I noticed him when we first arrived at the theater. He was hard to miss – a paralyzed man in a wheelchair being pushed by a beautiful woman with thick black braids. His face was contorted and his head leaned significantly to one side. The large wheelchair chair was tilted back, La-Z-Boy style, and his white sneakers looked brand new, as they would I suppose. I guessed he was about thirty. I wondered how long he’d been like this. “Blind from birth is what you want,” a visually impaired friend once told me. “To not know any different.” This friend had become blind at age eight, and still had memories of colors, which occasionally brought him immense sadness. After he lost his sight, his dad would drive him to big grassy fields so he could run fast and fall down safely.
The man in the wheelchair is now parked in the front of the stage. We are all here to see the Mucky Duck Bush Band, an Australian folk trio who has played together for forty years. They sing wistful songs about pretty Irish girls and soldiers returning from war. One of the performers, a friend here in Perth, asked my daughters to dance on stage during one of their songs. The girls are next to me, slightly fidgety with anticipation. “I don’t remember some of the steps,” the younger one had confessed to me this morning.
“It’s ok,” I had responded. “Just smile and try to have fun. People like to see other people enjoying themselves.”
The musicians walk out on stage with their various string instruments and within seconds, I’m tapping my feet and grinning ear to ear. It’s the kind of music that makes me want to live somewhere with a wrap-around porch and a shirtless banjo-playing wheat farmer.
Just as my wheat farmer is serenading me on the veranda, a loud noise erupts from the front of the auditorium. It is a primal groan, like an animal giving birth. The noise clearly startles the crowd and people crane their necks to see where it came from. It is the man in the wheelchair. The performers shift their gazes slightly but seem undeterred. I imagine after forty years, they’ve seen and heard everything.
He groans again, and also several times during the next song, a little ditty about Marco Polo.
Over the course of the next few songs, the audience’s collective curiosity and uneasiness morph into compassion and acceptance. We get it. This is not the sound of someone in pain. This is the sound of someone having a blast.
The girls dance beautifully and we walk to the lobby at intermission to stretch our legs. The younger one quietly inquires, “Why was the man making all that noise?” We talk about disabilities and some of us learn the word inadvertent. And then we eat some chocolate and go back in for the second half of the show.
During a silly song about all the animals in Australia that can kill you, the man in the wheelchair is particularly vocal. My younger daughter leans over to me with a huge smile and whispers, “He’s really enjoying himself.”
“It’s fun to see people enjoying themselves, isn’t it?” I whisper back.
She nods and squeezes my arm.