I must admit to not being a disability-studies powerhouse like Miss Crip Chick.

I came late, and rather haphazardly, to anything that resembles crip theory. Maybe that's why I'm so interested in how those of us with disabilities are perceived within the larger culture; I was well into my adulthood before I realized that we had anything like a unifying culture of our own. Of course, I was seventeen before I ever got to experiment with the internet, so in many ways I already feel that my understanding is a bit...antique on many issues

. Reading last year's Telethon Blog Carnival brought back so many memories.

There is a certain irony in the fact that I started my life as a fairly enthusiastic telethon viewer. Kids from school were always being asked to dust off their Sunday best and regale a pliable local audience with, usually, "Tomorrow" from Annie...it's been over twenty years...has something replaced this on The Pity Party Top Forty? I haven't watched one since I got political. But in those early days, I watched to cheer on my school girlfriends, and tragic as it feels now, because it was the one time I felt like I saw something I really understood on television.

Richie and Joanie never needed ramps or wheelchairs, but my friend Amy and I definitely did, and there she was, coming out of the same box as them, wearing her favorite pink dress. I thought that was the coolest. Of course, "we" weren't in the background of Target commercials or best friends on kid sitcoms or anything like that. Life hadn't even gone on for Corky yet, and we were completely invisible, for real, except for telethon and one local news anchor that had lost his legs after getting hit by a train as a boy.I don't know why, but I began to really want to see the stumps, but as far as I know, they filmed him from the chest up until he retired.

Oh, I suppose there was the occasional Jeri Jewell Facts of Life cameo, but it was hard to feel the same about her, cause she could walk, though it didn't look steady. I liked her, but she did talk like the imitations of "spazzes" that boys in school would do sometimes, which made it hard to want to be like her.

Maybe the the telethon wouldn't bother me so much if a Paralympian made it on the Wheaties box, or something equally all-American.Picture a modern world where someone's only exposure to young women is Miss America, and you might get why we don't dig the 'thon.)

I didn't understand everything, of course. Looking back at it, I think I thought telethons were like crip "Star Search" and, pretty soon, my friends were going to have their pick of soft-drink endorsements or something.I wanted to be on one in the worst way, even though, even then, I thought the UCP telethon was the lower-wattage event. I was also beginning to understand that I wasn't girly in quite the same way as my friends on The Jerry Show. Maybe that's why they got the bigger crowds.

I asked my mom, who said no, and some expletives she later had to teach me not to use, which she later softened to "over my dead body,"(Which might seem a bit over the top, but even then, I had the blogger's instinct for getting ideas stuck in my craw and my mom needed to be emphatic to brook no "Please, Mom!") At the time, I thought she wasn't wanting me to get famous. Now, I'm so proud to be raised by this particular ex-hippie introvert.

But even early on, I noticed that over the next few weeks, it was harder to put up with the fact that my brother did so much more by and for himself than I could.Being in a wheelchair seemed like a tougher break after the telethon, even though I was too young to put the hopeless, pity, message on trial.

And of course, you have Jerry himself, as New Mobility's Josie Byzek has so helpfully summarized, taking the criticism of ableist messages as his cue to channel Don Rickles.(In another, somewhat related irony, Jerry in his movies joins Goober and Gomer Pyle in "The Andy Griffith Show" on the list of Characters Erika Thought Were Disabled When She Was A Kid. They acted like big kids and just totally reminded me, aged about eight, of the group-home residents that my mother worked with that year. Bet Jerry's head would burst if he knew about that.)

Jerry needs to ask himself just what he's protecting by fighting change at MDA so very hard. He actually might not get it(which, given, his statements to "Parade" and other comments about gender-roles, is entirely likely) however, if he really cared about the cause more than his own chance to be in the spotlight maybe he would find that donations were about the same.

Posted by Erika J.