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.

by Pamela Colloff

August 2008

(Page 4 of 4)

Three of the four lead roles—Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man—would be played by students who were totally blind. (Fortunately, Mr. P noted, the story called for them to link arms whenever they had to walk somewhere.) As rehearsals began, actors diligently learned their lines in braille and in large print, depending on their eye conditions. Multiply impaired kids who were not able to read still managed to memorize their lines by listening to audio recordings. Junior Amy Flores, a pretty brunette from Eagle Pass who could carry a melody effortlessly and could act to boot, had been cast as Dorothy. (Born premature, she had lost her vision when too much oxygen in her incubator had caused retinal damage.) She had taken a while to warm to the part, she told me, because she was “not the girly type.” She preferred to compete on the school’s wrestling team and bragged that she had once given an opponent a bloody nose. “In rehearsal, I have to practice sobbing like a girl and saying things like, ‘Oh, please don’t take Toto away from me!’” she said dispiritedly. “I wanted the part of the Wicked Witch.”

As opening night drew near, everything began to fall into place. Actors no longer ran into one another onstage, and they delivered their lines without faltering. Mary Faith, who had spent months scouring secondhand clothing stores, put the finishing touches on the nearly fifty costumes she had made with her sewing machine and the help of a few teachers who had volunteered their time. Kristy Sikes, who taught a cooking class, asked her students to help prepare treats for the reception, like “Tin Man’s Heart Sugar Cookies” and “Yellow Brick Road Cheese Crackers” and “Ruby Slipper Punch.” Each cup was painstakingly poured by the kids, each cookie carefully frosted, each “Scarecrow’s Haystack” arranged on party platters that they were unable to see themselves.

Backstage, before the curtain went up on the performance that I attended—the first matinee before opening night—there was palpable anxiety. Munchkins lined the walls, jiggling their legs up and down as they waited for their cue, and Dorothy stood alone, exhaling. Only Glinda the Good Witch seemed unfazed as she sat and read The Great Gatsby by herself, her nose buried so far into the large-print book that it looked as if she might disappear into it. A full house, made up mostly of parents and students, waited on the other side of the curtain.

“All right, folks, let’s do a quick roll call,” Mr. P called out. “Attention, please! Dorothy?”

“Here!”

“Auntie Em?”

“Here!”

“Uncle Henry?”

“Here!”

When he had finished, Mr. P addressed the cast. “Five minutes until curtain,” he said to the actors who had gathered around him. “Remember: Get your voice out there, commit to everything, and sing with all your heart. Go ahead and take places. Have a great show. Most of all, have fun!”

From the very beginning, when Amy delivered her first line—“Oh, jeepers, my heart is beating so loud I can hardly breathe!”—the play went off without a hitch. She made her entrance rushing down the theater aisle, sweeping her cane back and forth across the carpet until she had reached the stage, an exercise that she made look effortless. By the time she finished singing “Over the Rainbow,” the audience had erupted in cheers and whistles and applause. And yet it was Mariah Long, the Scarecrow, who nearly stole the show with her hammy ad-libbing. As she walked arm in arm with Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, she said in a stage whisper, “It’s like the blind leading the blind!” When she and Dorothy made their first stop along the Yellow Brick Road at an orchard and Mariah was asked if there were any apples to be found, she said, “I don’t know, I’m not seeing any!”

When the play came to an end and Dorothy was back home in Kansas—“Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home!”—the audience responded with a standing ovation.

Four hours before the prom, the air inside Dorm K was already thick with hair spray. The University of Texas’s Delta Gamma sorority had volunteered to help the girls do their makeup, and they busied themselves powdering noses and dusting eyelids and brightening cheekbones. Only a few of the girls who sat in their prom dresses as their hair was curled and swept back into updos could actually see their own reflections, but all of them wanted to look beautiful—whatever beautiful meant. Most of them asked for little touches that they could feel, like cascading ringlets fashioned with curling irons or tiaras or rhinestone appliqués for their nails. A slim, blond sorority girl who had been bent over Amanda Huston leaned back to examine her work. “You look so pretty!” she told Amanda through her interpreter. “Do you want anything besides lipstick?”

“Everything!” Amanda signed back.

Liz sat gazing into a compact, trying to apply her own mascara. She was absorbed in the challenge, slowly turning the wand as she coated each lash, then trying to catch sight of her handiwork in the mirror. One of the UT students wiped a smudge of mascara away from Liz’s face as she looked on, then marveled at her skill. “My hair’s done too. I just finished putting on hair spray,” Liz announced.

“Can I feel it?” asked Ashley Jones.

“Yes, but be careful—it hasn’t dried yet!” Liz warned. “Chasity, can you see me?”

Chasity, whose hair was pulled back into a French twist, walked over to Liz and leaned in close until she was just a few inches away. She peered down and smiled at the highlighted ringlets just below her nose. “Nice,” she said before padding back to her chair, barefoot.

“I’m going to the prom with a guy from McCallum,” Liz told Ashley.

Ashley looked stunned. “Does he know you go to the blind school?” she finally asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, he’s cool with it,” Liz said, as if it were no big deal. “His stepdad is visually impaired.”

By the end of the afternoon, everyone was ready. Girls walked across campus in glittering formal gowns, boys in suits and a few rented tuxes. As they made their way toward the school buses that waited to take them to the prom, girls stood unsteadily in their high heels and assessed one another’s dresses with their hands.

The theme that night was “Enchanted Garden,” and the ballroom at the Crowne Plaza was decorated with potted plants and modest assortments of flowers—nearly all of which had been strategically placed beside the entrance so that students would smell them when they walked in. Most kids put away their canes, preferring to hang on to a friend’s shoulder as they toured the ballroom. Once they had oriented themselves, they sat down to eat dinner, unfolding their napkins in their laps and showing off their good manners. When the time came, Tammy Reed seized the microphone and cried: “Welcome to the 2008 TSBVI prom!” The lights dimmed, and kids began to scream with excitement as they rushed out onto the dance floor. “I lost my date!” Chasity said as she hurried past me.

When I spotted Liz and the boy from McCallum, they seemed perfectly at ease around each other. He was tall and dark-haired and unfailingly well mannered; he couldn’t stay out too late, he told me, because he had to go to church in the morning. Liz occasionally steadied herself by holding on to his arm. They stopped dancing long enough to watch Liz’s best friend, senior Ashley Perez, be crowned prom queen. Afterward the party resumed, and kids in leg braces and walkers all made their way out onto the dance floor. No one hung back, not even Amanda Huston, who could not walk unassisted; instead, she was hoisted over the shoulders of a teacher’s boyfriend and spun around as she giggled uproariously. Liz and her date swayed back and forth to Selena’s “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,” laughing. “I walked into a walker and a chair tonight,” Liz told me later. “But I don’t think he noticed.”

Before the lights came up and it was time to go, students got in line to have their portraits taken. Under a white archway draped in silk wisteria vines, they stood and posed for the camera. Some were led to the arch by their residential instructors, who tilted their students’ chins so they would know which way to face. (“The camera is to your right,” a teacher reminded a girl who faced the opposite direction.) Other kids found their way on their own, then quickly tucked their canes out of sight. They smoothed their hair and straightened their collars and flashed their broadest smiles for their moment in the spotlight. Some looked overjoyed to be in front of the camera, others terribly vulnerable. They smiled as hard as they could and then went back to the dance floor.

Why was it so important to have your photograph taken, I wondered, if you couldn’t see the picture? “To prove that you were there—you know, ‘I was at the prom,’” Lee Jones told me. “Just like in a normal high school.”

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