"Disabled" Musicians Make the Sweetest Sounds

How many "disabled" or truly physically challenged people have you seen in your workplace lately or over the years? Be honest please...One? Two? Maybe three? Over how many years of working? I can count on one hand the number of disabled workers I've seen in an office setting over thirty years of employment - Many buildings are "handicap accessible" but not necessarily the hearts and minds of the folks who occupy those buildings. They sometimes need a gentle nudge. I'm one of those musicians who always kept her day job only now I 'm a disabled musician looking for a day job. Now - how many disabled musicians have you seen perform? Besides Ray Charles, the blind blues guy in the movie "Road House", Diane Schur and Stevie Wonder? I mean locally, in your area - how many rock and rollers or jazz or pop performers with canes or in wheel chairs? I reckon very few if any. There are millions of disabled people in the United States, and probably many thousands of musicians among those millions, but where are they hanging out? Where are the "disabled" musicians playing their music if not in your local pub or concert stage?
If they're like me, they have gone underground, first to learn to deal with the disability, come to grips with new physical limitations and secondly to deal with and overcome an entirely different set of limitations - those of perception. How they see themselves and how others see them.
What once was taken for granted - the ability to walk up or climb up onto the stage, to shop for groceries, to try on clothes in a department store, to go for a hike and climb a hill, to go visit your friend in that beautiful house in the Hollywood hills with all the stairs - all these things and more suddenly or over time become projects requiring serious logistical planning and/or assistance.
Once these issues are honestly confronted then comes the part where you decide what's really important in life - For me that point came after I had four surgeries on my right hip, resulting in a serious infection that almost killed me and the deaths of three immediate family members including my mother and brother within a two year period. I was ready to cash it in but something kept me going and that something was this - a very old friend of mine whom I had not spoken with in years sent me a CD of music composed by our mutual ex - her ex husband and my ex-boyfriend(that's another entertaining story for another blog). Turns out he is also disabled and for years had been quietly composing and recording in his apartment some of the most beautiful music on the planet. When I heard the music I cried and then I called him. Then I visited him ( he lives in the Northwest and I was in California at the time) and we played music together for the first time in twenty five years. We recorded that session. I never looked back.
I planned my escape from California, window shopped for recording software and keyboard before I had any money to purchase it and waited for my employer to lay me off so I could at least have a cushion of unemployment benefits while I looked for work in the Northwest. When my employer finally did lay me off I was ready - I ate top Raman for weeks so I could have my meager one room of furniture and boxes shipped to Seattle via Starving Students. By the time I left California my furniture had already been waiting for six months in a friends house where I was going to live. I cashed in my 401k and bought my digital studio set-up for the room I occupy in my friends house. Learned how to use the software. Started composing and recording like there was no tomorrow. And for me there isn't - only today - only now.

I have been now in the Northwest for one year and a half and my first CD is nearing completion. I look for work every week, scrape by on unemployment, have no insurance and though I cannot walk very well and am never without physical pain (though I am hardly conscious of pain anymore), I am doing what I love, what I was meant to do, and what gives others the most pleasure - making music.
And that's the answer to the question - where are all the disabled musicians hanging out? In their bedrooms and livingrooms with their keyboards and guitars or whatever. It's time to come out of hiding, give your gift to a world that needs a little joy right now. Stand up spiritually (if not physically) and get up in the face (in the nicest way possible) of a society that would rather forget your existence because you remind them of their own frailty and whose icons are sometimes crazy but rarely crippled. You are needed - if only you knew how much -
Look in Wikapedia for a list of names of great musicians who are or were disabled. It's a significant but short list. Let's make it a longer one - Our hearts have been opened by our experiences and we make the sweetest sounds....