Wheelchair Is No Obstacle for Vista Pageant Contestant : Unbridled Beauty

Like a determined infant, Gina Marie Erickson crawls awkwardly down the stairs of her Vista home--a former ballerina and dance instructor who can now only dream about the graceful steps of her past.

Outside, with the pain flashing across her face, she slowly lowers herself from a wheelchair into the shallow end of the pool. The 23-year-old college student, who once swam daily laps as a tuneup to her hectic dance and acting schedule, now finds the cool blue waters her last remaining solace.

“Ahhhh, that feels good,” she sighs, resting her slight frame beneath the surface. “This is one of the only places where I don’t feel any pain.”

Three years ago, a freak accident in a company stockroom crushed the young woman’s budding career and threatened to spoil a lifelong dream--to perform onstage and one day open her own dance studio for children.

With a shattered spinal cord and accompanying nerve damage, there were days when she could barely lift her head off her pillow. Doctors gave her little chance of ever walking again.

So the blonde-haired free spirit finally resigned herself to a hard reality. Not only were her performing days over, but she was now hopelessly dependent on others.

These days, though, Erickson is as busy as ever. She’s acting again, thanks to her participation in the Performance Art Theater of the Handicapped, or PATH. She has recorded two pilot episodes for a children’s program she would like to see produced. She’s singing. And, she’s even taking guitar lessons.

Soon, Erickson will act out another dream she once considered dead--an effort to become Miss America. In the fall, for the second time this year, the Santa Monica native will participate in a qualifying event for the country’s most competitive beauty pageant.

Her goal is to be the first Miss America to roll down the runway.

“I don’t think it would be a strange sight at all,” she said. “Hopefully, there will be a day where it won’t be unusual for someone in my position to do these things.

“If a man of color becomes a doctor, they don’t pat him on the head in some patronizing way and say, ‘Very good.’ Someday it will be the same for the physically challenged. It won’t be some novelty to see them going on with life, achieving things like everyone else.”

These newfound ambitions are partly due to Erickson’s deep Christian faith and her relationship with a special mentor--a former actress and model who was once wheelchair-bound.

There was a day when Cynthia Thornell’s future was as bright as the Las Vegas skyline. Twenty years ago, she danced onstage as one of Dean Martin’s floppy-haired Gold Digger dancers. She was a model for Ford Motor Co., with her face gracing billboards nationwide.

She did countless television commercials and was first runner-up for the 1976 Miss California Pageant. Then, two weeks before she was to sign a major movie contract, Thornell fell off a cliff in Santa Barbara and shattered both of her legs.

“When I fell, my career was wiped out,” Thornell said. “One casting director told me that if he ever needed a wheelchair victim, he’d give me a call. Nobody cared about how much talent I had.

“All they cared about was that I was in a wheelchair. They were blind to everything else I had to offer. It was ugly. Talent didn’t matter anymore. And I never wanted to see that happen again.”

Through sheer determination, Thornell learned to walk again. And, she continued in her efforts on behalf of others who were physically challenged. In recent years, she began working as a PATH volunteer, coaching disabled actors and performers in workshops aimed at showcasing their talents to the Hollywood casting community.

That’s when she met Erickson, who had joined the group as a way to revive her singing and acting career. Thornell was immediately struck by the young woman’s poise and beauty. And, she was shaken by the stories of her past.

“When I met her, I realized just how close our situations were, how we both had so much unused potential,” she recalled. “And so I suggested that Gina enter the Miss America pageant. Because she had a right to do it, if that was her dream.

“There are (millions of) disabled people in this country, and they come from all walks of life. And here was a beautiful girl who belonged in that pageant.”

Thornell was tired of seeing talented performers ignored because of their disabilities. Though some performing venues are being opened to the handicapped, others are needed, she says.

Today, she says, disabled actors even perform in the “beautiful-people world” of television soap operas. But just last year, a 26-year-old deaf woman was disqualified from a Miss America pageant qualifying event because officials decided her interpreter gave her an unfair advantage.

“There have been strides made by the handicapped,” Thornell said. “But beauty pageants are definitely the last frontier.”

In April, with her new emotional mentor behind her, Erickson entered her first Miss America qualifying event in North County. When she filled out the application, there were no questions concerning use of wheelchairs, so she never disclosed her disability.

And so there was some whispering and raised eyebrows when she wheeled into the competition hall.

“I almost chickened out before I went in there,” Erickson said. “I knew I would face some negativity, and I thought ‘Do I want to face that?’ And my final answer was ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ Even if they had to search for a loophole to prevent me from competing, I knew I had a right to be there.”

Erickson was ready for the worst.

“Right off, the director looked at me and said, ‘Oh, are you one of our contestants?’ There was just disbelief. She told me that, in her 30 years working with these pageants, she had never run into anything like this.”

Erickson didn’t place in that first competition, but she is determined to try again at a second San Diego-area qualifying event in the fall.

Mary Bye, state field director for the Miss America Pageant, said it isn’t impossible for a disabled contestant to win the coveted crown.

“Nothing would surprise me,” she said. “We had one former winner with one leg shorter than the other. We’ve had others without the perfect figure or without the usual amount of talent. So I guess anything can happen.”

For the longest time, however, Erickson didn’t believe all things were possible. Maybe, she says, it was the freakish nature of her accident.

Back then, Erickson was an energetic 20-year-old who coached youngsters in the complex movements of ballet and dance. She had dreams of winning a scholarship to perform in Russia and one day attending an Ivy League college.

But everything changed in the summer of 1989. That’s when Erickson took time off from her college studies and began a temporary job for a major perfume maker.

One day, while holding a case of perfume under one arm, she tugged at the lowest drawer of a filing cabinet. At first sticking shut, the drawer suddenly released, sending Erickson sprawling onto her back on the concrete floor--the 150-pound drawer and its contents landing on top of her.

“When I tried to get up, my back felt like Velcro pulling apart,” she recalls. “There was a ripping and burning sensation. The pain was almost unbearable.”

The accident left her with three herniated discs in her lower back and damage to her spinal cord. There was little hope, doctors said, that surgery could correct her problem.

Suddenly, Erickson’s athletic life came crashing down around her. Her days of teaching ballet and dance were over. With the use of a cane and a walker, she could at first move about, however slowly, with assistance.

But she was also subject to blackouts and, after several falls, even that limited mobility was denied her. Ballet, which once was as much a part of her life as breathing, was now emotionally painful to watch.

And her injury continued to cause her pain. With the help of a therapist, she was able to locate two positions in which the piercing stabs of discomfort were eased.

She grew accustomed to the wheelchair, and to crawling around the two-story house she shares with her mother, Toni Erickson, in Vista’s Shadowridge.

“It was like living through hell,” Toni Erickson said of her daughter’s experience. “It was an unending thing, the pain she went through. She had so much talent. And here she was forced to re-evaluate everything in her life.”

The most difficult task was coming to terms with her new dependency, of often having to be carried around by friends and nurses.

“I had once defined myself by my independence,” she said. “At a young age, I had graduated early from high school, operated two dance studios and run my own business. And all of a sudden, I had to allow someone to help me. I hated it. But it was part of my new life.”

Her life became a mental replay of past accomplishments. But just when her self-pity ran the strongest, Erickson heard a speaker at her local church. The message: “I am not what I have done. I am what I am doing now.”

That’s when something snapped inside Gina Erickson. She got active.

She began performing for children at local libraries. Along with friend Emily Just, she produced two pilot programs for a children’s TV show she is trying to get produced.

Despite her pain, Erickson came alive again.

“During the television shooting for the pilots, I saw just how much pain she went through in the dressing room. It hurt her to move, to breathe, to put clothes on,” Just said.

“But when she got out in front of the kids, you could never tell. Outside that dressing room, nobody ever could tell how badly she suffered. Nobody. It was like her job, and she had to do it. That’s all there was.”

Now, Erickson also is active with PATH, commuting regularly to Hollywood to participate in seminars, even though she must take extra pain medicine to make the trip.

She is even watching ballet again, and has decorated her home with pictures of her favorite performers. And, from the waist up, the soft-spoken Erickson still feels like a ballerina, moving her head and arms in graceful movement during daily exercise routines.

While she is performing in PATH stage productions in both Los Angeles and Carlsbad and has received some television work, some goals remain elusive. One is to teach dance to children. The other is to one day open a dance studio for the blind.

“Through my worst moments, the children were so compassionate with me,” she said. “There were no uncomfortable stares. Some would come up to me and empathize, saying things like, ‘I broke my arm once.’

“Meanwhile, some adults would have rather crossed the street than confront me. It was like what I had was catching. Well, I have something to pay back to these children.”

But first, there’s the matter of the Miss America contest.

While she would rather glide across the stage in high heels, Erickson said she and her wheelchair will do just fine through the swimsuit, evening wear and talent competitions--despite the inevitable gawks and whispers.

When she’s done with that, Erickson said she might just tackle some other public prejudices about people with handicaps.

“Cynthia (Thornell) and I were talking just the other day about this new overweight Barbie doll on the market,” she said. “And we thought ‘Why can’t a Barbie in a wheelchair be next?’ ”