A Date With Not Just the Girl, but the Mainstream

I never foresaw writing a column about two teenagers going to the homecoming dance together, but then I heard about Cinthia Landau and Jeff Mattson.

Let’s start with Cinthia, a 16-year-old sophomore at Dana Hills High School. She’s going to break some hearts in her life, hopeless victims of her buoyant personality and budding beauty. She wants to be an actress someday, but for now lives in the lap of luxury in one of Laguna Niguel’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

A couple Saturdays from now, Cinthia will curl her hair, put on a long black dress and get ready to meet her homecoming date. Girls like her have been doing that for a long time.

In another time and place, Cinthia’s date would have been the high school quarterback. Or a reasonable facsimile. Or, at least, someone with a car.

He wouldn’t have been a red-haired, freckle-faced guy who doesn’t even come up to Cinthia’s shoulders. He wouldn’t have been a 19-year-old who can’t read at the high school level, drive a car or count his money. In short, he wouldn’t have been Jeff Mattson, who has Down syndrome.

In the world I grew up in, girls like Cinthia Landau didn’t go to homecoming with boys like Jeff Mattson.

I asked Cinthia how it came to be that, on Nov. 14, she will. She says it stems from her twice-weekly sessions as a student aide working around Jeff and other disabled students at Dana High.

“I like helping people, and I love those kids,” Cinthia says. “You get attached to them easily.”

And when she found out that Jeff wasn’t going to homecoming . . .

“I didn’t feel like I was obligated to go with Jeff,” she says. “I just really wanted to.”

She asked him, and he accepted.

Sitting in her living room last week, I tell Cinthia of my doubts that anybody from my high school days would have invited someone with Down syndrome to something as big as homecoming.

She nods, knowing what I mean. She knows about the glamour culture that surrounds her. “For me, a beautiful person is someone who shows beauty from the inside,” she says. “You could have tons of zits on your face and your hair can be a total mess, but you could be really nice to people and be the most beautiful, important person.”

She’s sensitive to how her date with Jeff will come across in the newspaper. She’s not doing it for publicity (I learned of it through the grapevine), and she’s not doing it out of pity.

In fact, she’s learned a lot from the 30 or so disabled students at Dana Hills, whose disabilities range from Down syndrome to cerebral palsy to blindness, according to an assistant principal.

“When I first thought about being an aide,” Cinthia says, “I thought it was going to be kind of depressing to see these kids and that they don’t have the faculties like we do. But when I’m with them, they lighten up my day. They’re so happy. All they want is someone to talk to. They want someone who will talk to them as real friends. That’s what aides are for, someone to talk to them like a kid would.”

She describes Jeff as “a happy kid, but he’s kind of aware of what he doesn’t have, so sometimes he gets kind of shy and backs off.” She plans to show him the ropes at homecoming and “teach him how to dance, whatever.”

Uh, that won’t be necessary, according to Jeff’s mother, Carlene Mattson.

“He’s a great dancer,” she says.

Her son has been involved in national Down syndrome events and is making progress toward independence, Mattson says. He writes for a publication with a Down syndrome readership, and he’s also shown he can handle some workday chores at a video store. Money is a difficult concept for him, but his long-range plans include marriage.

Typical of parents of disabled children, Mattson says she has to fight the impulse to overprotect Jeff, whether he’s getting involved in sports or dating.

“My greatest fear is that he will develop a crush” on Cinthia, Mattson says. “I’m hoping he feels that she’s his friend, but knowing him and that he’s a great romantic, I’m sure he’s hoping it’s more than that.

“He had originally asked a developmentally disabled girl to go to homecoming, and she turned him down,” Mattson says. “Then he came home one day and said Cinthia asked him to go with her. His comment was, ‘Mom, she picked me!’ ”

Since then, Carlene has talked with Cinthia and her teachers and is confident of her good intentions.

“If he gets his heart broken, everybody does that at some point, and it will be OK,” Mattson says. “There have been lots of things he’s experienced that are just harder for him. Someone is always faster, someone is always smarter, but that doesn’t mean you don’t participate.”

So, with everyone’s blessing, Cinthia and Jeff have a date.

“He has a great little sports jacket, slacks and a necktie that he likes to wear,” Mattson says of the big night.

Even with homecoming two weeks off, Cinthia’s invitation has already been valuable, Mattson says. It has delighted her son and nudged him closer to the mainstream of American life.

She recalls that in the days after Jeff’s birth, she couldn’t help but make a mental list of things he’d never do. On the list, she says, was going to the big high school dance.

A lot of things have been scratched off the list over the years, she says. Her son has had a happy life and has been “an incredible asset to our family.”

And now, he’s got a date with a pretty girl for homecoming.

About which Carlene Mattson says: “As a parent of a child with a disability, it doesn’t get better than this.”