March 18, 2013
A Fierce Kind of Love
Reading and Discussion
7:00‑9:00 p.m.
"This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings."
> Good evening, everyone. My name is Celia Feinstein, and I am the co‑executive director of the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. And it gives me great pleasure on behalf of James Davis and my co‑executive director Amy Goldman to welcome you to this production of A Fierce Kind of Love --
> We can't hear you.
> They can't hear you. Someone can't hear you.
> Pittsburgh.
> Oh. MAGPI people, help. Can you hear me now, Guy?
> He said yes.
> Yes? You can hear? Okay. Sorry. Okay.
Through the Pennsylvania office of developmental programs and the Philadelphia Intellectual Disability Services, the Institute on Disabilities at Temple has been collecting the stories of the Intellectual Disabilities movement for the past two years through the Visionary Voices project. With A Fierce Kind of Love we are using public performance to share our community's history with new audiences. Developed through a grant with the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, we are hoping to expand the audience of people who are educated in and concerned about this rich cultural history that is very much a civil rights history. I'd like to first and I'm going to do this without crying, I'd like to first acknowledge Lisa Sonneborn who is the project director and the producer of A Fierce Kind of Love.
(Applause)
I would also like to acknowledge our playwright Suli Holum and director David Bradley.
(Applause)
> I would like to acknowledge the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Heritage Philadelphia program and last and certainly not lease I want to acknowledge the men and the women who shared their stories with us so that we could share them with you tonight. Last just a little bit of logistics. So you have evaluations. If you picked up a Temple bag. If you didn't pick up a Temple bag please do. We would like to you complete the evaluations. It's very important to us to get your feedback. I also want to acknowledge that for those of you who can see behind us is the University of Pittsburgh, not the whole university but friends and colleagues who are in a sister program to the Institute on Disabilities. And our staff person Guy Caruso and mea and Bob are back there. There is a Town Hall‑‑
> Send us the bags.
> Send them the bags.
(Laughter)
Sorry, Guy. There is also outside when you came in the door a Town Hall Wall. So please share with us your thoughts, leaders you knew, photographs you have, some people have already started to pin up photographs. Thank you so much. We will be using that for a lot of different things. Emergency exits, there's one back there and one back there. We are not going to need them. And bathrooms are ‑‑ this is very strange, bathrooms are on the first floor for men and women and on the second floor just for women. I'd like to turn this over to my colleague David Bradley.
(Applause)
> Thank you, Celia. Good evening everybody. Good evening Pittsburgh and all the friends who are streaming in other locations around the country. It's great to be here with you. Those of you in remote locations don't to have do this but this is most port part of any theatrical event, please turn off your cell phones, pagers, all of those things. Thank you. We are very, very glad to have you here for the first public reading of this play in progress. Our process over the last several months has included listening days with parents and siblings and self-advocates and professionals in the field. Lots of research. And a series of short workshops where we tried out material, tested approaches and shaped the work into the event you're going to see tonight. This is a reading which means the ensemble will be working script in hand. Some parts lightly staged, others less so. That's to allow us to keep experimenting right up to right now. Your participation is a very important part of the process and we are grateful for you being here on the next step of this journey. We want to offer our deepest thanks on behalf of the institute and Suli and myself on this ensemble to those who have shared their experiences and given us permission to share their words. The lives and struggles and triumphs of the people in this community both now and in the past are inspiring. And the stories are inspiring but even more important is the vision, commitment, and fierce love that will continue to fuel this work. Thanks for being here. And enjoy the first reading of A Fierce Kind of Love by Suli Holum.
(Applause)
LEE> I can't tell you how much I love her.
I love to kiss the back of her neck.
You know, like you do to a baby?
The back of their neck is so delicious.
I do that to her, when she's going to bed, and she lays down, you know.
I'll say too her, are you going to say goodnight to your mommy?
LEE> Give her a kiss.
Are you going to say sweet dreams? And
LEE/BRIAN> Give her a kiss.
Are you going to say, see you tomorrow morning?
LEE/MARCIA> Give her a kiss.
Then I say to her, are you going to say, "I",
BRIAN> and then a kiss,
LEE> "love,"
ERIN> and a kiss,
and "you,"
MICHAEL> and a kiss.
Then I turn out the light.
Then I have to turn it back on again.
Yeah, she has to fall asleep with the light on. This is the routine.
It's been going on now for 55 years.
MARCIA> 1968. This whole thing broke with Bill Baldini, and it was horrendous to watch on TV. It was called "Suffer the Little Children," and it was an expose on the conditions at Pennhurst. For those of you who don't know Pennhurst was an institution for the mentally and physically disabled individuals of Southeastern Pennsylvania Southeastern Pennsylvania. And they let the TV cameras in and there it was in black and white. Horrendous.
Ten years later, 1978, Channel 10 News does a follow up, goes back in to Pennhurst. One of the first nights when it was on, I'm sitting in the living room with my daughters, and the Channel ten News host, Larry Kane, gets on and says, you may want to take your kids out of the room right now, because you won't want them to see this segment, it's so horrendous.
And just previous to that, we're all sitting there watching the same TV show, the same news show, and one of the Flying Walendas fell to his death, and they didn't think that that was the horrible for a kid to see, but they thought looking at children with disabilities living the way they were wasn't something he didn't want any child to ever witness.
Now I had become a real zealot, started getting involved in '72 with the Right to Education. And by the time the Pennhurst suit broke in '78 I was going every day and sitting in the federal court house and listening. I adored Judge Broderick. I fell in love with him, and just listening to all the stories, and the terrible things that happened to people, if nothing else it made me more resolved that that was nothing that was ever going to happen to anybody that I knew, and especially not my daughter Gina. So I had been working as an organizer, helping other parents, you know, meetings with the school district, people's IEP's. I had become a real zealot for people's rights and I was asked to go on a show with Larry Kane. I can't remember the name of the guy who ran Pennhurst, but he was on the show with me, and it was called "Behind Locked Doors", I think, the show.
And Larry Kane came over and introduced himself before we started the show, and I said, you know, I think I really need to say something to you before we go on TV. And he said, oh, sure. I'm sure he thought I was going to compliment him.
And I said, you know, a couple weeks ago, you had the show on, Bill Baldini's show, I said, and you ‑‑ that same night, I said you showed the Flying Walendas, one of them fall to their death at least a half dozen times during that day and evening, and yet you thought it was too appalling for people to let their children watch people with disabilities be treated in such an inhumane way.
I said, you know, I really take offense at that.
Well, of course, needless to say, he wasn't happy with me, and he didn't seem to get the message, but I just couldn't miss the opportunity to say to him what I thought he needed to know and so he would think about it the next time he did that.
So that was kind of that story.
My name is Dee Coccia. My daughter Gina was born at the height of people going into Pennhurst. She was not supposed to live a year, and now she's 47. And she likes to be ‑‑ her name is Gina. It's really from Regina and queen, so Gina thinks she's the queen.
I must have been a general in another life, but to me this is a battle. And you keep moving up the forces, one by one, and this is the very last bastion. This is the last bastion of the civil rights movement. And I was lucky enough to have a mom who would come and sit in my house and make sure that Gina got off that school bus and was okay with my other daughter until I got home. But it was pretty funny when my mom used to be in my house a lot, because she'd be looking after Gina, and I'd be running, you know, and the phone would ring and it would always be another parent. And the first words out of my mother's mouth to them was always: Are you a retarded mother?
When my mom finally passed away, all the moms who knew her said that they were going to send her flowers from all the retarded mothers.
I mean, at that time, mental retardation was not a bad word. And she'd always say to them, you need to get up and fight, you need to get up and see that people get the services they need.
LEE> Strange enough, it was always the parent that would be our first stumbling block at every new thing we tried. It was always the parents because they were afraid.
MARCIA> this is my friend Eleanor Elkin.
LEE> In 1972, the PARC decree mandated that in the state of Pennsylvania, education should be provided for all children regardless of any physical or mental handicap. Suddenly these children, children like my Richard, had the right to attend school. Up until that point they were at home ‑‑ those that hasn't been placed ‑‑ and parents were terrified. They fought us tooth and nail. What you say is, "you don't understand, you really don't understand Susie. This is going to be okay. Look at Richard. He's doing all right. Or look at Annie over here. She's doing fine and she's never been to school before"
"Well, my child is different."
And probably they were. They were all very different actually. Cause the group, the first class, they were all different ages, all colors, all degrees of retardation. They were different. There were ten kids and they were just as different and ten kids could possibly be. What we could say was, "Give it a try. Nobody's gonna hurt ‑‑ you can go the first day if you want to."
It took a while. With each new thing. And getting into the community was even worse. That was sheer terror. Especially if they were gonna bring their child home from the institution, from Pennhurst, and others, into the community. Ohhh that was terror for them. It really was. They were very, very frightened. They were sure their kid was going to end up laying on the sidewalk.
(Music)
ERIN> I saw Pennhurst on TV, on Ghost Hunters. They said it was full of ghosts. At Halloween you can go there.
LEE> Yes, you pay admission; there are actors there, like a haunted house. The developers wanted to turn it into condos, but, yeah, it's a haunted attraction.
ERIN> There’s no ghosts. It was a real place. People lived there.
LEE> People lived there.
MARCIA> I fell in love there.
MICHAEL> I worked there. I had a job, I had friends.
BRIAN> I lived my life there.
LEE> People slept in cages there.
MICHAEL> They didn't give me any clothes.
MARCIA> I was strapped to a chair there.
LEE> People were trapped there.
BRIAN> I was burned with cigarettes.
MICHAEL> I was punched.
LEE> kicked.
BRIAN> bruised.
and scarred.
I was raped.
MARCIA> I was ten years old.
BRIAN> I was 65years old.
MICHAEL> I was just a baby.
MARCIA> It smelled like urine.
MICHAEL> I forget how to walk.
MARCIA> I forget how to talk.
BRIAN> I forget my own name.
MICHAEL> It was in 1975, is that right, that you went to the first institution?
LEE> Yes, January3rd of '75.
ERIN> You remember the date?
MARCIA> Like it was yesterday.
MICHAEL> And can you remember the day you went?
BRIAN> It was January3rd
ALL> of '75.
ERIN> But, I mean, can you remember what happened the first time you went there?
LEE> I went to the institution and they said that this is where you're gonna be staying.
Your parents couldn't take care of you.
They don't want you.
You have nowhere else to go.
They put me in an institution. Because I wasn't one of them, as they say. I wasn't a normal person, but I do have a disability.
MARCIA> I was scared. I didn't know why I was up here. They said don't ask questions. So I didn't ask any more questions.
My brother went with me. He was abused and he ran away. I couldn't do that because
BRIAN/MARCIA/LEE> I was scared.
BRIAN> I was able to go to school on the premises.