Party ‘Whiz’ Plans Outings for Disabled

From a distance, it looked like any other beach party: blue sky, white clouds, the Marina del Rey sand glistening in the sun, and a group of people gathered near a smoky barbecue.

But this was a party with a difference: Instead of deck chairs, there were wheelchairs.

At the center of things, greeting the new arrivals and generally making sure the 40-odd guests were well fed and entertained, was a remarkable woman named Sue Gordon.

Gordon, 45, has been organizing gatherings such as this for years. Using a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis, her vision impaired and her arms and legs almost paralyzed, she had spent the previous week scrounging for donations and volunteers, issuing phone invitations, ordering flowers, arranging transportation, preparing the menu and doing the shopping.

The payoff came Saturday as the party went off without a hitch. The guests chatted, joked, ate, drank and loafed in the sun, and lavished praise on their hostess.

Yvette Fletcher, 57, who has rheumatoid arthritis and must use a wheelchair, is one of Gordon’s many friends. The parties, Fletcher says, are a chance to get together with “some of the most beautiful people,” and a remedy for the times “when I feel 150 years old.”

Susan (Tink) Miller, an interim co-director of the Westside Center for Independent Living, which refers many disabled people to Gordon, calls Gordon a “single-handed whiz,” whose goal is to eliminate the patronizing attitude of many toward the disabled.

Arguing that the media tend to glamorize the “disabled who climb mountains or athletes who win races,” Miller said that such an attitude breeds a feeling of inferiority in the others who tend to compare themselves with the over-achievers.

She believes that broad changes in attitudes are needed. “The wheelchair is simply a means of transportation for people who don’t have the energy to walk otherwise,” she said.

“They have a right to fail,” Miller said, adding that one of the benefits of Sue Gordon’s parties is that they simply allow the disabled to get together “to talk about the drudgery of daily life with their peers.”

For Gordon, the parties are a chance not only to get together with friends, but to help them become aware of their abilities. The will to overcome adversity, she says, is strengthened when the disabled are made to feel “that they are as normal as anybody.”

Gordon smiles wistfully as she remembers the day, a decade ago, when she embarked on this new cause from the solitude of her spartan West Los Angeles apartment: “My friends disappeared after they found out I was no longer normal. But I wasn’t happy watching the world close on me. I had to fight.”

The fight has been long and, at times, trying. It takes a strenuous effort, Gordon admits, to steer the wheelchair to the table, pick up the phone and call her friends as she gears up for the parties that have become almost a monthly event.

Smiling, she taps her fingers on her head. “I have all the numbers here, about 80 of them.” The muscles in her frail arm seem--for a moment--to give up, and she nearly drops the phone. The calls are made, and she strains to put the receiver down, but then laughs, “feeling like a mother who has just called up her children.”

Gordon says it is her deep faith, her determination and the support of her family that have helped her escape the feelings of frustration and of being neglected that are commonplace for a disabled person.

Her own battle began in 1963 when Gordon was employed as a legal secretary and an escrow officer at a private company on Sunset Boulevard. “I got up one morning hearing the phone ring. When I picked it up, I banged it against my head. But being what I am, I put on my high heels and went to work.”

The First System

What had seemed an apparently innocuous slip of the hand turned out to be the first symptom of multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease that attacks the nerves. The symptoms are diverse, but usually involve some deterioration of muscular coordination and can include speech defects, vision impairment and extensive paralysis.

“I never wanted it. But I had no choice,” Gordon says. “I was typing 100 words a minute then. And I found that I could only type two. I remember reading six books a week. . . . Now I can read only large type. I can’t go dancing anymore.”

She learned to live with it. “I did what the Chinese do when it rains. I let it rain.”

And eventually, she learned from it. She says her disability has made her “more appreciative of the inner spirit and not what a person looks like. . . . It has given (me) a deeper insight into everything human, has made me much more sensitive, and it has showed me how generous people can be.”

Gordon became involved in the parties through the Westside Center for Independent Living in Mar Vista, an organization created to assist the disabled in areas such as job searches, training and advocacy.

At first, Gordon helped a center employee, Willie Jackson, organize the gatherings, then took over the responsibility herself about 10 years ago, after Jackson departed.

‘All My Children’

“I fell in love with the idea, and I realized I was good at it,” she says. “I started out with 20 people, and when last Christmas 95 people showed up along with a Santa Claus, I felt that they were all my children. Some were older than I was, but that didn’t make a difference.”

Gordon’s parents and brother have always helped her with shopping and other details.

Her mother, Shirley Schneider, says that “it gives me great pleasure to help. Had it not been for these parties, (the guests) would have remained shut-ins.”

For Gordon, the parties are a means of helping the disabled overcome the idea that “they can’t do a thing and they need help and pity.”

Gordon makes a point of charging her guests for party expenses because “they don’t want anything to be given to them.”

She says: “We may look different, but we have the same desires and needs as anybody else. We want to be loved, we want to have sex, we want to dance, we are as good and just as bad as normal people.”

This plea for acceptance was echoed by others at Saturday’s party.

Yvette Fletcher, who has been in a wheelchair for five years, said that the onset of a disability is akin to a death in the family--except that the disabled are still around to be treated as outsiders. “There is first the denial, then the anger and lastly, the acceptance. We hurt inside; we cry like other people. But they are not ready to accept us for what we can do.”