Buy him some peanuts and Crackerjack

Here’s one last post I prepared before taking off for my residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Baseball season is finally here, and when I asked my friend Bob Ringwald to write a guest post about his love for the game, he willingly agreed.My brother Doug introduced me to Bob Ringwald years ago — they’re both jazz musicians, and they play together from time to time. Bob is blind, and it sounds like he’s looking forward to baseball season as much as – maybe even more than? – I am!

Take me out to the ballgame

by Bob Ringwald

The New York Giants moved to San Francisco In 1958, and that’s when I became a Giants fan. I was at a game at Candlestick park on a day when Willie Mays hit four home runs! But in the 60s and 70s, after Willie Mays left the Giants, I was working 6 and 7-nights a week as a musician. I had no time to follow baseball.

We moved to Los Angeles in 1979. One night I happened to decide to listen to a Giants – Dodgers game on the radio, and that was it: Vince Scully, the amazing Dodger play-by-play announcer, won me over. He is the best I have ever heard, and believe me, I’ve heard a lot of baseball announcers. I became a dyed-in-the wool Dodger fan.

We moved back to Northern California some 18 years ago, but I’m still a Dodger fan. I bleed Dodger Blue. Dodgers games are not heard this far north in Sacramento, but I can listen to the games using my computer on MLB dot com.

That’s Bob–Molly’s dad–announcing the lineups (reading from a Braille lineup card) at Dodger Stadium.

When we were still living in Tinsel Town, the Dodgers had a promotion once where you wrote in which baseball job you’d like to do: hang with the grounds crew, drag the base path during the 7th inning, sit with the sports writers and write your own story, hang out with the umpires, that sort of thing. I wrote a letter saying that I wanted to be the Public Address announcer. I knew someone in the P.R. department, so I handed the letter to him. That way it wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of letters I knew might come in.

On July 27, 1991 I used my Braille skills to announce the lineup for a Los Angeles Dodgers – Montreal Expos game. Guess I passed the audition: they invited me to announce the players as they came up to bat in the bottom of the 3rd inning, too, and when I put a little extra English on my announcement of Darrell Strawberry’s name, the 50,000 people in the stands went crazy. What a sense of power!

Later I was invited to go out onto the field at Dodger Stadium to see what the pitcher’s mound, bases, base path and home plate really felt like. I jumped up against the center field wall like a big league outfielder. I picked up the phone they answer in the bullpen when managers call from the dugout. I sat in the Dodger dugout alongside the famous drinking fountain that angry players have been known to destroy with their bats, and, as if that wasn’t enough, I also had the honor to sit in Vince Scully’s chair in the press box. My tour that day ended in the Dodger exercise room. Legendary Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda was on the treadmill, and we had a very interesting chat.

In the early 80s, my daughter, actress and author Molly Ringwald, sang the National Anthem at several Dodger games. Fernando Valenzuela gave her a signed baseball. Another time she was given a baseball signed by all of the 1981 World Series Championship Dodgers. I proudly display those autographed baseballs in my office.

From time to time people ask me, “If you can’t see the action, why would you want to go to the game when you could just as easily be at home listening to it on the radio?” I sometimes answer by saying “Why would you want to go to the game when you can see the action better, close up, at home on TV?” I do take a portable radio to the game to hear the play by play. But there is something more. There is the electricity of the crowd, the sound of the ball hitting the bat and mitt, the P.A. announcer, the venders selling programs, ice-cream, peanuts and other assorted goodies. And of course at Dodger Stadium there are the famous Dodger Dogs. Dodger Dogs are just regular Farmer John hot dogs. But, once you walk through the turn styles of the ball park, they become a gourmet repast.

Care to guess where I’ll be later today? Yes . . . . we’re traveling 400 miles south from Sacramento to Los Angeles to attend the Dodgers vs. Giants opening day game at Dodger Stadium. Care to take a guess which team I’ll be rooting for???

You can check out more photos of Bob’s baseball days on his web site. Play ball!

On the air again, and on the road again, too

Sound the trumpets! Here’s something I never dreamed would happen to me: I’ve been awarded a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts! Mike, Whitney and I take off today for a couple days vacation in Canada, and on Sunday morning Mike will rent a car and drive Whitney and me from Montreal to Johnson, Vermont. Thanks to fellow writer Jeff Flodin, who encouraged me to apply for this fellowship, I’ll be spending the entire month of April with 50 other poets, visual artists and writers at the Vermont Studio Center, where I hope to make some progress on a manuscript I’ve been working on.

That manuscript is about all I’ve learned leading memoir-writing classes for senior citizens here in Chicago, and I got the perfect sendoff yesterday afternoon: Chicago Public Radio aired a piece on All Things Considered featuring the writers in my Wednesday class. WBEZ has been doing a special series on what was going on in people’s lives the year they turned 25: scientific studies have shown that the frontal cortex area—which governs judgment, decision-making and impulse control—doesn’t fully mature until around age 25, which can make that year a transitional one for many people. After hearing a few Chicago celebrities interviewed on WBEZ about their 25th year, I assigned “Being 25” as a topic for my own celebrities, the writers in my classes. From the WBEZ web site:

In this installment of the Year25 series, WBEZ Producer/Reporter Lauren Chooljian visits a memoir writing class for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Their assignment? To write 500 words about where they were at 25.

Lauren stopped by to hear their essays and talk to the students about their stories. She came to find out their teacher, writer Beth Finke, also had quite a story to tell about her 25th year. It was not only the year she was married, but it was the last year she could see. Finke has been completely blind since she was 26 years old.

Wedding day, July 28, 1984, photo by Rick Amodt

If you missed hearing the piece on the radio yesterday, never fear: you can still hear it online. Mike will fly home from Burlington this Sunday after dropping Whitney and me off in Vermont, and he has generously offered to keep up the Safe & Sound blog while I’m away. You’re in good hands.

All for now, folks: we gotta plane to catch!

Our beloved worlds

Did you catch John Stewart interviewing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the Daily Show? Hear her interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition? Latino USA? Her memoir was published a few weeks ago, and I think the only day she’s had away from the book tour since then was Monday, January 21: that’s the morning she swore Vice President Biden in for his second term.

The reviews I’ve read of My Beloved World mention young Sonia growing up in a tiny Bronx apartment with her Puerto Rico-born parents, her father’s early death, her mother’s hard work, her beloved grandmother, and her appreciation for affirmative action. One reason she gave for writing the memoir was that so many people identify with different pieces of her story. She thought perhaps writing about her path to the Supreme Court might give them hope.

But, alas, very little of her story that I identify with most was mentioned during her book tour. You may not know this, but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was eight. I was diagnosed with Type 1 at age seven. With all the press coverage she’s had the past couple of weeks, the only thing I found that dealt with ways Sotomayor’s early diabetes diagnosis may have influenced some of her life decisions was in an article in the Charlotte Observer. The paper revealed that the chronic disease nearly killed her, and that one of the reasons Sotomayor never had children was that she was afraid she wouldn’t be around to raise them. I know what she means. Here’s an excerpt about my high school years From my own memoir, Long Time, No See:

In 1972, at the beginning of freshman year, I was admitted to the hospital twice, both times via the emergency room, both times close to coma. In the first episode, I could still talk when we arrived there, but the second time, Flo found me in a heap on the basement floor and dragged me, a hundred pounds of dead weight, up the stairs and out the back door and into the car. During that second hospitalization, my doctor, exercising his version of bedside manner, declared that I wouldn’t live past age thirty.

I was 14 years old when that happened, and my doctor then couldn’t have known about the diabetic advances around the corner. Fast-acting insulin, diabetic educators and home blood monitoring methods came along too late to save my eyesight, but those advances, along with my husband Mike’s willingness to learn about the disease and motivate me to stay well, have kept me happy and healthy far longer than my Nostradamus pediatrician and I could have expected.

The Charlotte Observer article reported that monitoring her health has become second nature to Sotomayor now, and that she gives herself insulin injections five or six times a day. Me, too! Justice Sotomayor told the reporter that she no longer worries she will die young. “When I reached 50, I was able to let go of that demon,” she said. “But not without recognizing its benefits. It drove me in a way that perhaps nothing else might have to accomplish as much as I could as early as possible.” I know what she means. Justice Sotomayor’s memoir ends when she is named to the Supreme Court; mine ends when we move to Chicago. And hey, with more advances in diabetes around the corner, watch out, world. Sonia and I are just getting started.

A triathlete in more ways than one

Remember my last post, the one where I wrote about all the young people in my 2010 Seeing Eye class using talking iPhones? Eliza Cooper was one of those young Seeing Eye classmates, and the very day I published that post last week she was featured in a story on Marketplace from American Public Media. The story was all about, guess what? Smartphones for blind users.

The story opened with reporter Meg Kramer explaining the many ways blind users find standard smartphones so helpful. “A phone’s camera can identify money and read text, and GPS navigation tells blind users where they are and what’s nearby,” she said. “Screen readers are second nature for someone like Eliza Cooper, Who has been using the technology since elementary school.” The reporter goes to expert Eliza for details about mobile accessibility, and then listeners follow along to observe how Eliza uses her iPhone as she packs for a trip with her Seeing Eye dog Harris.

This guy look familiar? He’s my retired dog Harper’s bro!

I liked Eliza Cooper from the minute we met at the Seeing Eye. She’s a talented drummer, an we had a ball jamming together at weekend parties during class. When we discovered her dog Harris is Harper’s brother, we knew it was destiny. We had to continue working together after graduation.

Eliza is a social media consultant, and I hired her for a few months back in 2011 to learn new ways to use my Twitter feed and my Facebook fan page. She’s come a long way, baby, since then. She picked up three new consulting clients last year and completed a number of short-term projects in social media and web consulting in 2012 as well. And get this–after completing her first two triathlons (you read that right, two triathalons) last summer, she began blogging for the Huffington Post about her experiences as a blind triathlete. Eliza also appeared in a profile in Triathlete Magazine last year and was featured as a triathlete in an ad for Volkswagen, too.

And now, she’s started 2013 with a bang, too. Her Marketplace story is called “Building a Better Smart Phone for Blind Users” and you can still hear it online. It aired in time for the annual Consumer Electronics show this past week and was heard on public radio stations nationwide. Go to Eliza’s blog to find out more about the Marketplace interview and learn more about her interest in social media strategy and management. Go, Eliza, go!

Wanna win an Oscar? Play a character with a disability

I turned the radio on just in time last Friday to hear Fresh Air’s movie reviewer David Edelstein say The Sessions ( a new semi-fictional movie about the life of a writer paralyzed below the neck from childhood polio) was better than some of the other “disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait” pictures he’d seen.

Cynical? Maybe. His statement does have merit, though. Take Al Pacino. He never won an Oscar for any of The Godfather movies, but when he portrayed a blind man doing the tango in Scent of a Woman? Woo-hah! Best actor.

Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar for Rainman, Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot, John Voight for Coming Home. Marlee Matlin won best actress for Children of a Lesser God, and plenty of actors and actresses have been nominated, too: Russell Crowe was nominated for best Actor in A Beautiful Mind, Salma Hayek was nominated for best actress in Frieda, Mary McDonnell was nominated for best actress in Passion Fish and Judi Dench for best supporting actress in Iris. Disability-focused movies are nothing new. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has enough of them in their collection to spend the entire month of October exploring the ways we have been portrayed in film. From the TCM web site:

The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film features more than 20 films ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s. Each night’s collection will explore particular aspects, themes, or types of disability, such as blindness, deafness and psychiatric or intellectual disabilities. In addition, one evening of programming will focus on newly disabled veterans returning home from war.

Lawrence Carter-Long has been joining TCM host Ben Mankiewicz at 7 pm central time every Tuesday in October to discuss the films they’re showing, which include:

• An Affair to Remember (1957) Deborah Kerr’s romantic rendezvous with Cary Grant is nearly derailed by a paralyzing accident.
• A Patch of Blue (1965), Elizabeth Hartman as a blind white girl who falls in love with a black man played by Sidney Poitier.
• Butterflies Are Free (1972, Edward Albert as a blind man attempting to break free from his over-protective mother.
• Johnny Belinda (1948) Jane Wyman as a “deaf-mute” forced to defy expectations
• The Miracle Worker (1962) Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and Patty Duke as Helen Keller
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Jack Nicholson as a patient in a mental institution and Louise Fletcher as the infamous Nurse Ratched
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) post-War drama starring Fredric March, Myrna Loy and real-life disabled veteran Harold Russell
• Charley (1968), Cliff Robertson as a man with an intellectual disability who questions the limits of science after being turned into a genius.

These movies reflect their times — the TCM retrospective only goes up to the 1980s, before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. I’m hoping that as those of us with disabilities become more of the fabric of everyday society, movie-goers will be subjected to fewer disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait-pictures and see more movies where we’re just part of the scene. So far, though, I can only come up with a couple examples of quality films featuring characters with disabilities in roles that are more in the background: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), where main character Charles reveals a crisis of confidence to his brother David, who is deaf; and Contact (1997) where Kent Clark, A SETI scientist, is blind and helps Jodie Foster with her research. Know any other memorable movies with characters who have disabilities? Please leave a comment here to let me know. I am, ahem, all ears.

Catching up

Some updates on the people you read about this past summer here at the Safe & Sound blog:

• Let’s start with my husband Mike’s guest post about White Sox pitcher Chris Sale. Last night Mike and I took the El down and got cheap tickets at the last minute to see Sale face Detroit’s Cy Young winning Justin Verlander. Alas. A rain delay. We were left to enjoy our beers and polish sausage while watching the Bears game on the JumboTron at White Sox Park instead. In the end, the game was postponed altogether. We still have Love for Sale, though.
• A cousin in Ohio read the post I wrote about my brother Doug bringing his trombone along on a visit to Chicago and sitting in with some jazz bands here. He forwarded the post to his son and daughter-in-law in Chicago, and Jason and Keely surprised us at one of Doug’s gigs. Friends from the neighborhood came, too, and I had great fun showing off my big brother.
• When Chicago trombonist Tim Coffman taught at that Jazz Camp for adults that I attended in July, I had no idea he knew my brother Doug. The post I wrote about jazz camp described the difficult time I had keeping up with the other jazz campers, and Tim’s reaction when he ran into me at one of Doug’s gigs confirms I was not exaggerating. “You’re Doug Finke’s sister?”
• If you read Sandra Murillo’s guest post about her friend who competed in the 2012 London Paralympics, well, Anjali Forber-Pratt’s races did not go as well as she’d hoped. “I proudly wore my Team USA jerseys,” she said when asked about returning home without a medal. “And I had the experience of a lifetime racing in front of sold out crowds of 80,000 in the stadium.”
• After I mentioned in a post here that Molly Ringwald’s father is blind, her proud dad (and fantastic jazz pianist) Bob Ringwald sent me a link to another Interview she had regarding her new book. Molly is currently on a 15-day book tour, and my brother Doug may be playing with her dad in San Francisco later this month.
• After a guest post by Sue Martin was published here, another guest post she wrote was published on the blog of the Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Health Information during National Suicide Prevention Week.
• If you were intrigued by my post about the essay I recorded for Race: Out Loud, they’ve archived the content created for the series. You can hear all of it now by linking to the WBEZ web site.
• I had such fun with the six-year-old great niece I blogged about in July that we invited her back. On her second visit, “Baby Flo” went on a field trip to the Old Town Aquarium store with her Great Uncle Mike. And I mean that word “Great” in every sense of the word.
• And lastly, speaking of great, a blog reader forwarded my post about chef Laura Martinez to an executive chef at a downtown Chicago restaurant. The chef had Laura in for an interview right away. From all accounts, her interview went well — she especially nailed it when asked how she handles challenges in the kitchen. The executive chef is looking to find a spot for Laura on his staff, and in the meantime, she is teaching a cooking class!

I’ll leave you here with the information about Chef Laura Martinez’s class. Sure wish I were 21 again so I could sign up. I could stand to learn from her knife skills!

Chef Laura Martinez is still hoping for a full-time gig. In the meantime, she’ll teach a cooking class for young adults.

The Chicago Lighthouse Vision Rehabilitation Center proudly presents cooking classes with
Chef Laura Martinez
Mondays, 5:00pm-7:00pm, September 24 – December 12
222 Waukegan Road, Glenview, IL 60025
Ages 13-21

Learn to cook: Chinese fried rice; pizza; brioche; couscous; “not your boxed” macaroni and cheese; Grandma’s recipes, and student requests.
Explore: the history and culture of the food of the week; menu planning; seasonal fruits and vegetables and budgetary factors.
Laura Martinez is a graduate of the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. She is totally blind, and excels in knife skills and in her use of herbs and spices, through her senses of touch and smell. Her finished product is as accomplished as any young chef, although Laura had the prestigious honor of being a chef at one of Chicago’s highest rated restaurants, Charlie Trotters.
To register contact:
Pam Stern, Manager of Youth/Senior Programs
847.510.2054 or pam.stern@chicagolighthouse.org

Something even non-believers can believe in

Groovy picture of my sisters and me in front of Cheryl’s lime green 1967 Mustang.

After publishing that post about 1968 last week, I have to make a confession: I was a square in the 1960s. While the hippies and peaceniks of that generation were worshipping Jim Morrison and grooving to Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, I was busy at the piano figuring out the arpeggio in Herb Alpert’s hit “This Guy’s in Love with You.”

By then I’d already been mesmerized by the woman in the whipped cream dress on the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album cover. Now Herb was setting down his trumpet for a tune, and in 1968 he was singing those lyrics to me, an awkward pre-teen in the Chicago suburbs. And so, along with so many other pop music fans from that generation, I was sad to hear that Hal David, the man who wrote the lyrics to that song and oh so many others, had died last week.

On Friday, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air re-broadcast a 1997 interview with Hal David, and when Terry Gross asked which of his lyrics were his personal favorite, he didn’t even pause to think. “Alfie,” he said.

Alfie? For real? “Alfie”? Not “The Look of Love”? “Walk On By?” “I Say a Little Prayer”? Of course I had to leave the radio to look up the lyrics right away.

You know what? If you take the silly name “Alfie” out of that song, the words are beautiful. Downright insightful. I’ll leave you with the lyrics sans the word “Alfie” here — you can judge for yourself. And hey, if you want to admit to enjoying an easy listening tune from time to time back in the day, by all means leave a comment and fess up. I’d be particularly interested in hearing what your favorite Bacharach/David tune is.

What’s it all about?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about?
When you sort it out, are we meant to take more than we give?
or are we meant to be kind?And if only fools are kind, then I guess it’s wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, what will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.

I believe in love.
Without true love we just exist.
Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing.
When you walk let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day.

A different, ahem, look at fatherhood

A few radio stories I’ve heard lately oughta give NPR listeners an idea of what a powerful – and positive — effect men who are blind can have on their offspring.

That’s Bob Ringwald, Molly’s father.

Let’s start with Bob Ringwald. My brother Doug introduced me to Bob years ago — they’re both jazz musicians, and they play together from time to time. Bob is blind, and his daughter Molly (yes, the one in all those John Hughes movies in the 1980s) was interviewed on Weekend Edition last month about her first novel When It Happens to You. She told Scott Simon that as a child she enjoyed sitting with her dad during movies and plays to describe the action. “I actually think that that informed my writing,” she said. “That’s something that I’ve done for so long, that it’s made me, perhaps, observe things in a different way.”

And then there’s Gore Vidal. After the famous writer and critic died in July, Bob Edwards Weekend replayed an interview conducted at Vidal’s home in Los Angeles in 2006. Vidal was raised by his grandfather, a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Sen. Thomas Gore was blind, and Vidal was ten years old when he started reading to him. “I read grown-up books to him: constitutional law, the Congressional Record, American history, poetry,” Vidal said. ”He was extraordinary, he was my education.” Vidal guided his grandfather to Senate hearings, and he said he didn’t dare fall asleep while sitting in the balcony waiting for the session to be over — at any moment his grandfather might give a hand signal to let young Vidal know to skedaddle down the Senate stairs to guide him to the bathroom.

And then, the live performance of This American Life that opened with Vancouver writer Ryan Knighton telling a story about a walk in the woods he took alone with his young daughter. Knighton is blind, and when she started screaming about a bear, he panicked. After weighing his options, he realized that her frantic cries of “bear!” were only in reaction to dropping her teddy bear on the sidewalk.

My sister Cheryl met Ryan Knighton years ago at a bookstore in Anacortes, Washington when he was touting his first book. His latest, C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark, is about blind fatherhood.

Ryan Knighton’s daughter is too young now to tell us what, if any, positive effects come from being raised by a man who can’t see her. I may not be a gambling woman, but I’ll betcha this: she’ll have stories to tell!

Race: Out Loud

I published a post here back in March after Chicago Public Radio let me know they wouldn’t be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to do for them. But here’s some good news: reports of my radio-essay death were greatly exaggerated. An essay I wrote aired on WBEZ this morning!

At the WBEZ studios, recording my essay. (Photo by Bill Healy, courtesy WBEZ)

I like working with public radio, so after I got that disappointing note I headed over to the WBEZ studios to meet with the Managing Editor of Public Affairs to see if I had any other options. She told me that in their new format they’d be covering topics in-depth from time to time, and that this summer Aurora Aguilar would be producing pieces on literacy, and Cate Cahan would be focusing on race issues. I told her I’d worked with Aurora and Cate before. She suggested I try pitching ideas to them. I pitched. They responded. I wrote. We recorded.

The piece I did for Aurora hasn’t aired yet. The one that aired today is about how blindness can change the way you look, ahem, at race, and Its part of Cate’s Race: Out Loud series. Here’s how WBEZ describes Race: out Loud on its web site:

We’re asking: What would it sound like if people said what they really think and feel about race, about ethnicity? What if they really talked about how it shapes them, their lives, and attitudes? What would we hear, if we listened?

That part about what we might hear if we listened is what motivated me to pitch my essay. And speaking of blindness, I can read Braille, but I’m painfully slow at it. WBEZ radio producer Joe DeCeault has been recording my essays for years, and the two of us developed a system where he puts me in front of a microphone, asks what the first paragraph in my essay is about, then what the second paragraph is about, and I retell the story paragraph by paragraph in my own words. Essays produced by Joe make me sound like I’m just sitting down talking to you, and we’re both pretty proud of how this works.

Race: Out Loud is a special project, though, so they have a freelancer doing the sound work. Bill Healy consulted with Joe about how to pull this off, but knowing that Cate Cahan and I had gone back and forth via email editing and rewriting the essay, Bill thought we needed to record it exactly how it had been written.

And so, after setting me up at the mike and testing my sound levels, Bill whipped out a printed copy of my essay and began reading it out loud line by line. I parroted what Bill said, and once I’d repeated all my lines, he spliced the sentences together, added sound effects and music, and…voila! When my essay aired on Morning Edition in Chicago today, It sounded like I’d read the whole essay all at once.

If you missed hearing the piece this morning, you can read the transcript and hear it online. Young Bill Healy sure rose to the task. He took photos for the online version and wrote some promotional copy as well. And now he can add “recorded a blind woman reading an essay” to his resume, too.

This mixolydian life

I spent the past four days at a summer Jazz Camp here in Chicago. That was not a typo. I was at Jazz Camp.

This is the fourth year that the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble combined to present the camp for adults, but it’s the first year they expanded it to a kind of humanities festival rather than simply a series of classes for amateur musicians. A story in the Chicago Tribune explains:

“We’ve extended it way beyond what it ever was … so that arts educators and anybody interested in jazz can see the connection between the music and other art forms,” says Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the non-profit Jazz Institute of Chicago.

The article quoted Deutsch saying that the idea of the Straight Ahead and Other Directions Jazz Summer Camp this year was “to show how jazz really touches everything.” Lectures on topics ranging from “Jazz and Social Justice” to “Jazz and the Stage/Silver Screen” helped them achieve their goal, and the star of the show was New Orleans saxophone master and Mardi Gras Indian Chief Donald Harrison, Jr., who opened each day with a lecture. I know Donald Harrison from watching him play himself on the HBO TV series “Tremé,” and in a talk about Hurricane Katrina he said it was the “worst and best thing” that could have happened to New Orleans. “It forced people to realize how important the culture here is. People from out of town are making a point to come, they are paying more attention to us, they realize now how important it is to continue with it. And the people from New Orleans who are really interested in keeping the culture alive realized that they could have lost it forever.”

My morning master’s classes were for the rhythm section, and I took an afternoon master’s class on beginning improvisation. Donald Harrison sat in on one of the improvisation classes and reiterated some of the musical terms that by that time were already spinning in my head: octotonic, mixolydian, tonic, dorian, altered. I was the only blind student at camp, and by far the least accomplished musician in the master classes.

But hey, jazz musicians are known for their ability to improvise. When I begged off taking the piano part for one tune, reminding the teacher that I couldn’t see to read the chart, a fellow student jumped in to join me on the piano bench and call out the chords. In-between sessions students offered to read the notes on the whiteboard out loud into my digital recorder, and others would lend an elbow to walk Whitney and me to the elevator to find the next session. I learned as much about jazz from the conversations we had during those walks as I did in class.

One of the photos Bill Healey took during our Thursday morning shoot. (Photo courtesy WBEZ.)

I hadn’t planned it this way, but Jazz Camp landed on my calendar days after my Easter Seals job had given me a new laptop with new software to learn. I’d started teaching a second weekly memoir-writing class the week before camp, too, and returned from a last-minute trip to see my oldest sister and her husband in South Carolina the day before jazz camp started. Add to all that, Chicago Public Radio had asked me to write an record a piece for them the day before I left for South Carolina.

My WBEZ piece is about how blindness can change the way you look at race, and it’s set to air in Chicago this Monday, July 30, during the Morning Edition segment of NPR. It’ll be available online after it airs, and when the producer contacted me this week to ask if they could come out to shoot some photos to use with the online segment, I told them the only time I’d be available was on my walk to jazz camp in the morning. We squeezed the photo session in.

All this activity didn’t leave me much opportunity to practice the piano in-between sessions, but in many ways, the timing was perfect. Figuring out chord structures and listening for changes and working out dorian scales helped balance everything else going on. It’s kind of like George Gershwin once said: “Life is a lot like Jazz… it’s best when you improvise.”