Night Proves Very Special for Disabled

A disability doesn’t have to keep you down--with determination, it can inspire a career.

Actress Victoria Ann Lewis was proof of that when she brought her one-woman show, “Stuck,” to Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa on Saturday night.

Appearing at an Artists Showcase benefit for Very Special Arts California--a nonprofit organization based in Santa Ana that promotes creative expression in people with disabilities--Lewis mugged and deadpanned her way through a skit about the challenges of being disabled that had some members of the audience applauding with tears in their eyes.

Lewis, who is physically disabled due to a childhood bout with polio, is best known for her role as “Peggy” on the “Knots Landing” television series. She is also the founder and director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Other Voices Project, a play-development lab in Los Angeles that helps educate the public about the disabled experience.

Guests mingled with Lewis after the show, sipping wine and dining on pasta as they spoke with her at the Center Club.

“We still live in a world where there is discrimination against the inclusion of people with disabilities in the performing arts,” Lewis said. “Even someone as moderately disabled as myself.

“This show gives me the chance to talk about the complicated balance border I live on between higher art and no art, between being disabled and not being perceived as being disabled and between being politically committed and being an artist who has to protect that.”

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Very Special Arts California is a state affiliate of an international organization founded in 1976 in Washington by Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of President John F. Kennedy.

“Smith founded both the Special Olympics and Very Special Arts to provide the disabled with an opportunity to enjoy their God-given talent,” said Mickey Shaw, executive director of Very Special Arts California.

Besides an annual arts festival, Very Special Arts California runs an art gallery at its headquarters in MainPlace/Santa Ana. There, artists with disabilities such as cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury and schizophrenia have works on display.

“Many of the disabled have tremendous talent and can’t so much as take a picture of their art to send me a slide,” Shaw said. “It’s the little things that hang them up. They can’t market themselves. Things we take for granted are a major undertaking when you have schizophrenia or are a quadriplegic.”

Said Catherine Thyen, who chaired the showcase benefit with Katherine Wagner: “I have a special appreciation for Very Special Arts. Often, people look at disabled people as disabled and nothing else.”

A sampling of artwork from the gallery was on display at the Center Club reception. Watercolorist Roger Tait of Anaheim--who suffered a stroke nine years ago--looked on proudly as guests admired one of his paintings.

Painting has given Tait, 61, a renewed sense of freedom.

“I was a carpenter one day and flat on my back the next. Painting gives me the joy of seeing things as I want them to be.”

Married with two sons, Tait was a carpenter and artisan at the top of his field, creating everything from “furniture and children’s playhouses to stained glass windows” when he had the stroke.

Doctors theorize the diabetic with high blood pressure had “sticky blood that caused plaque to form in my arteries,” he said. “The plaque broke off and formed a clot that went to my brain.”

Tait and his wife, Miriam, were devastated by the rigorous demands and limitations of their new life. Feelings of sadness and hopelessness filled their days. Not only had he lost his ability to walk, he couldn’t so much as lift a hammer or cut a piece of glass, Miriam said.

But hope came when Miriam remembered her husband had once expressed an interest in learning to paint.

“I told him: ‘When you get out behind this eight-ball, let’s go pick up a brush, so you can do what you’ve always wanted to do.’ ”

Just the thought of going to art class drove Roger “out of his bed and into the world,” she said.

These days, Roger’s artworks--mostly watercolor depictions of the windmills that dot Holland, his ancestral birthplace--sell at the Very Special Arts California gallery for a minimum of $500 apiece.

And Roger and Miriam--who is also an artist--find great joy in painting side by side at their home studio.

“Art was one of the things that drew us together,” Miriam said. “Now it’s the thing that’s keeping us together. When we sit down and paint, there’s a quiet that comes--something takes over and we’re gone. For both of us to be gone at the same time in the same room in this quiet, creative place is so intimately profound. Sometimes, in the midst of it, we’ll just look at each other and break up laughing.”

For information on Very Special Arts California: (714) 835-8867.