The Best of Disability Blogs and Banter

TCM’S “The Projected Image” Puts Spotlight on Disabilities in Film
The role of disabled actors, or lack thereof, in movies over the years is explored in the month-long festival “The Projected Image” on TCM.

The featured films span from 1927 to ‘87, and if anything, one notices more disabled actors in the earlier films. There’s Harold Russell, who lost his hands as an Army instructor during World War II, playing a disabled veteran in 1946’s  The Best Years of Our Lives. Two years later, Susan Peters, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a hunting accident, plays a conniving matriarch in the noir thriller Sign of the Ram.

“She’s literally hell on wheels in this thing,” says [Lawrence] Carter-Long. “If the industry could do something like that in 1948, you have to ask, why aren’t they doing it now?”
— Robert Ito, www.latimes.com

Does Spending a Day in a Wheelchair Teach Anyone Anything?
Here’s what one of NEW MOBILITY’s Facebook followers had to say about it:

I’ve lost count of the number of politicians that have approached me all proud because they’ve spent a whole day in a wheelchair puttering around their office. Bully for you, now leave the damn office, go down town to your favorite restaurant, take a cab or other public transportation, visit some historical buildings. Remember you can’t use your legs and go to the bathroom. Nope you can’t stand to pee, drive home, load the chair in and out of the vehicle, or prep a meal on conventional counters and stoves. Does anyone add this to their day in a wheelchair routine? Didn’t think so. You want to make it an eye opener, make it three days or a week in a wheelchair, enough to start to experience the back and shoulder pain and hot spots from exerting up hills and sitting on your ass all day, then come talk to me. Life in a wheelchair is more than bumbling around the office for the afternoon.
— Dave Desjardins
(see the whole debate at Facebook.com/newmobility)

Breaking Barriers: Shooting Victims Say That Rap Music ‘Saved Us’
Young African-American men are disproportionately more likely than their white counterparts to acquire spinal cord injury from a gunshot wound.

Such statistics and the stories behind them highlight the need that [Tapwaterz] Norris and [Rickfire] Velasquez set out to address. They saw that few people were reaching out specifically to African-Americans and Latinos with SCI. Hip hop music and culture could be a powerful tool [to achieve that].

But the coup that may prove to be pivotal is their recent “Welcome to Reality” G-mix with Snoop Dogg.

“Snoop supports the message, he’s rapped about it in the past, but I think we accomplished something [different] by doing this,” said Mr. Norris. “We brought him into our world.”
— Tina Calabro, www.post-gazette.com