look at them through this sort of other engaged the way I do

TR in Conversation with Andrew
I get it. For folks to get mad at that, I don’t think they realize what’s really going on like you being honest about that, is that process of checking your own ableism. You can’t get to a point without doing that work.

Andrew
Totally

TR in Conversation with Andrew
putting that in the book is inviting other people to do that, too.

Andrew
Thank you for pointing that out. Plenty of blind people said to me, just what you’ve said, where they’re like, that was me. And these are people, some folks who have been blind their whole lives. It’s not like it’s only somebody who’s like, has this site privilege or somebody coming at it from the outside. I think any blind person can have that perspective, and many of them do. And I’m with you that it felt important to take that risk of making myself seem like a real jerk in order to expose some of that ableism that a lot of us carry around.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
That’s the other thing too, that you, you included your wife? Did you talk to her before you include? Because I was like, oh, yeah, I don’t know if I could do that.

Andrew
I think she’s within earshot listening to me talk to you right now. So you know, you might hear the door burst open. And you know, she might

TR in Conversation with Andrew
Come on in.

Andrew:
She might jump on the mic. But, uh, yeah, I mean, like, there were definitely moments where I was like, I want to write an interesting book. But I also want to be married for the rest of my life. And I don’t want to jeopardize that. So there were a lot of tough conversations that we had. A journalist should never give their source a copy of the text to change. You can fact check it by saying like, is this true or not. But with Lily, it was a very different situation. Like, we just sat down with the book in front of us multiple times, like and did sort of a find, for her name. And then just like, read every sentence of what do you remember about this, and a lot changed in those conversations.

TR
You can’t overstate the importance of good communication. having these conversations, no matter how uncomfortable is so important to a relationship.

Andrew
It was like a way for us to talk through some of those issues. Even though a lot of that stuff was difficult. And like, I’m sure she would have been happy to see all of her name just like completely scrubbed from the book. I think to her credit, like she recognized the importance of including for the same reason you just said about the picnic scene. I don’t think I had read a book that was really honest in that way about how difficult the partners journey can be to and the trickiness around the way that your partner is entering blindness at the same time you are, it was worth the difficulty and the risk in order to start that conversation, not just in my own family, but maybe in others as well. Then

TR:
there’s the ableism we experienced through our society. In The Country of the Blind. Andrew writes about a poem read during a service at a synagogue.

Andrew
The refrain that the poem says over and over again, is fall to your knees and thank God for your eyesight. You just sort of have to sit there with your family, as like a whole room of people just sort of appreciates that they aren’t blind. I certainly still encounter it. I think one thing that’s changed is that that moment marked the kind of beginning I think for not just me, but for my family to sort of have a politics around it. It was kind of wild to me that Lily found it annoying. And then it wasn’t just me.

TR:
Everyone in the family is adjusting to disability. The question is, will that be done alone, or together?

Andrew
My son, I feel like I’ve sort of trained him to be a critical thinker about it. I will be watching something and he’ll sort of perk up when there’s like a disability reference that seems off. He’s in fifth grade. And at the beginning of the year, they were doing this exercise about guidelines for how to be a good community for each other. And one of them was like, be respectful. Even if the person has a disability. The line that caught his ear was even if they have a disability. He raised his hand and was kind of like I don’t know about like, even and the teacher was like, oh, yeah, that’s good. Like something was bothering me about that. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. To me that shows that he is really internalizing some of these critical disability thinking that I’ve sort of come to that makes me feel really proud and excited.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
What’s your son’s name?

Andrew
Oscar.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
Is that like a head nod to your grandfather?

Andrew
It is. It is.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
Oh, very cool. (Laughing)

Andrew
He was a playwright. His name was Neil Simon, one of his best known plays that got turned into a TV show and a movie was “The Odd Couple”.

— Music begins Theme song from The Odd Couple
— Narration from the opening of the Odd Couple
On November 13, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. That request came from his wife.

Andrew
my wife, Lily, when we were trying to think of baby names. She said, Well, what about Felix? My first thought was the odd couple because Felix is the sort of more fastidious neurotic member of the odd couple. I was like, No, it can’t be Felix. Oscar, that’s who you want to name a baby after.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
A hearty laugh!

Andrew
. She wasn’t even thinking of “The Odd Couple”.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
I hope he’s not like Oscar though. He’s not pulling out sandwiches from the bed?

Andrew
He’s got a little bit of both, I would say.

— The Odd Couple theme music comes to an end.

— Music begins A funky baseline opens to a smooth mid tempo R&B groove.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
What was your experience, if any, with disability arts prior to 10 years ago, when you opened up your cane?

Andrew
Hmm. That’s a good question. I think I’d encountered it in the art world. When I first learned about the work of Christine Sun Kim. She’s a Deaf artist who does really interesting work around like sound or like representations of sound, interesting stuff with captions. That would have been on that level, or certainly, like mainstream blind musicians, that would have hit me on that mainstream level. That movie, like I think Sound of Metal, but really, it was not on my radar.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
If they’re in the mainstream, I don’t consider that disability culture. That’s just me. Are they making the art from a disability perspective? I think that’s the way I draw that line.

Andrew
My book is a mainstream book, you know, like it’s with a commercial publisher? Does that mean that like what I’m doing is not from a disability perspective, it’s kind of a bigger question about identity. Does your work fall under the category of the identity just by virtue of your having the identity? Or does the work have to like, be about the identity for it to be included? I think it’s kind of a spectrum.

TR
What qualifies something as disability art? disability culture? What makes someone a disability artist. Questions really worth exploring. I’ll do some of that in the ongoing self portrait episode.

Andrew
That’s the question that I’ve been wrestling with really like through the whole process of writing the book and figuring out my own identity as a blind person is like, is it supposed to be central? Or is it supposed to be incidental? When is it Central? When is it incidental? I read an interview with this bio ethicist who was blind named Adrian ash who died a couple years ago, she was very adamant that blindness was totally incidental. Her friends joke that she was 20, before she realized she was blind, because she just was like, it doesn’t really affect my life. But then when she applied for a job, and it was pretty obvious that she didn’t get the job because she was blind, because the person was basically explicitly like, I don’t know how we would hire a blind person, that’s when she became blind. That’s when it became a central part of her identity, that kind of politicizes it in a way that I don’t totally track with. If we’re talking about disability arts, I do want to center blindness as a writer, in some ways. There’s other times when, when I want it to be totally off to the side.

— Music comes to a close.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
What has the response been like today? And I’m wondering if there’s any difference between blind and non blind readers?

Andrew
Yeah, it’s been great. I’ve gotten some criticism. But over my overwhelming experience has been one of people really responding positively to the book, it seemed safe to assume that like people whose experience was close to mine, would be like, oh, yeah, I recognize that like the first time I used a cane, stopping driving. But one of the things I learned in writing the book is that blindness is such a diverse experience, not only in the ways that people experience blindness, but also all kinds of other life experiences intersectionality’s that can inform one’s relationship with disability. The cool thing for me, after the book has come out has been just seeing folks whose experience is very different from mine, also resonated with a book that makes me feel like I captured something about blind culture Blind politics in 2023. The experience that extends beyond my narrow experience of it,

TR:
the response Andrew hears the most from those who are not blind?

Andrew
“I learned a lot.”

It’s shocking sometimes how little people really stopped to consider the experience of blindness. And so I think one thing that book has done is really just like cracked that world open a lot more for a lot more people

TR in Conversation with Andrew
What was some of the criticism you mentioned that you receive.

Andrew
One of the things I really tried to do in the book is like not just have it be a memoir. I think the parts that people respond to the most are like me writing about my relationship with my son or with my wife are very emotional, personal moments. And I understand that, I think it’s important to include those, but I also get pretty nerdy. And talking about history of audio description, or the history of Braille history of the organized blind movement and NFB versus ACB versus AFB. Plenty of readers who didn’t know anything about blindness pointed out that it’s wild that there’s like these ancient beefs between blind people. Why are blind people fighting? Are they supposed to be in solidarity with each other fighting the fight to raise Blind people up. there are certain readers who are like, dude, enough of the alphabet soup? I don’t care, let’s move on.
That’s one criticism.

TR
You should judge for yourself. Get the book.

Andrew
The book is on Bookshare. It’s on barred I read the audio book myself. Every blind person who hears the audiobook is like how the hell did you do that? The short answer is Rp. 5% of my visual field still hanging in there.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
You did a great job reading that book. Part of that I’m sure was from your podcast experience and narration and stuff.

Andrew
Totally. Yeah.

TR
You can learn more about Andrew, his work and find him on social media by visiting his website AndrewLeland.org.

There really is something for everyone in this book. But here on Reid My Mind Radio, we’re especially interested in those adjusting to disability. while Andrews experience is specifically about blindness. I want to strongly encourage those new to disability to read The Country of the Blind, you’ll see yourself, your family, you’ll hopefully confront your own feelings about what it means to be disabled. And don’t worry, the final say is always up to you.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
So what’s your current citizenship status for the country of the Blind? Are you a citizen? Are you just visiting? What are we doing?

Andrew
I’ve applied for a green card. It’s been approved and now I’m just like waiting in the mail for it. So I’m like technically a citizen but I don’t have like the full papers yet.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
I can’t give you those papers, but I can tell you that you are an official member of the Reid My Mind Radio family sir.

Andrew
That’s much better news. That makes, that makes my day. And I have to say, you know, I didn’t want to I didn’t want to like mess things up by flattering you too much, but, you know, if we’re really talking about blind President? It’, you got my vote, it’s all you Thomas.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
(Laughing) Well, I appreciate that, but I am not running.

Andrew
Alright, well, I’m still gonna write you in. Gonna get my slate and stylus and braille you right on to the ballot.

TR in Conversation with Andrew
There you go. All right. Well, if I get enough, I’ll think about it.

TR
You know, I really do appreciate Andrew’s vote. But even more than that, I appreciate all the effort put into the book, sharing his experiences and time with the Reid My Mind Radio family. Sharing the art of adjustment.

I’m very hopeful that Andrew will come back and share some of his experiences around audio description. We of course, had a little conversation about that, but I think a future episode on what we were specifically talking about would be nice. That’s all I’ll say for now. Well on that topic at least.

— Music begins Hail to the Chief.

— Tap on microphone

TR
— Over exaggerated clearing of throat.

(In a presidential style speech )
. My fellow citizens, as we move forward together united as one, no matter where we land on the spectrum called blindness. We should ask, not what the blindness has done to us. But rather, what is it that we will do with our blindness?

We should also remind ourselves… to rock with Reid My Mind Radio wherever you get podcasts. Transcripts and more are at ReidMyMind.com.
Just remember, that’s R to the E, I, D!
— Sample (“D! And that’s me in the place to be.” Slick Rick)
Like my last name!
— Reid My Mind Radio outro

Peace!

TR in presidential mode
And may God Bless Humanity!

Hide the transcript

Audio: Record player static… “Back in the Day” Instrumental, Ahmad

TR:

Every now and then I like to tell my kids about my experience growing up. It puts things into a perspective. At least that’s my intent. They usually just make fun of me.

I tell them how as a young child growing up in the 70’s we used to get dressed up to go to the movies. I mean actually put on our good clothes. For me that meant dress pants which more than likely was polyester. Hard bottom shoes and dress shirts or sweaters.

(“Yuk”)

Movies were an experience.

Over the years that experience changed. By the early 80’s, I didn’t get dressed up and go downtown with my family, we now had a local theater. I could go with my friends, choose my own clothes. At first that was during the day time, but then as I got a bit older and a new multiplex theater was built in the borough, we all traveled there on Friday and Saturday nights.

Audio: Krush Groove Movie Trailer…

RIP, to the Whitestone Theater in the Bronx!

The experience continued to change. I changed as well. I began to prefer going to the movies during the day again. Eventually with my own family.

For a few years, I stopped going to the movies altogether. That was when I could no longer see the screen. I didn’t return until a theater about 30 minutes away from my home began offering Audio Description. That process wasn’t very smooth at first, but it did get better.

Now I’m back to my family trying to tell me what to wear.

Today, Covid 19 has obviously made adaptation a requirement for just about everything in our society. As we’ve seen, these adaptations paired with accessibility can equal opportunity. It’s not permanent, we know experiences evolve. When it’s inclusive, well I think that’s a good thing!

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with my sweat-shirts!

I’m Thomas Reid, your host and producer!
You’re rockin’ with Reid My Mind Radio!

Audio: Reid My Mind Theme Music

Cathy:

My name is Cathy kudlick and I’m Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. I should spell out Longmore because so many people here it as lawn mower, but it’s Longmore. It’s a disability cultural center. We try to kind of get people to think about disability in new and creative and innovative ways.

I’m a History professor in addition to my role as Director at the Longmore Institute and I teach Disability History among other things and I come at this largely as somebody who grew up with a serious vision impairment and was in complete denial through much of my life trying to pass and pretend and all of those things and then a random encounter with somebody and then started to read more about blindness tuff and disability stuff and all of that led to kind of start to say hey there’s nothing to be ashamed of here so why not embrace what’s really cool about this and think about it in new ways.

TR:

Thinking about disability in new ways. We’re going to come back to that.

If you’ve been riding with Reid My Mind Radio, you’re probably thinking we’re about to dive into Cathy’s journey. It’s obvious, Cathy’s story falls in line with this podcast’s mission. Well, for now that’s not the case. She has however, agreed to come back to share her story on a future episode.

Today’s episode is all about the…

(Audio: “Super, Super Super, from Super Rhymes by Jimmy Spicer)

Superfest Disability Film Festival.

Also here to take us through the festival is Emily Beitiks the Associate Director at the Longmore Institute on Disability.

Emily:

I’m the Coordinator of Superfest. I work with the film makers each year to help them audio describe their films and work with the audience each year as we kind of learn from them what works what doesn’t work and bring Superfest into other arenas to kind of broaden the reach of where our films are seen and introducing people to audio description for the first time when I do school assemblies or go to libraries or not your traditional Superfest audience. I’m a non-Disabled accomplice in this world. My mom had a disability since before I was born so I’ve been really passionate about bringing my own experiences kind of straddling both worlds experiencing disability discrimination and also participating in it as being a non-disabled person.

TR:

Let’s start with a bit of history.

Emily:

Superfest was started in Southern California in Los Angeles in 1970. It switched hands to various organizations over the years and migrated up to the Bay area where it was run for many years by Culture Disability Talent. It was a really well loved grass roots effort volunteer lead.

TR:
Running an event like this solely with volunteers can be a challenge. In 2012, Superfest found a new home with The Paul K Longmore Institute on Disabilities and The San Francisco Lighthouse.

Emily:

It was just kind of a very exciting match because the Longmore Institute was just getting started in a new sort of way as our founder Paul Longmore had passed away and Cathy had come on as Director and Lighthouse was a really established organization but focusing more on direct services and was interested to kind of push their boundaries by doing some more cultural programming.

We partnered up and ran Superfest for the past seven years.

TR:

The festival, which originally was not an annual event, is now headed into its 34th year. This will be the first time it’s solely run by the Longmore Institute, as the Lighthouse leadership decided to focus on other programming.

Emily:

We were really lucky to have that partnership with Lighthouse for many years because they just had a sort of organizational structure for like getting the bills paid and the reservations booked that moved a lot faster than we were capable of when we were just getting started. We’re really lucky that they waited and gave us a lot of warning because now we’ve been up and running for some time and we’re ready to run the ship by ourselves.

Cathy:

The other thing that kind of got thrown into this that makes it less hard to measure what the big change is you know with Covid how much of this is ultimately going to be online anyway. We’re still trying to decide. We don’t quite know if the venues we want to have it at in mid-October are going to be open and ready and all that. So it’s hard to measure exactly what a new Superfest without Lighthouse is going to be like.

TR:

Fortunately, Superfest in October won’t be their first go at managing events online.

Emily:

For the last few years, we do an annual event called the Longmore Lecture in Disability Studies and we had started to experiment with using Zoom to live stream that event to be able to bring it to people that by nature of their disabilities they couldn’t come or geographically they couldn’t come in person. When shelter in place hit and we’re here in San Francisco which is one of the first places in the country that got the official lockdown, we kind of saw it as a real opportunity, we’re like oh, we can do online programming. We’ve had experience with this and we could figure out how to bring it to a festival environment.

TR:
The challenge in presenting films online is the threat of pirating.

Audio: Scene from Pirates of the Caribbean”

“You are without doubt, the worse Pirate I’ve ever heard of.”

Jack Sparrow: “But you have heard of me”

Emily:

But I knew I’d worked with enough film makers over the years who I could reach out to that their primary mission was just for people to see their films. So the risk of possibly somebody making an illegal recording was just not as big of a concern. The more people that see this film the better.

TR:

Some of the films included work from Reid My Mind Radio family members Cheryl Green & Day Al-Mohammed.

Emily:

People really need this right now. People are cut off from their community and at the same moment that there’s so much hurtful and ablest rhetoric circulating around disability. And so to be able to spend an evening or an afternoon watching some disability films it also really brings people together and celebrate disability and get at the nuances of life with a disability that certainly the mainstream media doesn’t always get, just felt like a really important possibility.

TR:

My initial interest in featuring Superfest here on the podcast began with access. I was really impressed with the way they just for me at least, appeared to come out of nowhere and start providing content for the disability community. The way they do access; not only did I feel included, but knowing others were also able to participate just felt like something I should share with the Reid My Mind Radio family.

I wasn’t the only one reacting.

Emily:

One person was like I’ve never been able to participate in any sort of film festival in my life because I spend most of my time in the bed. They said this was just incredible to get to be part of this. Another one that stood out was a guy who stayed up super late to watch in Kenya with a group of friends and was like that was absolutely worth staying up for. Now I have a group of friends and we’re going to watch all your programs. And he certainly has.

So just being able to bring this program to people that don’t have what we have in the Bay area has been really exciting.

Cathy:

Emily thought to do another really cool one which was Superfest Kids which was kind of a nice home schooling moment I guess, with disability awareness and it was all geared towards kids. How many people did we have on that one? Do you remember?

Emily:

We had about 150. A number of people were like my kids are supposed to be on a Zoom call with their class right now but this is a more important lesson.

TR:

A lesson that more of us need no matter our age.

For the unfamiliar, the idea of a disability film is something like;

Cathy:

Oh Disabled people are people too and isn’t it great that they’re there and this is a positive happy uplifting story. It’s not a depressing one whatever. Those are fine, but we highlight what we think is disability 201 – films that share the creativity and the ingenuity or the unexpectedness or the intersections of disability with other kinds of identities.

TR:

Identities like race, gender, sexuality

Considering the idea of Disability 101 versus 201, you may think those new to disability should begin sequentially. Cathy however doesn’t see it that way.

Cathy:

I would say go to Superfest right away because if you’ve even thought about disability for five seconds or anybody around you has thought about it, chances are they’ve seen some version. It’s usually some films by a family member or friend that just thinks wow you know it’s really great that so and so with fill in the disability and then fill in what they did. They either traveled somewhere or they climbed a mountain or they went to school.

TR:

The 101 or 201 classification isn’t about good or bad. The distinguishing factor between the two is 101 films aren’t often made with disabled people in mind.

Cathy:

We want people to sort of think about disability as experimental and as interesting and as passionate and not just as yet another feel good story about somebody climbing a mountain because they started to be more comfortable with their disability or they needed to prove themselves. We want to ask them to think about well what happens when that person comes down from the mountain. What’s their life like after that?

TR:

That’s another difference. The 101 films feature a single disability experience.

Cathy:
But the 201 version would have them speaking to other disabled people and kind of bonding. There would be some sort of connection and some sort of excitement and engagement. It’s not just like one person being show cased all by themselves.

It might be that they have a quirky view on things and they change the thinking of other disabled people or they changed the thinking of people around them to give an unexpected perspective on the world around them.

TR:

The 201 films like Superfest, really center disabled people. And at the end of the day, as Emily explains, the goal is pretty simple.

Emily:

We’re just trying to not have them be bored. Even if you are new to finding your disability identity, typically a 201 film can just go a lot farther with pushing people’s buttons and thinking like wow, there’s this whole world of thinking about disability that I haven’t seen before.

A few years back we came up with a list that we kind of think of 10 things that define disability 201 and what Superfest is all about. Things you’re going to find at Superfest that you’re not going to find anywhere else.

TR:

These are things like;
People with disabilities as the main characters
Intersectionality – people with disabilities aren’t just white men as often portrayed in movies. So at Superfest, you’ll see representation from Black, Latinex, and LGBT people with disabilities.

I’ll include a link to these ten categories on this episodes blog post at ReidMyMind.com.

At Superfest, all screenings include open Audio Description. So unlike when you attend a film at your local theater and you request the headset and receiver to privately stream the audio description, these films have the description streaming with the main audio. As Cathy notes, this does require some introduction for an audience unfamiliar with AD.

Cathy:

You’re going to hear this and you’re not used to it. Think about it as a new way of watching films. I’ve often thought of it as in that context of when they introduced talking to silent films. It’s another layer that people weren’t ready for and then suddenly like woh this is very new. The problem with that though is it can be sensory overload for people that have processing or cognitive stuff going on

TR:

A challenge of producing a film festival like Superfest is the idea that creating access for one group of people may unintentionally exclude another group.

For example, Emily talked about a film called To Be or not To Be. It featured a young man with Cerebral Palsy in Kazakhstan. The film which was in Russian, required translation. For sighted users, printed sub titles along the bottom portion of the screen will do the trick. Blind viewers require over dubbing.

Emily:

The focus of the film is really his incredible acting abilities. In making it accessible to the Blind we were then losing hearing this actor with CP and his own voice telling his own life story. So it was a really tough example of like a competing accommodation of wanting to bring access to the Blind but not wanting to lose this man’s voice.

TR:

This particular film worked out because it had enough quiet space that the description and dubbing was staggered to allow the actors voice to be heard. For this very reason, Superfest now determines which films are better suited for open description but offers closed description for others.

Emily:

So much of our work is working with these film makers to teach them, think about the problem and have tough conversations as we do it so that hopefully people are thinking about it in advance of making their films.
[TR in conversation with Emily:]

So what is that process like, of teaching the film makers?

Emily:

Well, when they apply to participate in Superfest, there’s a requirement box that they have to check that says that they’ll get their films captioned and audio described.

TR:

Most of those who apply are in agreement with this philosophy. In some cases especially for independent film makers, the cost of captioning and describing, while small in comparison to other production costs, can present a challenge.

Emily:

A lot of our film makers are able to get it done. Other times we have to work and get creative about finding funds ourselves to be able to cover those expenses or find funders that are willing to do it for them. With each film kind of think it through with the film makers and sort of talk through the strategies.

TR:

Funding is just one of the challenges. Some films may just be packed with dialog and visuals leaving little space or no space for description. Emily and Cathy explain how one such instance was managed and how the result can be a win for all involved.

Emily:

And so we were like we’re going to just have to add pauses to the film to do this right and get some of that Audio Description in. There were going to be visuals that like everyone in the crowd who was sighted was going to laugh at that and we didn’t want to risk that people would not get to experience those jokes. And so we built in those pauses and I think this film maker was super up for it.

Cathy:

You know when audio description’s done badly it’s horrible, it’s like suffocating on something that’s beautiful and something that’s not. But when it’s done well it kind of coaxes out some great stuff that’s already in there and enhances it. So she got somebody to audio describe the film that had the same snarky tone that the images did. So it totally enhanced the images for everybody.

Emily:

We’re introducing it to them for the first time but we’re also really trying to empower them to be advocates for what the final product is and be like you know your film best. You know if that visual right there matters or if that was just some B roll you needed to fill the shot. The more active that they can be in the audio description process if they do outsource, the better the results have been.

Cathy:

To me that’s the dream of a Superfest audio description experience where the film maker says woh this made my film better!

TR:

Currently, English and American Sign Language (ASL) are the only supported languages. However, an online festival offering multiple links for various languages would simplify the process in comparison to a live physical audience.

Getting that audience whether in person or not takes work.

Emily:

Shout out to our wonderful student assistants. Every time we have an event they get an email from me like okay, here’s the audience for this one, think of everybody you can and send them this email. We have like a big list of disability organizations all across the country, but then with each one we’re like who can we reach that would not have any interest in attending a disability film festival but because of this new sort of twist on it right, might be interested.

TR:

Selecting the students, or Longmore fellows, as Cathy refers to them is not about finding interns to get the job done.

Cathy:

We try to hire as many students with disabilities and put them in the majority as our kind of student workers but also we’re educating them and bringing them into community with each other about new ideas around disability.

TR:

The students are experiencing the mission of Superfest, advocacy, education and community building. All done through the phase one judging of the films.

Cathy:

It’s almost like a class but we get paid internships for students with disabilities to come and basically watch like 190 – 200 films and have to Weddle it down to like 10 or 15. And we teach them and they teach each other and they become advocates and learn about representation of disability and all these things by working together.

TR:

Both Cathy and Emily lead the interns in discussions about the films. With each of the students coming to disability from different angles as you can imagine, the conversations are rich and engaging.

For more on Superfest jurors, check out episode 76 of Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Podcast. I’ll hook you up with that link on ReidMyMind.com.

While much of the world got caught flat footed during the pandemic, we see how the team at Superfest was in a position to quickly respond.

Emily:

We have always evolved with new twists and turns each year.

Emily & Cathy:
There’s always something!

Cathy:

The BART Station right by the venue was down. We created a bus bridge to another BART station. We found out like that morning at the festival.

Emily:

One year we arrived at one of our venues and the night before they had painted a wall like right outside the entrance to our auditorium. So the fumes were going to be a serious problem for anyone with chemical sensitivity. We’re like, alright great let’s figure it out. We’re going to get some fans in here. We’re going to reroute and everyone’s going to enter through the back.

We’ve been giving advice to some of the other film festivals not just disability film festivals but film festivals period with how to do online programming. I think that’s a great example of like when you’re in the disability community you’re used to things not being made for you because of ableism. That gives you this adaptability and flexibility and like our festival has that spirit.

TR:

The Superfest Film Festival will take place on October 17 & 18, 2020.

With 15 films all falling within the range that Superfest aims to include.

Emily:

Different disabilities featured, a mixture of documentaries that look at some of the honest hardships of life with a disability and others that are light and hilarious and really get at some of the funniest moments insider humor inside the disability community. A lot of really incredible artistic films that explore the beauty that comes with disabled bodies and disabled dance movement.

TR:

This year’s set of films consist of 14 short and 1 feature film.

Emily:

Called God Given Talent that explores a local Oakland based artist who’s Black and Blind. Really looking forward to sharing that more local story.

TR:

And yes, you are going to hear more about that particular artist in an upcoming episode right here on the podcast.
*

For more on the films included in this year’s Superfest lineup visit SuperfestFilm.com.
You can learn more about the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at LongmoreInstitute.sfsu.edu
They’re on Twitter @LongmoreInst and Facebook Facebook.com/SFSUDisability.
Or, just check out this episodes blog post at ReidMyMind.com for all the links.

Superfest sounds like much more than a film festival. In fact, I see it as a resource for those adjusting to blindness.

Chances are those new to blindness or disability in general haven’t spent much time critically thinking about disability. Being new to the experience is an opportunity to examine all that’s been accumulating in the sub conscious over the years. The films featured in Superfest encourage us to move our thinking about disability to a conscious level.

Take a look at the list of 10 things defining the 201 films and Superfest. They resemble some of what I’ve been learning along this journey of adjusting to blindness. Like;
* Recognizing the various ways disability intersects with other identities
* Exploring disability as a political and social issue, not just medical
* Seeing ourselves throughout all aspects of society and finding friendships within the community.

In fact, now that I think about it, Superfest sort of reminds me of how I feel about this podcast.

Cathy:

People need to know about this. it’s just such a great opportunity and it’s kind of great that it’s gone under the radar for so many people for so many years but on the other hand it just would be so great to have it be really, really well known. It’s so beloved and people are so excited about it and every year people come and they’re just like woh, we never thought of this. This is so amazing.

TR:

I’m just sayin’!

While I’m looking forward to Superfest being online this year because I personally get to attend, I know there’s no replacement for that in person experience. I look forward to one day being able to participate in person. I get the sense that it could be a similar experience to my first blindness conference. That sense of belonging or community.

Audio: It’s Official…

Cathy Kudlick…
Emily Beitiks…
And Superfest…

Its official! You know you’re part of the Reid My Mind Radio family!

Come hang out with yours truly and the rest of the cool kids watching some fun, interesting and thought provoking films. Head over to SuperfestFilm.com to check out the lineup and grab your ticket. Don’t forget the snacks and drinks. (You gotta have the snacks and drinks.)

Subscribe wherever you get podcasts!
Transcripts & more are over at ReidMyMind.com. And yes, that’s R to the E I D
(Audio: “D and that’s me in the place to be” Slick Rick)

Like my last name.

Audio: Reid My Mind Outro

Peace!

Hide the transcript

TR:

Welcome back to the podcast featuring essays of compelling people
impacted by Blindness and Disability.
it’s called Reid My Mind Radio!

Every now and then, I include some of my personal experiences as a man adjusting to becoming Blind as an adult.

I’m Thomas Reid, producer and host of this here podcast
living up to the claim of making blindness sound funky!

I’m not only referring to the actual sound, but I’m talking about the energy.
It’s positive, yet real and always upbeat. Funky is my way of challenging how you the listener may
think a podcast geared to those adjusting to blindness is supposed to sound.
Should it sound sanitized, institutional? Not here it won’t.

So if you’re riding with the Reid My Mind Radio family well then you must be funky too!

On the podcast today…

Audio: “Dance”

Audio: Reid My Mind Radio Intro

“Once you start asking; how does your body move? How does it communicate movement? Movement is a rigorous and tough beautiful way of communicating. We owe it to ourselves and to our audiences to find, nurture and develop the greatest range of nuance in physical communication that we can. It’s an amazing kind of vocabulary.”, Alice Sheppard

TR:

Today we’re exploring some of that vocabulary with Dancer and Choreographer, Alice Sheppard. She’s also the founding Director of Kinetic Light;

AS:

Which is an ensemble of disabled artists making immersive dance experiences.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Tell me a little bit about your first experience with dance.

AS:

I was a Musician, an Orchestral Pit Musician. Dancers were just simply the things above me on the stage pounding away, being late, needing the music to go slower, needing the music to go faster. (Laughs) I didn’t understand much about the art form . Dance was not something that my family had access to or I would have had access to even try. Dance just wasn’t there.

TR:

Eventually, She’d gain that access but the steps to becoming a dancer were far from choreographed.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

My understanding is that you became a professor… Yes?

AS:

Yes!

[TR in conversation with AS:]

(Laughing…) AS:

Laughing…

[TR in conversation with AS:] I just want to make sure the internet is correct.

AS:

the internet… in this case the internet is correct! Laughs…

TR:

A professor of Medieval Studies to be exact.

in 2004, Alice saw a performance by a disabled dancer.

AAS:

I didn’t really know what to expect. I was worried it was going to be cringe worthy and it wasn’t.

It was, … amazing! It was smart. It was political. It was sour. It was bitter. It was funny. It was tender, loving and joyful. It was the fullest expression of what you can hope for a body and mind and a heart. It grabbed me. It transported me and transformed me in ways I had not imagined possible.

TR:

Following the performance , Alice had a conversation with the dancer, Homer Avila.

AS:

We were talking about Disability and art and aesthetics and integrity and how you could work from a position of wholeness. He had an amputation to his leg, but he wasn’t saying things like he’s working from a deficit position, he was just working with the body that he had and reforming the art around his body. I was all into this because it was in line with what I was reading and thinking and writing about as a professor.

At the end of the evening he had issued a dare to me and a couple of other people who were hanging out

TR:

The dare?

Take a dance class.

AS:

I said yes because you know when you’re drinking you say yes to a whole pile of things.

[TR in conversation with AS:] Laughing…

AS:

Yeh, maybe this should be a lesson in bad alcohol. Don’t drink!

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Laughing… Maybe it’s good though because it seems like it worked out for you.

AS:

Yeh, yeh! (Laughing)

[TR in conversation with AS:] Not that I’m promoting alcohol. Laughs…

AS:

Laughs…

TR:

Sadly, that was Avila’s last performance. He passed away six weeks later.

AS:

I really felt like I had to honor that dare.

TR:

Finding a dance class doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, but it took Alice some time to find a school that would actually teach her. Instead she received responses like;

AS:

Well I don’t really know how to teach you or you can just be over there and maybe you can figure something out or make something up.

I never actually got to be in the dance class.

TR:

One school even had security post up outside of the class. We’re still trying to figure that one out!

I personally have never seen dance outside of that performed by someone with full use of their legs. So I asked Alice to describe how she does it.

AS:

Mostly in a manual wheelchair. Sometimes on crutches and some of my work is actually being done in a wheel chair with crutches on my arms as well.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

So tell me what does that look like?

AS:

If you can imagine a pair of manual crutches with rings like the European Lofstrand forearm crutches, they just have hoops at the top so you can hang them off your arms. I made them too short to stand up on, but long enough to be able to push my wheelchair like ski’s. Then I have these huge like 9 feet long, I can reach all the way up to the ceiling up to 11 1/2 feet and 9 feet wide. it’s just the incredible feeling of this huge wingspan and you can whirl those crutches. You can turn like nothing on earth, you just whirl them. Because they’re so wide they give you this incredible balance. It’s awesome! (Laughs…)

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Wow!

You’re going between the chair and the floor sometimes too, right?

AS:

Oh yeh! We use the floor in our chairs. We wear straps so the chairs come with us and we come with the chair. And then we can dive to the floor and roll and do all kinds of things on the floor. Sometimes we’re on the floor without our wheelchair.
It’s an amazing kind of vocabulary. I think once you start asking how does your body move. How does it communicate in movement? Movement is a rigorous and tough and beautiful way of communicating. We owe it to ourselves and to our audiences to find, nurture and develop the greatest range of nuance in physical communication that we can.

TR:

Eventually, Alice found her way to the Access Dance Company in Oakland California, where she took her first physically integrated dance class.

[TR in conversation with AS:] What was the experience like for you?

AS:

No one has ever quite asked me this before. Give me a moment to actually tell you the truth of it.

It was a sense of being at the beginning of something. Something I knew I couldn’t do. I knew I didn’t have control. I didn’t have the skill but it was being at the center feeling this whole area open up wide, wide, wide before me. And the joy and the pleasure of if I could be in there it would be amazing. I was aware that I sucked massively. I wasn’t doing the things that they asked, well. Even though I was doing them to the best of my capacity at the time. As a musician I recognized that I was at the same level of inquiry that I was at in the music practice. Where you’re like oh right I can see it, I can feel it, I don’t know what it’s going to be but I know that I have to work to get there.

TR:

Meanwhile, on the east side, in Georgia to be exact, Laurel Lawson was preparing to enter grad school.

LL:

I grew up playing music both as an amateur and as a professional and acting. I saw this dance class. It was in a great time slot right before I needed to be at one of my acting jobs. I thought it would be interesting, you know pick up a little broader skill base and it would be a good warm up. I’ve done a little bit of jazz like that minimum amount of theatrical dance that you need in order to get through musicals. So I went and signed up for this six week class. Boy I sucked so badly!

TR:

Well Douglas Scott apparently saw some talent there. He’s the founder and director of Full Radius Dance, a premier physically integrated dance school. He invited Laurel to audition for the dance company.

LL:

Two months later I was on stage in my first professional appearance.

It’s a little weird right. I often think about that. It’s like the most “bass awkward” way of falling into this field in some ways. A field that is so competitive that people work and dream and hustle from the time that they’re five years old and I took this weird circuitous path and almost wound up dancing by accident. Maybe that’s the title of my autobiography, “The Accidental Dancer”.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Laughs…

TR:

The community of professional dancers isn’t that large. Eventually, Alice and Laurel met. First chatting about technique, exercises and shared experiences.

LL:

We always knew we had work to make together. It was just a matter of getting to the point for us as individuals, for us as artists where we were ready to do that. Where we could put together the kind of structure to support it and for the rest of the world to get to the point where we had this little bit of an entry to be able to get other people to realize hey we have something to contribute here. The funding and presentation landscape makes a huge difference in what gets presented and what does not.

TR:

That structure is Kinetic Light.

LL:

At the core of it, Kinetic Light consists of this collective of three artists, Alice, myself and Michael Maag who is our production, projection and lighting designer.

Kinetic Light is a little unusual in the way we operate compared to what you might call a conventional dance company. We’re a multi-disciplinary. In some ways we’re not necessarily a dance company. Dance is front and center but there are also ways in which we are a multi-modal performance company. Are we a tech company? That’s a question that we keep going back to because we’re not quite a dance company.

TR:

There’s multiple functions associated with running a dance company.
Of course, there’s the choreography, but we can’t forget the administrative work of funding, managing projects and more.

And then there’s something of particular interest to those with vision loss that Alice explains has always been a part of the plan.

AS:

My thought was always that we would do access. What I didn’t know was the kind of journey that it would become.

TR:

We’re talking about audio description. Well we’ll call it that for now. But the question is really how do you take a visual art experience like dance and make it available to those who are blind?

First, Alice invited friends to attend a live performance.

AS:

Georgina Kleege who is a Blind professor at UC Berkley. She’s a professor of Blind aesthetics and the arts and writing. She’s got this awesome book out right now called “What Blindness Contributes to Art”.

TR:

The goal was specific.

AS:

We want all of our people to come and have a good experience. How do we do it?

This was in 2016, but in 2012 I began exploring these types of threads anyway in my work. And then she picked up those threads and pushed them to the next level. And I was like ok, let’s do that.

Georgina and Josh Miele who, if you don’t know Josh you should talk to Josh, he’s an amazing technologist.

TR:

Shout out to Reid My Mind Radio Alumni Josh Miele. I’ll link you to his episode on this episode’s blog post.

AS:

Cool!

Georgina and Josh said yeh, ok, so you did better than the average and your definitely on some pathway but that isn’t it. It isn’t enough. We aren’t getting what everybody else is getting.

At that time what we were doing was making description of the physical movement.

LL:

That was really painful for us. this was our community that we had invited to come see us and we failed.
[
We hadn’t offered them an equitable experience.
]

TR:

Describing a dance performance isn’t a straight forward task.

Let’s take an example I feel almost everyone is familiar with.

Let’s say a dancer puts his left foot in.

Audio: Horn!

then puts his left foot out.

Audio: Two horn hits!

he does the Hokey Pokey and turns himself around.

Audio: Hokey Pokey song

Now that’s description!
It’s actually conveying all that’s taking place.
Well, if there’s only one person.

But let’s make that dance a bit more complicated.
say our dancer’s left foot is in while his right hand is up
and his partners right leg is up
and another dancer is flying across the screen with a particularly dramatic facial expression.
I’m not even getting into the lighting or stage props that often accompany the Hokey pokey!

AAS:

What you’re getting is this kind of displaced description. You’re not getting a sense of the art.

This is where Laurel comes in, she’s an engineer and designer and she thought of a way in which you could play multiple sound tracks on an app and a way for it to actually sync in time with the show. And so with this kind of technology at the basis the question became not how you make dance accessible, that’s boring. The question really is how do you transform the art of dance into the art of sound.

LL:

I had a little germ of an idea that would become Audimance.

TR:

Audimance was developed in association with Kinetic Light’s DESCENT.

AS:

Descent is a queer inter-racial love story between two disabled women.

Basically invents a backstory to the sculpture the Toilette of Venus and Andromeda by Rodan.

It figures out what does this goddess from Greek myth doing with this figure from Roman myth and why are they put together. Why does Rodan do that with them? It challenges Rodan’s own notions of feminism and lesbianism. It challenges the place of the incomplete body in Rodan’s thinking and sculpture. It’s an incredible kind of imagining of the relationship between the two. A love story maybe. It shows the ways in which disability and art go together. It re-imagines access ramps. It’s a thing this Descent!

TR:

With that in mind, let’s walk through how a nonvisual audience member experiences this performance using Audimance.

It starts with the pre-show. Here’s Alice.

AS:

The program is recorded. In the program there’s some background context to the work, and overall plot summary, a background on the set, an overarching narrative context if you want that. Rodan’s sculptures so there’s some information about that. Basically, information that is contextual.

TR:

That one aspect of Audimance is already surpassing how many of us experience description. Meaning, no longer are we confined to the strict time limitations dictated by the performance. Audience members may be able to access this pre-show information days before the event itself.

And then, if you arrive at the theater early, before the show…

AS:

One of the things we’ve been developing is a kind of tactile experience. This was something that josh was essential in thinking through. We 3D printed the set. The ramp and you could hold a model of the set in your hand and feel some of the things around that. There’s samples of the costumes, the surface, the flooring of the set, the kinds of material elements.

TR:

You may wonder, why a 3D rendering of the set if you’re physically there? the set of Descent is a ramp. And not just any ramp.

AS:

It’s 24 feet wide, 15 feet deep and it goes to 6 foot high at a kind of pointed mountainous peak that I sit on top of.

Each part of the ramp has its name. There’s the peak it’s a top of a mountain. At the bottom of the peak there are waves and there’s water, projections of waves water and rock. And then there’s this huge deck, this angled deck that is sometimes grass and sometimes a mountain range and sometimes an ocean. And the water waves whip up and down the ocean. It’s incredible!

TR:

You have all of the context information about the upcoming performance. And now, it’s ShowTime!

AS:

“How do you transform the art of dance into the art of sound.”

(Repeated from above but with an effect as if reflecting.)

TR:

That one question became several more that she proposed to her friends experiencing the performance non visually.

AS:

What are you listening to? What is communicative sound for you? How do you get art out of sound? What sounds mean something?

And then the question was what sounds are actually in the dance itself? Here’s where we ended up. We have to be able to convey the sounds of the work itself as a sound.

I rang Disabled Queer Trans gender Poet Eli Clare and I said, will you write poetry for this dance? Eli turned the dance into poetry. And I was like wow!

TR:

Audimance empowers the listener with choice and control. Pairing for example the poetry of Eli Clare with the original sound scape composition of Dylan Keefe from the sound rich podcast radio Lab.

Laurel tells us about other tracks and possibilities.

LL:

We can be working with people who are writing prose. For example maybe even describing it technically so that a nonvisual audience member whose also trained as a dancer is actually hearing in dance language about what we’re doing and understanding it in that medium. We can work with sonification of the stage or our bodies or interpreted sonification of the choreography itself. So for example you might be hearing a breath, a heartbeat a sound (slap, slap) as we contact each other as our chairs hit the stage

If you imagine you’re in a big room, a museum gallery, imagine that there are 20 speakers scattered throughout this room. They could be on the ceiling, floating in the middle of the air, on the walls or the floor and every speaker is playing a different track. But all the tracks are part of the same performance. As you wander through this space you can control what you’re listening to. You’re creating your own experience of this art. You can go cuddle up to a single speaker and listen to one track from beginning to end. find a mix, maybe between three or four speakers that appeals to you. Keep moving and keep listening to the way that the tracks and the performance shifts and changes as you’re constantly in motion between these speakers. Got that image. Ok, condense all of that down into a phone screen and you got Audimance!

Since I am sighted every bit of process all along the way we were going back and forth with non-visual audience members, collaborators, testers.

From the describer side I think we’re opening a lot of stuff up to. We’re trying to involve the describer as collaborator through this process. We’re not replacing audio description, we’re blowing it open.

TR:

With other options for Descent’s nonvisual audience members like an interpreted dramatic dialog, a description track specifically for those with kinesthetic imaginations or those who actually feel what’s being described, plus description of lighting… yeah, kaboom!

LL: on centering blind

Audimance is specifically designed for nonvisual users. It absolutely centers Blind users who have advanced listening skills.

TR:

You know you’re an advanced listener when you have the ability to audibly synthesize simultaneous streams of information. Probably more common is the ability to comprehend information at an increased rate. 25 percent, 50 maybe even double or triple its normal rate.

For example, a more seasoned screen reader user probably sounds like this…

Audio: Fast screen reader reading
“You know you’re you’re an advanced listener when you have the ability to audibly synthesize simultaneous streams of information. Probably more common is the ability to comprehend information at an increased rate. 25 percent, 50 maybe even double or triple its normal rate.”
TR:

Someone new to vision loss and therefore new to screen reader technology and synthetic speech and in general active listening sounds more like this…

Audio: Screen reader voice reading in a slow speed.
” You know you’re an advanced listener when you… Oh my goodness this is slow! I’m getting sleepy, sleepy”

LL:

obviously anyone who is hearing can use it but this isn’t a question of trying to make it work for everyone. It is made for and it centers this population that was being underserved artistically

TR:

With multiple choices, someone new to vision loss may be more comfortable simply choosing one or two tracks such as the poetry or traditional description.

Audimance allows users to make selections at any time since the tracks are synchronized to the live performance.

LL:
Are we providing an identical experience to a sighted audience member watching the dance? No Because that does not exist and saying that we’re making something identical is false equivalence. Do we think we’re creating something that is equitable in terms of a rich multi dimension complicated artistic experience? Something that has been crafted by the artist as part of the piece from the beginning?

Yeah! And that’s the feedback we have gotten about it.

TR:

Audimance is Open Source software that’s still in the early alpha phase of development. But there getting close to where anyone will be able to download the program.

LL:

Where venues will be able to download a creator interface and you can just go in a venue and have it pull up the experience for the show that you’re going to see.

TR:

That could be the more traditional description. But I’m hoping for a more artistic, thoughtful, equitable experience.

LL:

It was created for performance art, but certainly any theatrical performance, potentially even for music performances or for speakers to provide visual descriptions of the people on stage.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
That’s going to be fun to watch when people just kind of take that and say I want to play with it because they’re not even thinking about it from the perspective of inclusion or audio description. And it’s just I want to play with this and see what I can do.

LL:

I am so looking forward to that part of it because technically well when you think of it it doesn’t necessarily have to go with a performance. It can be an independent audio only artistic experience. Having people play with this kind of spatialized durational sonic art is going to be fascinating.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
And so that’s open source meaning anyone is going to be able to have access to that. There’s the equity component of that too. Or is this going to really cost people thousands of dollars? (Laughing…)

LL:

(Laughing)

Well you know the problem with that is if we make it cost thousands of dollars we’re going to have a real hard sell telling venues okay, there’s no excuse for your performance not to be accessible. Or dance companies, choreographers here, even if it’s just you describing your dance. You go into rehearsal and you just do the description if you have to. We’re not telling you you have to pay to bring an additional artist in for the week and house them and so forth.

TR:

Audimance is currently being supported by donations. That’s financial and labor.

LL:

If you are interested in contributing to this software itself as a programmer, as a designer, as a technical writer we need everybody right now. If you’re a project manager. If you’re interested in helping us write instructional content. We need tutorials and how to use it. We’re going to need tutorials to introduce presenters to it eventually. You can find the project on GitHub.

People can make financial donations on our website, KineticLight.org.

TR:

you can even earmark your donations specifically for the Audimance project.

Want to learn more about Audimance, Descent, Alice and Laurel?

AS:

There is a newsletter!

[TR in conversation with AS:]
Really and how would someone subscribe to that?

AS:

On your phone you can text 66866 to sign up.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
Wow, look how fancy you are? (Laughs…)

AS:

Laughs…

[TR in conversation with AS:]

(Playfully)
So you’re telling me, you don’t go to a website and put in all your information. All you have to do is text?

AS:

You can do that too. You can go to the website and put in your information.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

What website would that be?

AS:

(laughs…)
KineticLight.org

[TR in conversation with AS:]
What would folks get from the newsletter?

AS:

That’s a really good question. You would meet some of the team. You would learn about the performances or film screening. You might learn about an award. Sometimes we put in cool ideas about Disability culture. Sometimes we’re talking about work friends of ours are doing.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
Yeh, I like it! Cool!

TR:

I’ll tell you something else that’s pretty cool!
That film screening she mentioned? It’s a film featuring Alice and three other dancers . It takes place…

called Inclinations. it too highlights performance on a ramp. This one however is outdoors.

This particular film consists of audio description with two narrators.

Audio:

TR:

you should recognize that voice. That’s Cheryl Green, a podcast alumni and part of the Reid My Mind Radio family!

And the other describer…

Audio:

TR:

Yours truly!

Big shout out to Cheryl Green, Lisa Niedermeyer and everyone else involved in making that happen! That was fun!

Inclinations has been screened at Festivals in Canada and the US including;
National Dance Day at Kennedy Center
Superfest Disability Film Festival 
Cinema Touching Disability

For more on Inclinations checkout Alice Sheppard.com

Audio: “Check it out y’all!”

TR:

there’s a lot to be excited about Audimance. The feature that in my opinion means the most; It’s empowering.

It shifts the conversation from providing access to creating nonvisual experiences.

There’s so much possibility. Especially when you factor in that the technology is open source. It’s made for live performances but the same concepts can be applied to recorded performances.

We’re in a time where audio production is on the rise. I’m talking about the growth of podcasting. I think about the potential in the live podcasting space. Moving away from the Q&A format to a sound rich experience.

Forget about that idea that we need to wait for the kind help from others. Audimance is a collaborative effort from the cross disability community. If you’re not throwing your fist up in solidarity for that one, check your pulse!

Salute to Alice Laurel and everyone involved with the project!

And if you like what you heard?

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You can always visit www.ReidMyMind.com, that’s R to the E I D like my last name!

AS:

And I was like wow!

Audio: Reid My Mind Radio Outro

TR:

Peace!

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