Spiraling Through the School of Life by Diane Ladd

Author:Diane Ladd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2010-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

VERY SPECIAL

MOMENTS

When Laura was doing the film Mask, Barbra Streisand stopped by the set one day and asked director Peter Bogdanovich, “My God, where did you find a blind girl who could act?”

Peter answered, “She’s not blind. That’s Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern’s daughter.”

Barbra said, “I thought that child was blind! I thought she’d never seen anybody in her life. She must be wearing special contact lenses.”

Peter shook his head. “She’s not wearing anything on her eyes, Barbra,” he replied.

What Miss Streisand didn’t know is that Laura and I had gone to a stable run by Liz Lukather, an amazing woman, partially paralyzed by polio since childhood. She became a doctor, even though no one wanted to let her into medical school. She owned a riding stable for disabled children and taught those kids how to ride horses.

Laura went there to learn how to ride as if she couldn’t see, because she had to do so in this movie. Liz put a blindfold over my daughter’s eyes and taught her how to feel the horse and then how to sense any fence or other object that was invading her space.

While I was there, Liz showed me a child who’d been in a drowning accident and then had been revived. By the time he was conscious again, his oxygen had been cut off long enough to cause severe brain damage. He had a look on his face that seemed to indicate that he wasn’t cognizant of his surroundings.

I couldn’t help but think of my first little girl, who’d hit her head in the pool. Instead of feeling grief, however, I just watched Liz put these special children on horses. Their entire faces changed—only by fractions, but you could see that something was different. They knew that on a horse, they could do something; they had control of that animal. It was one of the more astonishing experiences of my life.

I’ve seen a similar phenomenon while working with disabled children for the Special Olympics. It was amazing, for lack of a better word. Standing alongside the professional athletic volunteers, including Rafer Johnson, we’d watch these young potential athletes in their precompetition minutes standing by the side of the gym. For example, we’d observe a child with cerebral palsy wait on the sidelines with his shoulders slumped. But when the music blared over the loudspeakers and it was time for him to do his number and be “on,” it was as if he knew that it was his moment in history to fulfill his destiny. My God! The shoulders would come back up, the body would change, and the child would move forward to do a tumble, beginning his award-winning performance.

I’ve watched these moments with tears in my eyes. They also make me think about how our society has changed for the better. Two hundred years ago, these same children would have been pushed off a cliff to get rid of them; they would have been tossed away and deemed worthless. This is a good lesson for all of us.

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