Out of Sight: Podcast 
Dance Lessons 
Out of Sight
For the 140 students lucky enough to attend the Texas School for the Blind, life is about team sports, class plays, American Idol parties, and prom night. In fact, it’s the one place where they can see themselves for who they really are: typical teenagers.
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“I came here for the first time when I was eight, for camp, and I didn’t think I had a vision problem,” Liz told me. “I grew up with my family denying that I was blind. My foster mom is very supportive, but when I lived with my real mom, she thought I was making it up. So when I got here, I was like, ‘I’m not blind. They’re blind. Get me out of here!’” Liz had softened her opinion of the school since then—“I wouldn’t have made it without this place,” she said after she sketched out a few details of a harrowing childhood—but she was still happiest when she could convince herself that she was no different from anybody else. During fifth and sixth periods, when she went to McCallum High to take classes such as physics and English, Liz was always quick to hurry off the van that had “Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired” printed on its side. She refused to use a cane, even though she did not know her way around the campus, preferring to bump into things rather than appear to be disabled. “I’ve walked into a desk and run smack into a teacher, but I just played it off and made it into a joke,” she told me. “I still don’t like admitting that I have a vision problem, but I’m working on it.”
The students I met who were congenitally blind seemed to be content just the way they were. “I always ask my mom, ‘What’s it like to see?’ and she can’t explain it,” said a sixth-grader from Abilene named Mariah Long, whose optic nerve never fully developed. “I kinda try to imagine what seeing is, but I don’t know. People feel sorry for you when you’re visually impaired, but there are a lot of advantages. I mean, I can hear what everyone’s saying, even when they don’t think I can. And I can get under the covers at home and read, but my sister has to turn the light on!” Often it was the students who were in the process of losing their sight who appeared in Marnee Loftin’s office complaining of panic attacks or depression.
Nothing seemed to create more anxiety for Liz than her Orientation and Mobility, or O&M, lessons, which required her to use a cane while navigating her way around unfamiliar places. Only in O&M did her confidence falter. Once a week, she had to find her way back to campus from a different location in Austin, where she was dropped off by her instructor, an upbeat woman named Mary Faith Price. (“I teach kids about spatial relationships and how to get from A to B without getting killed,” she told me.) Liz was in need of O&M instruction because the limited vision she had could fade and because she had a more pressing problem: night blindness. If she was outdoors after dusk, or indoors in very dim lighting, she had almost no sight at all. (For her, daylight saving time was a life-changing event.) Liz’s night vision was so poor, in fact, that she knew she would have trouble seeing much of anything once the lights were turned down low at the prom. “I told my date that when night comes, I’ll be totally blind, but I’m not sure he believed me,” she said.
Liz agreed to let me tag along one morning when she had an O&M lesson—which, as usual, she was running late for. She hurried down the hall and burst into Mary Faith’s office five minutes after the bell had rung.
“Where’s your cane?” Mary Faith asked.
“I don’t know,” Liz said, shrugging.
Her instructor cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”
“Oh my gosh, Mary Faith!” Liz said, sighing for dramatic effect. “Can’t I borrow one?”
Mary Faith had a collection of extra canes on hand for just such an occasion and gave Liz a cane with a friendly but firm reprimand. It was a conversation they had had before. “We’re going downtown today,” Mary Faith said. “I’m going to take you to Colorado and Third, and you’ll need to find your way to the bus stop on Congress.” Liz had been dropped off in residential neighborhoods, but never downtown.
“Mary Faith!” Liz looked petrified.
“Am I pushing you too hard?”
Liz shook her head. “I’m good,” she mumbled.
Mary Faith drove us downtown, allowing me to accompany Liz as long as I promised that I would not give her any guidance. “This is north,” she told Liz when we reached our destination, turning her by her shoulders toward the Capitol. “You’re going to have to get yourself home from here. The number five and the number three bus will both take you back to school, right?”
Liz nodded as if she were being sent to her death.
“Good luck!” Mary Faith said brightly. “I’ll see you back at school.” And then she was gone. (Though she didn’t actually leave; I noticed her observing us from her van down the street.)
Liz stood still and gripped her cane. Downtown traffic rushed by her as she tried to get her bearings. She turned east, sweeping her cane back and forth across the sidewalk. When she reached the corner, she seemed at a loss for what to do next. “There’s no pole!” she said under her breath, feeling for something that wasn’t there. She had counted on finding a light pole, the kind with a buzzer that sounds when it is safe to cross, but there wasn’t one. She squinted, trying to discern whether the light was red or green, but she couldn’t make out the signal from where she stood. Finally she did what Mary Faith had trained her to do: She stood at the curb for a long time, listening to the ebb and flow of traffic. She waited as the light turned from green to red and back to green again and again. When she was satisfied that the car engines she heard idling were stopped at a red light, she stepped into the crosswalk.
Liz made it across the street and took a left. She looked relieved when she heard the brakes of her bus screech to a stop ahead of us. We had covered just two blocks, but it felt as if we had traveled a very long way.
The only thing that nearly overshadowed the prom was the spring production of The Wizard of Oz. Staging a two-act musical with 29 cast members would be daunting at any high school, but at the School for the Blind, it was a herculean undertaking. Helming the two-and-a-half-hour production was the school’s indefatigable English teacher, Robert Pierson, or “Mr. P,” who ran students through their paces in rehearsals that often stretched past nine o’clock in the evening. A great deal of time was devoted to blocking scenes, or teaching actors where to situate themselves onstage. Mr. P could not always show them where to stand, so he sometimes guided them with his voice, counting out loud as he walked beside them (“It’s one, two, three steps to Auntie Em”) and rapping his knuckles against props (“This is the door to the Emerald City”). When an eleven-minute-long musical number in Munchkinland called for actors to sway from side to side in unison, he held the students by the shoulders and moved them to the beat until they understood what was expected of them. “This is a visual thing, folks!” he said by way of explanation. He had to remind students to face one another as they delivered their lines and to turn toward the audience when they sang. “We’re not trying to fool anyone into thinking that the actors can see,” he told me. “But this production is for a sighted audience.”
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