We're talking fair and balaced here.

Theatergoers face small-hearted patrons
MIKE ARGENTO

Jun 30, 2006 —

About two weeks ago - June 15 to be exact - a group of people with disabilities went to the Dutch Apple Dinner Theater in Lancaster for a show.

The group, 11 people ranging in ages 21 to 69, went to see "1776," a musical about, well, 1776. It was a diverse group, sharing one thing - they were all disabled to some extent. Some are mentally retarded, some autistic, some with cerebral palsy. Two were in wheelchairs.

The outing - part of a local program to provide people with disabilities with recreation and entertainment - was a pretty routine thing. The program organizes various outings for its clients. They go bowling or to Pizza Hut or to Damon's Grill. The dinner theater was intended to be a nice day out at the theater.

And typically, the folks rarely encounter problems because the days when people with disabilities were segregated from the rest of the population have long passed. Besides, as a people, we are much more enlightened these days about people with disabilities and see them as human beings who deserve to be treated with the same kind of respect and decency afforded anybody else.

Typically.

Sure, there are occasions when they attract some stares or the opposite - deliberate attempts by those in the vicinity to avoid eye contact or interaction - but, for the most part, the folks are left alone to do the kinds of things that everybody does.

Yet, the trip to the dinner theater turned out to be the exception, one of those times when the people with the real cognitive disabilities reveal themselves.

The group arrived at the theater and had assembled outside while supervisor Juli Torres went to the box office to collect their tickets. When she returned, and they began to enter the theater to find their seats, they encountered two elderly couples.

One of the men looked at the group and said to a woman, apparently his wife, "Let's go find our seats before those people go in."

The tone of his voice and emphasis on the words "those people," witnesses said, left no doubt what he thought about "those people."

Now, Torres has experienced this kind of thing before. Her 21-year-old daughter, Cindel, is severely handicapped, and she's had to endure people making remarks or staring or just being rude. Yet, every time it happens, it still stings.

But usually, people back away when they're caught acting like they're the ones with the malfunctioning circuitry in their brains, embarrassed by their stupidity and their rudeness.

Torres turned to the man and asked, "Is there a problem?"

She expected, at best, a half-hearted apology intended not to convey sorrow, but embarrassment at being caught being a jerk, or, at worst, the cold shoulder.

She didn't expect what she got.

The woman replied, "Yes. Yes, there is."

Rather than acting ashamed of their idiocy, these folks seemed to revel in it, to be proud that their ignorance represented turning back the clock to a time that no civilized human wants to revisit.

"Yes, there is."

Torres was amazed and appalled. It wasn't as if she were bringing a group of screaming children to the show. These were well-behaved adults who were looking forward to an evening of musical theater.

"I didn't know there were people that rude in the world," Torres said.

Well, there are.

Torres reported the exchange to the woman at the box office, whose jaw dropped when she heard about the conversation. The woman apologized profusely, which, when you think about it, is kind of weird. She was apologizing for something she had nothing to do with and had no blame for, save for selling tickets to people with small brains and smaller hearts.

The dinner theater staff was accommodating and did everything to make the evening go well. Only one of the group left during the show; she was impatient with its slow pacing.

"Everybody else," Torres said, "seemed to really enjoy it."

Except, perhaps, for the people who had a problem with them. You'd like to think that their evening was ruined by the presence of people they found objectionable.

It'd serve them right.

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.Read more Argento columns at ydr.com/mike or at www.yorkblog.com - Argento's Front Stoop.

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Idiot angry at 'those people'
MIKE ARGENTO

Jul 7, 2006 —

Last week, I told the story about a group of disabled people encountering rudeness in the form of idiots at the Dutch Apple Dinner Theater in Lancaster, and for the most part, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Except for one caller.

She wanted me to tell the other side of the story, the side that illustrates the idiots' point of view because, as we all know, in order to be fair and balanced, we in the news media must report the idiots' points of view as if there was nothing wrong with being an idiot.

Now, you might be thinking that it's unfair and unbalanced to call idiots idiots, but in this instance, we're talking accuracy. So, idiots it is.

The woman, who will go unidentified because she didn't want to tell me her name, bravely defended idiots, using her personal experience to illuminate the issue. She had a couple of stories that she said illustrated how disabled people exist pretty much to make her life miserable.

She said she and her niece went to the dinner theater for its annual Christmas show last December, and there were disabled people there who ruined it for everyone.

Seriously, that's what she said.

One disabled person, in particular, caused her and her niece and, presumably, others suffering from diminished compassion syndrome, no end of problems.

This disabled person, a woman, was apparently blind and couldn't walk very well, walking with halting strides that slowed her pace.

"It took her almost an hour to get through the buffet," the caller said.

So the disabled person kept her from a second helping of scalloped potatoes.

She said her niece approached the disabled person and asked if she could help her. The disabled person didn't respond.

"She couldn't hear either," the woman said. "It was ridiculous she was there."

And that wasn't all. She said the disabled person left her wheelchair and walker in the aisle between her and the buffet table.

"People had to go around to get to the food line," the woman said. "That was really rude. Nobody did anything about it. You had to go around 100 feet instead of just going about 10 feet."

The gall.

She said she and her niece are never going back to the theater.

Because of "those people."

You know, "those people" probably feel the same way about her.

It isn't the only time the woman has had a problem with disabled people.

She recalled going to the movies, and while she was buying her ticket, a woman in the lobby was yelling and waving her arms. The woman described it as "freaking out." She said she mentioned to the clerk at the ticket counter, "I hope she's not going into the movies with us."

The ticket clerk was offended, telling the woman that the person causing her concern was a regular at the theater and nobody else was bothered by her.

She said she told the clerk, "I have a lot of things wrong with me and so does my niece, and we don't bother anyone."

That she has a lot of things wrong with her explains a lot, and the second part of her statement is debatable.

She continued, "I have things wrong with me, and I don't bother anyone with it. If going out would disrupt someone else's life, I wouldn't go out."

She said she doesn't ask for special treatment because she's had cancer or a knee replaced or whatever else afflicted her - not like disabled people, she supposed, with their special parking spaces and special privileges. "I think we bend over backwards too much for these people," she said.

I would like to take this opportunity to interrupt to say, you know, you just can't make up stuff like this.

It got better.

"When I see someone in a wheelchair, I run," she said. "I go the other way. I don't want to deal with that."

She said disabled people were rude, just like "people who drive old junker cars and have them break down in traffic and make everybody late for work."

I tried telling her that some people can only afford old cars and that it may be kind of offensive, and incredibly stupid, to compare a person with a disability to someone who drives an '87 Monte Carlo.

She didn't want to hear it.

I also asked her whether it had occurred to her that her attitude could be seen as, well, unkind and uncompassionate.

And she said - I'm serious - "They are not in my shoes. You can't judge somebody unless you step into their shoes."

When I tried to explain that's exactly the point, that for the grace of God, she could be the disabled person that someone's complaining about, that we're all human beings on this small planet and that those who live with disability deserve to be treated with the same kind of respect that every human being deserves, she didn't seem to understand what I was saying.

"You just don't get it," she said.

Well, some things, I guess, I just don't want to get