Synopses & Reviews
In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.
About the Author
Terry Galloway is a deaf, queer writer and performer, who tours her one woman shows as a cheap way of seeing the world. She has performed her solo shows "Out All Night and Lost My Shoes" and "Lardo Weeping," in venues ranging from the American Place theater in New York to the Zap Club in Brighton, England. In Austin Texas she gained a reputation for playing comic male roles as a student and Research Associate for the University of Texas' alternative Summer Theater Festival, Shakespeare at Winedale. She's also known as one of the founding members of Austin's wildly popular 6th street cabaret Esther's Follies and as the founder of Actual Lives, a writing and performance workshop for adults with and without disabilities. In Tallahassee, Florida she is the Head Cheese of the Mickee Faust Academy for the REALLY Dramatic Arts and the co-founder of the Mickee Faust Club, a performance group responsible for the award-winning video parodies, "Annie Dearest, The Real Miracle Worker, " featuring lots and lots of wah-wah, and "The Scary Lewis Yell-a-thon," featuring a Jerry Lewis look-alike and a bevy of inspirational cripples. She writes as well as performs and you can find her articles, monologues, poems and performances texts in, among other publications,
Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp, Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater,
Out of CharacterRants, Raves and Monologues from Today's Top Performance Artists,
Plays from the Women's Project,
Texas Monthly Magazine,
Austin Chronicle,
American Voice,
The Dolphin Reader, and numerous anthologies about queerness, deafness, disability, theater, and Elvis. She has been a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, Florida State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. She's won a variety of awards including an NEA, a J.Frank Dobie Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, grants from the Texas Commission of the Arts and the Florida Divisions of Cultural Affairs, 5 Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards, 3 Prindi National Public Radio Commentary Awards, and a Best Swimmer Award from the Lions Camp for Crippled Children. She splits her time between Austin Texas, and Tallahassee, Flordia where she lives with her long-time love Donna Marie Nudd, a professor at Florida State University and their cat Tweety.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Nine
Part I: Drowning
Them and Me
Visions
Presto Change-o
Meaner
The Performance of Drowning
Lost Boy
Part II : Passing
Little-d Deaf
On Being Told No
Passing Strange
Drag Acts
Shhhhhh!
Jobs for the Deaf
The Shallow End
Part III : Emerging
Scare
Who Died and What Killed Them
Why I Should Matter
Epilogue: A Happy Life . . .