"Disability, schmisability," announces journalist and former war correspondent John Hockenberry as he wheels onto the stage.
Paralyzed in a car accident at 19, Hockenberry believed "the mechanisms within me to adapt to physical change were part of my wiring." Describing how people reacted differently to his wheelchair-bound for once he put colored lights on the front wheels, he says they realized that "he's not trying to escape the machine. He's integrated with the machine."
Hockenberry then talks about the typewriter, invented in the early 19th century as a tool allowing the blind to write. "An inquiry into the nature of human deficits producedd a device that is ubiquitous," he says.
Then he mentions Beethoven, who mapped hearing abstractly onto his brain: "The ears are important, but you don't need them."
