I Can't Get Away From Work

     I attended an opera last week and was surprised to find it exploring themes that are quite familiar to me.
     I'm not an opera buff. However, my wife and I went to Charleston, SC for a few days last week for the Spoleto Festival, as we have for more than thirty years. I generally stick to the non-opera performances but this year the main opera is George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. How could I miss an opera sung in English featuring songs such as Summertime, Bess You Is My Woman Now, I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' and It Ain't Necessarily So? My wife and I went and enjoyed it greatly.

     While Porgy and Bess is set in the African American community of Charleston in the 1920s, it may be more about the subject of disability than anything else. The opera's most important character, Porgy, is disabled, apparently by paraplegia. Gershwin based his opera on the novel Porgy written by Charleston native Dubose Heyward. The title character of that novel was loosely based upon a well known personality in Charleston, "Goat Sammy," a crippled beggar who got around in a goat cart. Heyward had been fascinated to find out that "Goat Sammy" had been arrested on a charge of aggravated assault for a crime of passion. As Heyward put it “the object of public charity by day, had a private life of his own by night." Note that this disabled man in the 1920s had to resort to begging to support himself. Yes, we still have beggars but that's generally not the fate of disabled people today and that's largely due to Social Security and Supplemental Security Income disability benefits. My bigger point is that Heyward thought it important to tell the world that disabled people actually have lives apart from their disability. Disabled people are quite capable of passionate romance, among many other things. It remains a point worth making. I have seen cases where Social Security Administrative Law Judges were surprised, even affronted, by evidence that a disabled person had a life apart from their disability. How dare a disabled person father a child or become pregnant! How can a person be truly disabled if they attend church or get arrested for a crime or enjoy the company of friends and family? To think like that denies the possibility that disabled people are truly human, that they have the same hopes, dreams, pleasures, pastimes, urges, shortcomings and frailties as the rest of us.

     I don't think it's an accident that the novel Porgy dealt so much with the theme of disability. Dubose Heyward's own health was poor. He suffered from the effects of polio, as well as other illnesses. As a result of his own experiences, I expect Heyward had reason to contemplate the ways in which society thinks about the disabled. I wish those attitudes had changed more since Heyward's day.