Three visually impaired people walk into an ice cream parlor…

Tonight the person behind the counter read the flavors off to an 8-year-old girl and a man with a white cane. They didn't know each other, but both had strabismus (eyes that turn out from each other). The man bought the girl a milkshake and then a cup of ice cream for himself. I sat with him, introduced myself and told him I had low vision too but don't use a cane. He explained that in his home country of Argentina, people who are completely blind use white canes and people who are visually impaired but have some vision use green canes so that others know to ask, "How much can you see?" Argentina passed their Ley del Bastón Verde ("Green Cane Law") in 2002. Why not do the same in the US? It would help visibilize we the in-between, las personas con baja visión, or people with low vision.

Blind Film #10: They Live

The promise of glasses, as a way to see what's right in front of our faces, has never been more clear than Roddy Piper's revelation in the 1988 cult classic, They Live:

Blind Book #1: Girl in the Dark

Anna Lyndsey isn't blind, but she lives in the dark because of her acute photosensitive seborrhoeic dermatitis, an illness that makes all contact with light feel like a blowtorch on her skin. While most blind folks can walk out into the light, they just can't see much, Lyndsey could see were she able to exist in the light. Have a listen to this chapter, "Metaphor", in which she reviews a handful of audiobooks whose protagonists have something in common with her. She also reviews a couple of new age healers and offers a game:

Games to Play in the Dark 5: Scribe 

This is a game to play on your own, when talking books have palled, when you have no visitors in prospect, when boredom eats your brain. 

You will need a large bound notebook and a pencil. A bound notebook so that your pages are disciplined and do not become entangled. A pencil, because a pen could run out and in the dark you will not be able to tell. 

Pick up your pencil and open your notebook. 

Place the thumb of your non-writing hand on the page beneath the start of the first line. 

Your thumb will act as a marker, so that there will be space between each line and the next. 

Write. 

Write what? 

Write what you know. Isn't that what they say? What you know is the darkness. 

And as you begin to form words on the page, the darkness around you moves. It starts to gather, to circle, to form a vortex round the end of your pencil, and then — down the pencil's black centre it pours. 

It is unstoppable. It flows faster and faster, funneling down that slim conductive wand, erupting on to the page, staining its purity with straggling struggling words. 

And in your mind, a light goes on.

—Anna Lyndsey, Girl in the Dark

Listen (or read) here.

Cones Cones Cones

First snippet of CONES debuts in Philadelphia April 6+7 as an opener to the group Binge Culture from New Zealand. Here is the event listing on the Medium Theatre's website, and here's where you can RSVP.

And now a question about this photo:

What do you see when you look at it? Which of the three images looks like the "real" one?

I myself really only see differences in the background tiles. The foregrounds look more or less the same to me. Leave a comment below and tell me what you see.

Blind Film #9: Genghis Blues

Paul Pena's story is a good one. With a background playing Portuguese music, American blues and rock, he became obsessed with Tuvan throat singing back when few westerners had ever heard of it. My pick for most moving scene from this film is when Pena uses a Braille reader on a page of Tuvan text, then on a Tuvan-Russian dictionary before he can translate the Russian translation into English, I identify with the obsessive quality that drives someone with low vision to take great pains (and yes, it is a little bit painful) to do something like that.

R.I.P. Paul Pena and Kongar-Ol Ondar. Thanks for bringing so many of the planet's great musicians together and for sharing your brilliant artistic visions with the world.

Rods & Canes

It's confirmed: the solo piece called CONES will debut in June, and we'll show a piece of that piece April 6+7 at the Rotunda in West Philly. More about that soon.

Much of this blog has been dramaturgy for this performance, and as we segue into more writing and rehearsing for CONES, these blog posts will be less frequent.

I'm really psyched to have some professional eyeball people on board. One of them is a fellow theatre artist who works with people who are losing their vision. The other day we met and talked about how there isn't much of "a blind community"—unlike deaf folks who have their own language and culture, blind and low vision folks don't necessarily hang out together. Why would we? The blind leading the blind might not be the best way to cross the street, and until self-driving cars hit the market, we're not apt to drive each other to Home Depot to stock up on power tools.

She also talked about how the bulk of the people that she trains to use white canes are not "fully blind" but have some vision. Popular perception of a person using a cane is that they are completely blind, but more common are folks just using the cane to tell others, "I can't see so well." The misconception of cane-wielders being completely in the dark vs. non-cane users being fully sighted, essentially invisibilizes the legally blind majority: folks who use canes and can see, as well as folks who don't use canes even though they sometimes can't see.

CONES and this blog are the beginnings of that conversation about this majority, a unconnected populace of real-life Mr. Magoos, searching for each other, not in the dark, but in the fog. That's what I'm talking about.

What I See in the Dark

Today we went with our retinal photographer to take turns floating in a sensory isolation tank.

I've been looking forward to this for years and am so psyched to have made friends with some folks who have one in their house. When it was my turn, I showered and then opened the closet door in the bathroom that reveals the hatch to the tank, looking like a cross between the Apollo Space Capsule they had the science museum when I was a kid and the doorway to Narnia. Inside is like a roomy, waterlogged coffin: tall enough to sit up in and long/wide enough to lie down in without touching any sides. The air and water are heated to body temp with enough salinity to support a supine person.

As I shut the hatch, lay down and turned out the light, my first concern was not touching sides. Then I realized I was holding my head up, so I let it go, further and further back, much further than I thought I could go until my trapezius could really relax. As I began to lose sensory perception of the difference between the air above and saltwater below, internal sensations crept in: the rhythm of breath and heartbeat, an itch on my face, my belly, in my ear, and most prominently, all the light I see all the time in my eyes.

The tank is totally dark, so dark it doesn't matter if eyes are open or closed. But for me it looks like the Milky Way: a haze of shimmering stars everywhere I look. It's so bright that at first I wondered if I'd left the light on, but those lights are always there, even in the background when my eyes are open. This is my biggest impediment to seeing, even more than myopia or astigmatism.

This first float was a project of noticing: What do I see when there's nothing to see? A future float might be the project of seeing no stars, only dark.

The Proof is in the Reader

This just happened. Again.
Same person spotted typos
in a mass email I sent out.
Same person laughed about it.
Again. Utterly embarrassing.
When will I learn? So confident
that I'm seeing what others see
when we look at the same thing,
yet every day I sit down here
to write about how I do not.

Oh, and this keeps happening too
too. No matter how in I am on the
the secret, I just can't stop myself.

The Evolution of Devolution

Careers Ended, Some Un-Begun

Tonight someone asked me if I wanted to participate in a reading of a play. I didn't tell him that I'd need a script in very large type, that I might not be able to read it at all, or that I once didn't return a call from a casting director who'd wanted me to come in and read a part in an audition.

I used to make and sell woodblock prints and was often hired to make puppets for plays. As my vision waned, it became more difficult to do the detailed work that these jobs required. Eventually I could no longer do it at all. I stopped making prints and puppets in 2010.

When I was a college radio DJ, I applied for a third shift public radio job in Boston. The interview was great, but after the board operator showed my AP feed, PSA cards and atomic clock, none of which I could read, I didn't go back for my studio test. I stopped DJing soon after.

I love to cook. Years ago I briefly worked prepping salads in a restaurant on Chicago's North Side. One day the head chef yelled at me for not making one the way she wanted. I hadn't seen what she was talking about. I gave notice the following week.

When I was very young, I worked at two moviehouses, starting out as a corn-popper and ticket-ripper, and then got promoted to manager-operator. The "operator" part means knowing how to run and maintain the film projector, which I couldn't focus. I left after the owner told my coworkers, "What can he do? He's blind."

As a kid, I loved math. In 4th and 5th grade our math teachers gave us these quizzes that were printed so faintly that I couldn't read them. Instead of taking these tests, I'd just sit at my desk and cry. By high school my math skills had dwindled to the point where I was getting C's and D's.

The takeaway: My many possible careers as stage actor, visual artist, NPR reporter, DJ, chef, cinematographer and mathematician may not have panned out, but I sure do have a lot of skills under my belt. Got a job for me? So long as I can do it and it's discrimination-free, I'll consider it. You know how to reach me.

Can you spot the the mistake here?

When I was kid, one of my favorite books was Optricks by Melinda Wentzell and D.K. Holland. It was full of bold, immersive, classic optical illusions, just about all of which you can now find online. Among these was the one that you see in the title of this post—did you spot the the mistake? That's it: "the" appears twice consecutively, but many people don't notice because the repeat word is on either side of a line break. It's also an article, a tiny, auxiliary part of speech that, in print, the brain tends to gloss over more than, say, a flamboyantly flourished adverb.

Who Was That?

This keeps happening:

I'm in a public place, someone comes up and says hi to me, we converse, and then say goodbye. And the whole time, I have no idea who that person is.

It happened today. She had sunglasses, a sense of humor, spiritual insights, and a nice hug. Sounds like I'm leaving a "missed connections" post on craigslist, only this person knew who I was and assumed that I also knew who she was.

And the reverse happens too: I'm in a public place, someone comes up and says hi to me and then tells me who they are, just incase I can't figure it out. And most of the time I say, "I know who you are!" because there's a lot of shame around not recognizing someone familiar, even if it's for a retinal reason.

I've been logging these vision-related situations here online, and also doodle journaling in a notebook. This entry seems apropos:

The arrow is pointing to a pair of dark glasses under the caption, "hiding dark glasses behind back."

Blind Film Special: Tommy Edison

The reel Tommy Edison. Who needs lightbulbs? Let this guy guide you through the dark:


Check out his YouTube channel, and his other YouTube channel.

Tetrachromatics 101: A Rainbow of Misinformation

Capitalizing on the web's weird dress fetish the other day, an inaccurate Linkedin article about tetrachromacy (having 4 types of retinal cone cells instead of the usual 3) wormed its way off the internet and into 3 million people's heads. The article offered a bar of 39 web-safe colors (pictured above) and told readers that the number of colors they saw indicated the makeup of their cone cells. This article was so misleading, I refrain from even linking to it, but I will point you to this video that gives a fun 5-minute crash-course in cone science. I've also posted some reputable sources at the bottom of this post.

How (aside from spelling and grammatical errors) was said Linkedin article inaccurate? Let me count the ways:

1. The title statement, "25% of the people [sic] have a 4th cone"is false. Only the half of us with two X chromosomes (primarily women) are eligible to have four types of cone cells (RGB+1), and of these a possible 12% are tetrachromats, meaning that only 6% of "the people" (half of 12%) can have a 4th cone. Of these 6%, very few are functioning tetrachromats: that "+1" cone is akin to the low-functioning mutant cone in X-linked colorblindness (see #3 below).
2. An online rainbow will NOT tell you if you have a 4th cone. Because color monitors are trichromatic (RGB) like the cones in our eyes, they do not produce colors that trichromats cannot see.
3. The statement, "You are dichromats, like dogs," is not true for all people who have trouble differentiating color. In common X-linked color blindness, a third cone is present instead of the red or green cone, it's just low-functioning. Many color-impaired people have other retinal disorders, such as cone dystrophy or macular degeneration, which can limit perception of color. They are not dichromts.
4. Saying that colorblind people, "are likely to wear black, beige and blue," is baloney. Colorblind people often ask color-seeing friends to help them pick out and label clothes and advise them as to what matches with what. Or they just go through life wearing whatever.
5. Also false: "25% of the population is dichromat" and, "50% of the population is trichromat." Almost everyone (at least 94%) is trichromatic.
6. Saying that tetrachromats are "irritated by yellow" and therefore own no yellow clothes is a sham Just as with the "black, beige and blue" statement from #4, the author is picking colors that tend to be popular or unpopular and misleading readers into thinking that they are retinal mutants.
7. Finally, who in the world puts a winky-face with its tongue hanging out in the title of their article and expects it to be taken seriously? 'Nuff said.

Further reading:

• Good popular science article on the subject: Greenwood, Veronique. "The Humans with the Super Human Vision." Discover. August, 2012.
• A little more academic: Katta, Samata. "Ask a Neuroscientist: Human Tetrachromacy." Neuroblog. Stanford University. December, 2013.
• Again, this short video from Blue Man Group gives a quick introduction to how rods and cones work.
• And this podcast piece about tetrachromacy is as excellent as it is entertaining:

Amazing Grace is Overrated

"Mike May is a skydiving, downhill skiing, daredevil of a man who just so happens to be blind. And then one day, he is faced with his biggest challenge."

Fascinating piece from the fantastic podcast, Snap Judgment.