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(2 votes, average 5.00 out of 5)
Written by Jamakaya
May 5, 2011
When actress Geri Jewell was 12, she found what looked like cute little balloons in her parents’ bedside drawer. She blew up a few, rubbed them in her hair and made them stick to the wall. Then her dad walked in.
A bit disconcerted, Jack Jewell explained to his daughter that, well … they were toe warmers that men wore under their socks. He then opened two more condoms, put them on his big toes, finished dressing and left for work.
Geri tells this story in her new book, “I’m Walking as Straight as I Can,” to illustrate her ignorance about sex and her family’s inability to clarify matters. It’s one of many hilarious anecdotes in the book, which is subtitled “Transcending Disability in Hollywood and Beyond.”
Geri started as a stand-up comic and was the first actor with a disability to be featured regularly in a TV series, “The Facts of Life,” 30 years ago. More recently, she played Jewel in the HBO series “Deadwood.” In the book, she comes out as a lesbian, so the title is a wry comment on disability and sexual orientation.
Geri was born prematurely under traumatic circumstances when her pregnant mother was hit by a car. She spent her first three months in an incubator. When she was not crawling by age 1, her mother sought medical advice. The diagnosis was cerebral palsy, which is characterized by involuntary movements and perceptual difficulties. Along with motor problems, Geri had substantial hearing loss.
Geri writes about the close relationships she shared with other kids with disabilities in her “special needs” schools, but also about how segregation undermined her confidence and hindered her social skills. She describes how naïve and immature she was when she entered the cutthroat world of Hollywood. She tells heart-wrenching stories of how some people abused her trust or treated her disrespectfully.
Geri is disappointed that her identity as a “disability icon” typecast her in roles as disabled characters, but she’s also proud of being a role model and being able to speak out on behalf of people with disabilities.
On one memorable occasion at a White House event in 1985, Geri was supposed to perform a few minutes of comedy. Instead, she delivered a passionate statement against fear and prejudice that was a plea for accepting people with disabilities. Unconsciously, it was also about sexual orientation, because at the time she was grappling with her own awareness of being lesbian.
She writes movingly about her long coming-out process. Uptightness from her Catholic upbringing, insecurity due to her disability and fear about her career all delayed the inevitable. She was married to a man for 12 years, experienced long bouts of depression and overcame an addiction to sleep meds.
Despite all this drama, her book is often laugh-out-loud funny, studded with what Geri calls her “Lucy” moments, worthy of the madcap Lucille Ball. There’s the chaos she accidentally wreaked at her high school stage debut and the earthquake that struck on her wedding night (“It wasn’t our lovemaking that made the earth move...”). Among the celebrity anecdotes, Carol Burnett, Sid Caesar, Patty Duke, Dick Clark and Liza Minnelli come off as class acts.
The innate sense of the absurd that many LGBTs and people with disabilities experience due to their “difference” seems to be the wellspring of Geri’s humor and resilience. She ought to be working more consistently. She is a very funny woman.
