Magical Bridge Accessible Playground

Play and playgrounds aren't usually my thing.  That is, I don't usually write about issues that concern children; I don't know many children, disabled or non.  And that has got me thinking.

Mostly, I write about adult life with a disability.  I often write about acquired disability -- because that is my experience and, also, the experience of many people in my immediate vicinity.  But there's another side to disability that I don't often write about -- life from birth with a disability.  I know that growing up disabled is very different from my experience; I see flashes of it in conversation with friends, and I see flashes of a different community, one I can never know, when people who are disabled from birth are gathered together.

I've been thinking about these and other fissures in disabled community and about how I can learn.

Someone approached me in the gym to talk about supporting an accessible playground for children.  I can't travel to the event, but I can publicize it here.  For two reasons.  If you are in the area, GO!  If you know about how to create accessible playgrounds and can be a resource or have resources, please get in touch.

I was also struck by the importance of accessible public play space.  I talk a lot about accessible architecture and the importance of accessible public space, but play space, as opposed to park or hiking space, hadn't occurred to me.  I've written a little about hiking, walking, and trails here, here and here.  Now, I'm thinking about playing and parks.

Kids With Dreams Field of Dreams Event

Kids with Dreams, a Stanford University social entrepreneurship group that serves to improve the lives of disabled children, is sponsoring an art and sports day for kids and families. There will be barbecue lunch available for purchase.

The Magical Bridge Playground is Kids With Dreams featured nonprofit organization. All proceeds will go to The Magical Bridge Playground.

The Magical Bridge Playground is a new kind of playground in the making. A park that, when built, will be accessible for people of all abilities so friends, families and children will have a place to come out and play together. Please visit http://www.magicalbridge.org/index.html

Kids with Dreams Field of Dreams

Date: Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

Time: 12:00pm-4:00pm

Location: Wilbur Field, Stanford Campus

What: Come to Wilbur Field Sunday, April 3rd to enjoy a day of fun for kids of all abilities!

For directions:  /http://www.stanford.edu/group/kwd/events/

On Feeling

I want to believe that with education people can change how they feel about disability.  They might not want to change, of course, but I believe they can. I have to believe education makes a difference -- that even though people feel what they feel; they can change if not what they feel but how they deal with that surge of emotion.

I'm learning that feelings are not just feelings, emotions that come and go.  They are, in fact, dangerous.  I and other disabled people have to live the consequences of other people's feelings.  Untrammeled feelings are the biggest source of my daily oppression.

Let me say that again.  Dealing with my impairment is not the worst part of my daily life -- other people's feelings are.  Emotional outrage, disgust, fear, etc.  are not limited to the person alone; they become public policy. They become cultural stereotypes, attitudinal commonplaces, words of wisdom.  What people feel about disability and the disabled can deny me a ramp into a restaurant, a job, companionship... They can isolate me, terrorize me, lead to violence against me. They aren't just feelings; they are impediments to my full participation in the world. If everyone kept their feelings to themselves, well,.....

Well.

Dancing (While Black And Disabled)

I love reading Black Swan Diaries; this is a blog written by Aesha Ash, one of the very few African American professional ballet dancers.  If you have never seen her dance, do so.  She is utterly gorgeous.  Her blog is about some of her experiences as a dancer in the professional ballet world.

This week's posting is about race and ballet.  She calls it: "shut up and dance."  Dancers are not supposed to bring our personal issues, baggage, concerns, questions and experiences into rehearsal (unless the process requires this kind of exploration).  This is true for some modern and contemporary dancers and even more so for ballet dancers, like Ms. Ash.  In general, the ballet world is less accepting of anything that might indicate difference than the modern dance world (though it is tough going in either place).

Ms. Ash questions what happens when people cannot speak out, say, about race.  The post features a picture where the dancer (Ms. Ash) appears to be silenced by her pointe shoes -- the ribbons of the shoes seem to make a large "x" across her mouth.  (If you can look more closely, though, the tape doesn't actually visibly meet the ribbon.)  Either way, though, it's a striking picture.

For instance, were individuals in the dance world also fed up with constant reminders of diversity problems? Do discussions about race serve to perpetuate racial attitudes and hamper progress? Does the failure to address significant racial disparities in society make issues of race and inequality go away?

I never wanted to spotlight my race throughout my career, but the topic always seemed to arise.

Her comments are a typical and effective formulation of the problem people of colour face in the workplace and in the world at large.  How do we, as a nation, talk about race?  How do we talk about race while we are in the workplace (as opposed to at home)?  Why is it people of colour keep having to talk about our race?

Race in my dance world is difficult to categorize.  In general, most of the dance companies that I watch seem racially integrated.  That said, the meaning of "integrated" is different for each company.  I also am able to go to see companies whose work specifically explores race and ethnicity as a topic and/or whose work draws on/explores dance forms/movement vocabularies that come from a specific racial or ethnic heritage.

All that said, I don't know that it is a panacea.  I don't know, for example, about funding.  Are companies whose work is "unmarked" funded more often and in greater amounts than those whose work is not?  I don't know, but I could bet the answer is probably.  Do mainstream audiences turn out for work that is explicitly tied to a particular racial or ethnic group?  I don't know, but I could bet the answer is probably not as much.  What about things like presentation, booking, production?  Unless you are staging your own show or submitting to a defined festival (Black Choreographers Festival, for example), how easy is it to get on the stage?  Probably not as easy.

What about my life as a dancer in a physically integrated company?  Well, you know, disability does odd things there.  The disability circles I travel in personally (i.e., outside my dance life) specifically engage the invisibility and marginalization of people of colour in the movement.  We talk about the ways the movement has and hasn't been able to include the experiences of people of colour.  But for the past I don't know how many years, my company has been able to hire and keep several disabled dancers of colour.  In fact, I'd guess that the percentage of people of colour among our disabled dancers is larger than the percentage of people of colour among our non-disabled dancers.

I don't know how to interpret that.  I don't think it's necessarily about either my company or about disability culture as a whole.   At a rough guess, I think it's about the modern dance world.  But that's not my point today.  On a day-to-day basis, I don't know what to do with my racial difference.  I'm not even sure that it is consciously recognized in anyone's mind but mine.

After a show, audience questions focus solely on my experience as a wheelchair user.  It might have penetrated their subconscious minds that they are looking at a woman of colour, but their conscious mind asks only about the disability.  That's partly because we need especially established environments to ask safely even the most basic of questions about race.  I can't imagine anyone coming to something framed as a performance around the integration of disabled and non-disabled dancers asking about race.  It would be outside the invisible but mutually agreed socially allowable norm.

By choosing to work where and how I do, I choose to have one part of me more recognized than any other.  My choice, my problem?  Not so fast.  That's not so clear.  I think there's something else going on.  Something that I might lightheartedly formulate as "disability bats last" or "disability shouts loudest: or, even, "disability is my squeaky wheel."

Take, for example, what happens to my identity as a woman in the presence of my disability.  Gender becomes explicitly visible in our current rep in two ways: dances that engage the question of sexual or romantic relationship and moves of extreme strength/speed/delicacy that can be tied to the norms of gender.  But it's also partly about the disability shouts loudest thing.

We were once reviewed by a critic who claimed disability as a new gender because we used our chairs to lift.  Though, nowadays, women lift each other and men with increasing frequency, lifting is traditionally the prerogative of able bodied men.   This critic seemed to see our chairs assuming a "masculine" role, regardless of the actual gender of the chair user.  We were invisible; our disability took precedence.

Things are even more complicated when it comes to race.  I do occasionally bring African influenced movements into my work, but with the exception of taking Horton in an overwhelmingly white modern dance situation, my experience of an African dance class in majority African-American situation has been unwelcoming.  That's one of those things about how race and disability play out in the non-dance world.

I love how I feel in West African tradition dance classes, but it has been made pretty clear to me that other dancers don't feel that I have a place in their world.  It's not because I can't dance -- several of the dancers who have been most unfriendly have come to our performances and have celebrated our/my work.  It's because my disabled dance doesn't belong in that world.  It's because my body doesn't have a place in that dance tradition. I do my thing in a world where my movement focus is on my disabled body.  I choose to, yes, but I also have to.  I couldn't show up to an audition for black dancers and expect to be taken seriously.  Local dancers know about our company and what we do, but there's no crossing of the lines.  I have talked to several instructors about being in their classes and about classes they might recommend to me.  Stony, hard faces; polite verbal demurrals.  I should just show up and force the issue, but who wants to do that?

My company expressly attends to the diversity of bodies and movement potential created by the difference of disability, not the difference of race (or gender).  And although our personal lives and experience may influence what we do, we mostly work in the abstract.  It is very easy to make visible and meaningful the difference of my disability when asked to move across the floor.  I don't know how I would make legible the difference of my race.  And, to be honest, I am not concentrating on that part of me.  My conscious awareness is directed to the execution of the task; I'm not thinking about all the different things that I bring to the task.

Here's what I mean.  My hand looks different from other hands as it strikes the wheel.  But how it strikes the wheel is not an immediate function of my race.  I don't know how it is that I would move differently if I were consciously to move as a disabled woman of colour (I'm going to leave my other identifying communities aside for a moment because they aren't visible.)  I do know that I can perform my equivalent of hip hop moves or make my equivalent of modern and African dance lines.

So, I have a question for myself.  How do I lay claim to my heritage as I do what I do?

Revelations: http://www.alvinailey.org (Andrew Eccles)

The post here contains a picture of 9 dancers from the Alvin Ailey Company.  They are posing in a position from Revelations.  Their costumes, all earth tones, blend with the skin tones of their bodies and into the neutral marley and studio wall.  8 of the dancers spread their arms as if they were birds; they stand, bend and arc at various height levels.  The 9th stands arms outstretched into a high 'v' shape.




This second image is from a series of pictures taken by the Wizard in 2007.   I had just seen Ailey and Urban Bush Women for the first time.  I wanted to capture that shape in my own body; it meant so much to me.  Wizard and I went outside to see what we could see.  We snuck up against our neighbour's garage wall, and I tried to find the bird shape in my own body.  (More complicated than it looks, given my starting point in a chair, but this is one of the better attempts.)



I keep a small symbol of it right here on my blog -- in the header image and my explanation of it from a 2009 post.

I drop into that bird position, and I feel at home. I drop into that bird position, and my body feels as if it has been there for centuries; it takes on the history -- movement and political -- of all that I am and all that I can be seen to be. When I drop into that bird position, I feel safe, secure, and strong. I love the way it blends an African dance shape with a wheelchair. I love the contradictions it seems to imply. That's why I haven't updated my site. That picture reminds me of who I am as a dancer. It invites me to become who I might be as a dancer.

That last line is the key.

Tripping Or Falling

I fell out of my wheelchair yesterday.

It was my first involuntary, non-dance related fall in perhaps a year.  I was completely unprepared both for the mechanics of the fall and the lingering sense of dislocation in my body (figurative, not literal).  On one side of the street, the kerb cut functions as it is supposed to.  But yesterday, I couldn't find parking there.  So, I parked on the side of the street where there is a crack just at moment where you would come down the kerb cut and hit the concrete slabs of the road.  The crack is triangular and big enough and deep enough to ensnare a caster.  I know this.  And after a couple of near misses, I have become quite skilled at not tripping up.

Yesterday, I was carrying a suitcase on my lap; I balanced my boots and a bottle of water on top of the case.  I was moving swiftly and fluently; I glided down the cut; I reminded myself about the crack.  I knew something was wrong when I felt my chair rise, my suitcase slip.  I heard the case hit the ground and felt myself arc in the air.  For a second, I pictured myself rolling under the car, but my seat belt grabbed me; I put my hands out, and I was down.

I'm not sure quite how the next seconds went.

The best I can figure out is, that as my boots and water bottle scattered, I went down over the suitcase.  It winded me.  I was flopped over my case, looking up, flailing an arm, and figuring out how to move again.

A horn honked.  I looked up.  The lights had changed.

At this point, I begin to feel afraid.  I'm down; I'm finding it hard to move.  I'm staring at the bumper of a grey Chevy.  And people!  People!  No one has come to help.  I wave at the honker and the people.  They are waiting for their light to change, I realize.  I laugh.  I'm fucked.

The people stream over, as I begin to push myself back up.  An officer appears from nowhere; how did the police get here so quickly?  The grey chevy reveals itself to be a police car.  His lights are on; the traffic doesn't move.  Now and only now does everyone want to know if I am OK.  Now and only now are people available to help.  People surge into view.  They pick up my boots and bottle; I push back into a sitting position.  Someone hands me my case.

"I tripped," I say to police man.  I realize that it is futile.  Who will understand that I tripped because of the crack in the road -- and not just that I fell because, well, disabled people do stupid stuff like fall out of their chairs.  "While you're here; I tripped on the crack."  The officer responded immediately: he was county, not city; it wasn't his problem.

My body has settled a little now.  But the distinction between tripping and falling has suddenly become crucial to me.

I love some of the OED entries for the verb to trip:

I. To tread or step lightly or nimbly.
1.a. intr. To move lightly and nimbly on the feet; to skip, caper; to dance; †of a horse: to caper, prance (obs. rare—1). arch.

And 3

3.a. intr. To go, walk, skip, or run with a light and lively motion; to move with a quick light tread; also with it, and in phr. †to trip and go.

In fact, there are 5 different usages with sub usages before we get to:

II. To strike with the foot so as to cause stumbling (and derived senses).

(App. an English development of sense.)
6.a. trans. To cause to stumble or fall by suddenly arresting or catching the foot; ‘to throw by striking the feet from the ground by a sudden motion; to strike the feet from under the body’ (Johnson). Also with up, † down. Often with the heels, foot, etc., as object, esp. in the phrase to trip up one's heels.  (subscription only).

Tripping is so very much a foot based action.  It is all about how we do or don't get to keep control of our feet.  It is perhaps ironic to use trip to explain how I "fell," but it enables me to emphasize two things: the fact that my chair does function as a part of my body -- the casters are my extra "feet."  And second, the fact that I didn't just spasm or collapse my body into the road.  My chair and I were tripped by an environmental hazard.

I've written a lot about falling.  In 2010, I wrote about balance (i.e., not falling) as an art.  2009 has a post about falling as a dance move.  Apparently, in 2008, my hip surgery was more important than falling, though falling may have made an underlying problem worse.  In January of 2007, I wrote about the feeling of falling; in May, I wrote about the fall that separated my shoulder; in September, I wrote about some of the muscle memory and fear of falling.  In 2006, I wrote about falling as social humiliation.  (NB: this is one of my first blog posts.  It's cool to see some of the ways in which I have and haven't changed as a blogger.)

There's a subtext here that needs further investigation.  Something about my pride as a wheelchair user.  And about that sense of control that we think we have.  I hate the loss of control I experience in falling.  It strikes at my sense of artistry.  I am a skilled chair user.   I hate being reminded that, well, the unexpected happens.  I also hate the idea that I might be read as ... well, .... deep breath.... a stereotype of a disabled person.  Without control.

I am control embodied.  It pains me that I have involuntary movement.  Falling brings all this up for me.

Wheelchair Repair:2

Talked extensively with the customer service representative at Tilite.  This isn't going well.  I'm disappointed.  I love their chairs, and I always talk about how good the people and the chairs are.

The situation is tricky; I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail here because I recognize that the Ti representative has taken some initiative and did help me out of a bind.  I don't want to go trashing someone whose goodwill did get me safely through a performance when my provider could not help.  But I am staggered by two things.

One: the claim that no one had thought that a chair could be broken the way I have broken mine!!  (Umm.  Tilite, you should be talking to me about chairs, usage and design.)

Two: Granted, the representative was feeling frustrated with me -- I kept persisting for ideas about a solution for a probably unfixable situation -- but a broken chair is not the "price that we pay for our independence."  I.e., shut up, suck it up; I've other phone calls to take.  A chair, any chair, my chair is not the price for my independence, it is my independence.  And this one isn't measuring up.

Cooling down.

It's one of the those flip remarks that phone support people make when they are in difficult situations that they can't resolve.  But it has ticked me off.  That chair cost me a lot of money.  If what I am learning is true, my chair is not going to make it as a performance chair.  And that is very worrying.  It's essentially an expensive, decorative lemon.  And I'd like a little help with fixing that, I'd like to contribute to the design of the next model (so no one else has to go through with this), and, yes, I'd like a chair that can withstand the rigors of performance.

Tomorrow, I will meet with my provider.  We will order the replacement parts.  There will be an as of yet undetermined wait while Tilite makes the parts.

Don't Leave Me This Way

No. Don't leave me this way.  I can't survive....  (Thelma Houston.)

I've been thinking today about Schein und-Sein- appearance and reality.  I'm using the German words because of the play on English.  Schein is pronounced "shine."  And today, I've been wondering about the absence of shine.  What happens when the shine disappears.  I've had  a very hard time in the past two months.  The least of it is the almost 30,000 air miles -- there's the happenings of the places I've been.  the stress of family relationships.  The responsibilities I have in my own life -- the people I've disappointed, let down.  The new friends I want to engage more deeply; old friends I haven't been as available to.  There's the performances I've given -- some of which were incredible and moments of which I sincerely wish had never happened.  There's the stress of the front that we maintain to colleagues, family, and friends.  Somehow, we at, sleep, shower, pay the bills, fill the car, arrive for appointments, warm up for rehearsals, smile at our partners....

Then, finally, there's the moment when the shine slips away.  Just when you think that you might get away with it; that you might actually be invulnerable, untouchable, OK....

When the shine, the glossiness, the beauty and untouchability slip away, you have to face truth.  My wheelchair is falling apart.  Yes, I'm almost grieving for it.  When my chair is OK, I can do anything.  Go anywhere.  Be anything.  My body needs work or perhaps it needs not to work.  (Smile.)   When the gloss comes off, you can only be yourself.

Post here contains a picture of me on the floor (out of my chair) -- arms behind me outstretched, body curled over my bent leg and my other leg extended to the side.

I find I am scared to be without my shine.  (Whew!  Said that one online!)

I like who I am when I am dancing, performing, moving, moving.  There is some part of all that, some person there who is a real me.  But there's also a me off stage, a me who exists when not travelling to rehearsal, studio, or class.  That me is much more vulnerable, subject to hurt from my body and from the people around me.  Subject to the stresses and pinches of everyday life.

When I am grounded by my body, I find that I have to take time to be re-grounded -- in the other sense, the sense of finding my centre, the reality of my life.  Learning the lessons of the body is always harder than it should be; I've been writing about this for years now.  And still, when the body crash comes, I am surprised.

Wheelchair Repair

Chair hacking.  Chair repair.

Seems like there should be a difference between the two.  But right now, my experience of simple repair seems more like mine of unbridled hacking.  In the past year, I have successfully cracked 2 carbon fiber Jay active backrests, rendering them completely unusable.  2!!!  I have to wonder whether it's the dancing, some flaw in the chair, in the setup of the chair, or in the backrests themselves.  I have begun talking to the manufacturer -- no joy so far.  (Come on, Tilite!)  I will talk to my provider again tomorrow (probably no joy there, either -- though they did replace the first one for free).  Grrr.  Will keep you updated.

Wheelchair maintenance is awful in our household.  I always start the project and then need Wizard's help. This he usually gives begrudgingly.  There's always a complaint about why I am doing it wrong, why my tools are insufficient, and why he shouldn't be involved.  I always get angry; then, I end up crying (sorry, can't be a tough woman all the time); I don't need him to be anything other than the brawn to my (usually correct, but sometimes overly optimistic) brain.  I don't need the commentary and the advice; I just need muscles.  He always says we should have a professional look at it, but professionals don't come out on Sunday afternoon or at 9pm on a weekday.  And then when you take a chair in, they almost always need an appointment or they don't have the right part or ....  So, we're stuck with maintenance as a semi-joint afterhours/overtime project.

This time, though, it was different.  There were the usually hare-brained schemes to make it work.  We cobbled together parts from remainders of another chair.  Wizard wanted to hide my tools in a place where I couldn't find them -- would prevent me from using the wrong tool. But somehow or other, we agreed we didn't get all twisted up.  We agreed we could get more tools -- something with power!  (Well, of course!  Why didn't I think of that??)  A vise would be in order.  And a workbench!  And suddenly, the chair was fixed enough to go to rehearsal.

There's still a problem with some stripped bolts and some shear/loading, but these aren't Sunday night things  That's for me to work out later.  I reckon this fix will last another six or so months (by which point it will be 3 backrests!)

I wonder if there is a point at which my chair just isn't designed to do what I'm doing with it.  Having an upholstered back would fix the problem, but the support is amazing.  Plus, the efficiency of the energy transfer in a hard back makes everything so much less work; I'm not sure I want to change that.  The work I do in my dance is different from the stuff anticipated by Invacare's Twirl (sigh!) dance chair.  I don't like the design of that at all; wheelchair dance sport is a different project from integrated dance.  One chair doesn't fit all activities, and that makes being a disabled athlete, mover of any kind extraordinarily expensive.

But I so loves me a new shiny wheelchair....  (Hey, Tilite!)

Accessible Gynecology

This ought not to be radical, but it is...

The Raymond Naftali Center

Is pleased to welcome to our staff

Carol A. Livoti, M.D., F.A.C.O.G

Dr. Livoti will be providing comprehensive gynecological services in a fully accessible setting

To make an appointment, call Aracely at 646-230-9292

Medicare, Medicaid and most managed Medicaid plans accepted

Location: 508 West 26^th Street (between 10^th and 11^th Avenues), 10^th Floor, Manhattan

Disability, Gender, Race and Class: Another Vignette

An interracial family (black man/white woman) boarded the train -- with four children -- at Newark and disembarqued at Baltimore.  The conductor seemed very excited to be on a train with this man to such an extent that he actually stopped by my seating area and talked about how proud he was --  the man was a Yankees pitcher, and he was going to be on this conductor's train.

Things went wrong when it was discovered that the kids were noisier than the rest of the passengers felt was appropriate.  (Note: I have nothing to say about the actual volume of the children's play; my only point is that the children's behaviour was felt to be outside the bounds of behaviour best suited to the class of cabin.)  People began to complain to the train staff and, in particular, the conductor.  Various members of the staff came in and, over the parents' own protestations, proceeded to tell the children to be quieter and to use their inside voices.  I could see the conductor begin to get frazzled. He had a lot of respect for the pitcher and did not feel comfortable intervening.  Despite the efforts of the staff, however, the children continued to be noisier than a certain contingent of the passengers would have wished. The tension rose.

When the pitcher and his family left the train, the conductor explained to the other passengers that he's a Yankees pitcher.  One of the (white) women  who had complained so vociferously about the children responded, with extra syrup in her voice, "Oh. That makes sense. Because this *is* first class...." There's a pause.   it's quite clear to me that she is not using her “inside voice.” But she continues–to the conductor– as if he would know,"Are all those kids hers?"

The conductor seems to feel that he has to account for his hero and that he has to explain him to the rest of the passengers.  He also does not feel comfortable approaching the man.  The man is a famous pitcher; who is the conductor to step in?  I also wonder if it seems to the conductor that the man's social cachet as a baseball player actually does give him a license to have a family whose standards of behavior seemed not to meet the common standards of behavior in a public place.  He seems to rely on the ideas that we both expect celebrities to be different and allow them to be different.

The woman whose response I have quoted disgusts me.  What does it mean for the cabin to be first class.  Black people don't take first class transit?  Only black people who are sports personalities take first class transit -- and they are revealed as more money than class because they don't know or aren't able to maintain the social code expected of people who pay a certain amount of money for a ticket?  Beats me. And then, there's the comment about the children.  What?  No white woman would want to have that many children with a black man?  Could have that many children?  Or is it that she was surprised to see that a white woman could have children of those different colours?  I can guess, but I honestly do not understand.  And why did she think it was appropriate to speak to the conductor in that way?  What was he supposed to say?  "Yes, ma'am?  I agree ma'am?  I don't know, ma'am?"

The pitcher wasn't the only black person in the cabin.  I was also there; sitting, acting out noisily only in my mind.  I had been placed in the accessible seating area.  Unlike the pitcher, who I assume, paid for his ticket and was there on the usual terms, I had sneaked in on the pity card (or it might have been the cute card, I suppose).  I was completely invisible to the woman.  If anything, I deserved to be there less than the pitcher.  But I had kept my mouth shut and my head down.  If the woman thought that being in first class was a way to escape a multi-racial world, she was wrong.

In retrospect, I wonder if my silence (which was actually born of guilt and a desire to escape notice) made me so unnoticeable because her stereotypes of race are gender inflected.  If I had been noisy or had attracted attention in any way, what would she have seen?  The attractive male pitcher had partnered and built a family with an attractive white woman.  That's not unheard of.  And, indeed, not unusual for sports celebrities (that's a whole separate conversation).  But that doesn't make it any less controversial.  Did she see in this man the usual stereotypes of hypersexuality -- "all those children?"  Did she think that he had overstepped his place?  Were we back in the fifties?  Why was I invisible to her.  Was that a consequence of my behaviour?  My gender?  Or my disability?  Or some weird connexion of all three?  What if she had known about my own relationship status?  Would it have changed her opinion of the pitcher's family if she had seen me in my own family situation?  With my friends?

It's taken me a long time to sort through a lot of this.  Mostly, I don't know what to make of any of it.  I do know that taking a train should be a neutral kind of thing.  That we should be able to travel from Newark to Baltimore without experiencing this kind of behaviour.  I am grateful for my invisibility, but I find myself also kind of ashamed by it.  I was in a position to speak up, and I didn't.  I could have intervened against the griping about the children; I could also have spoken up against the woman.  I could have made myself visible in other words.  I might not have changed the outcome of the situation, but I might have made it more complicated.  And that complexity might have gone some way to dismantling the authority and privilege of the white woman.