Acting on Determination

When she was paralyzed from the waist down by a car crash last year, Valorie Grear feared her days as a college drama teacher were over.

She would never be able to handle the physical demands of a forceful stage marshal, she worried.

But a month after returning to her theater arts classes at Pierce College, Grear has become the star of her own drama, determinedly resuming her career in a wheelchair and winning the admiration of her students.

“It certainly hasn’t affected her character,” student Louis Wheeler said. “If anything, she’s a stronger person--if that’s possible.”

In July 1995, Grear was attending a reunion in Tennessee of the cast of an early-1970s production of “Hair” by the Memphis State University theater department. An accident during that trip left her with a spinal cord injury.

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Now she is teaching again, albeit with a much lighter schedule, and she has given up directing for now. Although she tires easily, she is pleased to be back, she said.

To accommodate her return, Pierce officials altered the performing arts building to make it more accessible to wheelchairs.

“They’ve been incredibly supportive in addressing whatever needs I might have,” Grear said. The plant facilities director, Dave Bush, “walked through the building step by step and wrote down everything that would have to be changed,” she said.

Her husband of five years, Paul Nordberg, an art instructor at Pierce, said he had misgivings about Grear going back to work only a year after the accident.

“I had mixed feelings about it,” he said. “It’s such an ordeal to get here and put herself at risk on the road. But on the other hand, I’m glad to see her feeling well enough to be here.”

Grear travels to and from her Woodland Hills home in a vehicle equipped with special hand controls. Another recent milestone, she said, was being able to pick up her 13-year-old daughter from gymnastics practice and do other “motherly things that I hadn’t been able to do.”

Grear said her disability has made her realize how much she enjoys teaching.

“I found out how important my work is, what a privilege it all is,” she said.

But she has had to adapt her teaching to make up for the inability to stand or move her legs.

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One freshman admitted that when he saw Grear wheel into the classroom at the beginning of the semester, he was skeptical that she would be able to teach him to be a more physical actor.

“But the chair disappeared after a while,” said Dominic Garcia, 18. “It wasn’t an obstacle. . . . I think it provokes me to work harder, to see what she has accomplished.”

Grear also said that when she is in the classroom, the chair seems to vanish.

“The focus is not on me and what’s happening,” she said. “It’s on my students and the exchanges with them.”

Although her doctors have said they do not expect her to walk again, Grear tries to be optimistic.

“There is now more hope for an eventual cure for spinal cord injuries because of the research being done,” she said.

And her students said that just as they knew she would be back at school, they are confident that one day she will walk again.

“It’s going to take a lot more than this to stop her,” said Josh Ryan, who had performed in several of Grear’s productions at Pierce.