Unemployed Little People

When I saw the movie Forrest Gump, I wondered who the actor was who played Lieutenant Dan. I was interested because he was a double-leg amputee. And it turned out that the actor was Gary Sinese, who still has both of the legs that he was born with. But during the scenes where Sinese needed to be legless, the filmmakers just chopped them off using the miracle of CGI. And yet there is still a debate raging in the community of little people about whether or not any of them should accept roles as elves or stereotypical dwarf stuff like that. Some of them think that if casting directors only seek them out when they’re looking for elves, it assaults all of their dignity. And accepting those roles only makes it worse. But others say that working as an elf is better than not working at all. (There is also a debate raging in me about whether or not calling them little people also assaults all of their dignity . It sounds too child-like. I can for sure see why they don’t want to be called midgets. That sounds like a put down. Some people think that they should be called people of short stature but something about grates on me like calling cripples physically challenged grates on me. But whatever they want to call themselves is okay with me. Who the hell am I to tell anybody what they have to call themselves?) But one might think that by now this same cinematic technology would’ve been used to end this debate once and for all. If they could just lop the legs off of Gary Sinese, maybe they could just have actors of normal stature play elves and such and just lop them down to the correct size. And then casting directors would never again have to be bothered with auditioning little people. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

Walking Pneumonia

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a woman who uses a wheelchair and it changed my life. It turned my whole world upside down. I now feel more vulnerable and fragile than I’ve ever felt before. Because this woman told me that she had once been diagnosed with walking pneumonia. I replied, "How did that happqen? You can’t even walk.” And then I said, “You got all of the bad stuff that comes with being a walkie without any of the good stuff.” Up until that minute, I always thought that this was one of the advantages of being crippled: Some of my crippled friends once told me that they wanted to publish a book entitled 101 Advantages of Quadriplegia. I remember that they listed one of the advantages as being that your friends never ask you to help them move. And I said, “No, but they always ask you if they can use your van.” I felt inspired to contribute to this worthy endeavor. I figured that I had been around enough as a cripple to be able to come up with a whole bunch of cripple advantages, other than all of the prime parking (in theory). And then later on it occurred to me that another advantage of not being able to walk was that at least you can’t catch walking pneumonia. But now I knew that even that wasn’t necessarily the case. This was indeed ridiculous. It was like a person who was born biologically female being diagnosed with prostate cancer. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH