Check out Comedian Kathy Griffin's Visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center this Thursday

This week on Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, Kathy performs at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. From the previews, it looks like she visits the disabled soldiers in rehab. It looked like an interesting pop culture take on the subject, so I thought I'd put it out there. It is supposedly one of the only times that a camera crew has been inside the rehab facility at Walter Reed. This Thursday night 10/9 central (August 14th 2008).

If you aren't familiar with the show, Kathy Griffin is a moderately successful comedian who makes fun of everyone and everything, including herself. Her material is somewhat controversial, but nowhere near as racy as a lot of male comics. The show is a hilarious reality show about Kathy promoting herself and trying to become more famous, in a self-effacing sort of way. Kathy said about this episode:

I'm so proud of winning that battle with Bravo — they didn't want to make it a whole episode. But I'd found that those guys at the hospital — the majority were amputees — just have the sickest sense of humor and were so wanting to laugh and use humor to get through their situation, because that's how they deal. So I said to Bravo, "Go [bleep] yourselves — I'm not doing Frontline here, you know. I'll still be making a fool of myself and saying inappropriate things. But this'll be a window into what happens to these people that you're not gonna see on The [bleeping] Kardashians!"

Other cool stuff:

Cute article in the LA Times about teenage girls with visual impairments learning how to surf. It's a light fluffy piece that goes out of its way to emphasize the 'kids with disabilities are just like other kids' aspect. Cool picture to go along with the article.

This story from the St. Petersburg Times, "The girl in the window," is a moving profile of a little girl with developmental and physical disabilities that resulted from her extreme neglect from birth to age seven. With the love and support of the family that adopted her, she is learning to walk and talk and play for the first time at age 8. I thought it was a great portrayal of a child with a disability and what she and her family struggle with, without presenting the girl's life as a tragedy, or the parents as martyrs or heroes. Excellent journalism.

And finally, a Nike commercial, featuring Oscar Pistorius (he's at the very end). I'm not all about the Nikes, but this is a great commercial. I love the song, too (All These Things That I've Done, by The Killers).

Cool Bits of News About 2008 Beijing Paralympics and Olympians With Disabilities

The Paralympic Games in Beijing will start on September 6th. Learn about the twenty Summer Paralympic Sports at this website! Did you know that this year Rowing is a new event at the Paralympic Games? Do you know how to play goalball? Brush up there. Do you know about the different classifications for different events? Lots of great info on that site. Did you know the Summer Paralympic mascot is a cow? Neither did I. Apparently,

Cows, symbolic of a down-to-earth, diligent, staunch and never-say-die spirit, are adopted to show the unremitting spirit of athletes with a disability in being the best they can be. It dovetails with the upbeat spirit of Paralympians and the concept of "Transcendence, Equality, Integration" of the Beijing Paralympic Games.

The determined, optimistic and diligent spirit of cows reflects a positive attitude to life. The Paralympic Games calls for people with a disability to enjoy the same rights to compete in sports as anyone else, and to achieve sporting excellence and inspire and excite the World, and thus develop their strength to add vigor and vitality to social progress.

Yes, those cows and their never-say-die spirits...Hmm. The Olympic mascots are: a fish girl, a panda boy, a fire boy, an antelope boy, and a swallow girl.

Watch the Paralympics

This site, Paralympic Sport TV, will show news and events from the Paralympic Games, which start on September 6th, 2008. It is run by the International Paralympic Committee. Watch a cool trailer here. I don't know how much coverage they will feature.

If you live in the UK, details of Paralympics coverage on TV can be found here. They will air over six hours of Paralympic sport per day for twelve days.

In Australia, the ABC will broadcast over one hundred hours of Paralympic coverage. That's the most Paralympic coverage of any country. The schedule is here.

As far as I can tell, there will be little to no coverage of the Paralympic Games in the United States. A nice person from the US Paralympic Team website informed me that hopefully there would be news about some Paralympic coverage. I will keep you posted! I'm guessing there should at least be some televised specials. If anyone knows of any scheduled coverage, leave me a comment!

And finally! This year marks (I believe) the first time that an athlete will compete in the both Paralympics and the Olympics. South African swimmer Natalie du Toit, who I wrote about before, will compete in the Olympic 10 km open water swim ( a new event) as well as six different Paralympic swim events.

Unfortunately, Oscar Pistorius did not qualify for the SA Olympic team in either the individual or relay competitions. He will represent South Africa in the Paralympics and he plans to continue training in hopes of qualifying for the 2012 London Olympics.

In addition, Polish table tennis champ Natalia Partyka will compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic table tennis events. She is missing her right forearm and she competes left handed.

Images: Top: A cute little brightly-colored cartoon cow is the 2008 Paralympic mascot. A caption states her name in English and Chinese as Fu Niu Lele.

Bottom: Natalia Partyka, a young white woman missing her right forearm, strikes an athletic pose as she prepares to return the ball in a table tennis match.

Actors and Characters With Disabilities: RJ Mitte as Walter Junior on 'Breaking Bad"

The LA Times says that "although nearly 20% of Americans from the ages of 5 to 64 have some kind of disability, less than 2% of the characters on TV display one, and only one-half of 1% actually have speaking parts."

This year a new show on AMC debuted a great kid actor with a disability in a great role. The show is Breaking Bad starring Brian Cranston (who you may recognize as the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) as Walter White, a meek, middle-aged high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer. In desperation, Walter turns to creating and selling illegal drugs to get money for his treatment and to support his wife and son after his death. Cranston's portrayal is nothing short of incredible and I hope he gets an Emmy for his work on the show. Season One was fantastic, and I anxiously await Season Two in 2009. I would highly recommend this show to anyone (but it is DEFINITELY not for kids. Ok for teens though, with a strong anti-drug message).

Walter's son, Walter Junior, is a high school student with cerebral palsy. He walks with crutches and has somewhat slurred speech. Other than that, he is a typical kid, dealing with his disability and struggling to deal with his father's diagnosis of cancer. It is a strange world we live in when I can praise a show merely for having a disabled character who is realistic, not played for pity or tragedy, and portrayed by an actor with a disability, but there you go. Breaking Bad is a perfect example of how to have an interesting, well-rounded character with a disability.

The actor, R.J. Mitte, does a fantastic acting job in my opinion. He is believable and he has great comic timing. His character is sarcastic, in some ways immature, and in other ways wise beyond his years. Besides that, he has all-American boy good looks. I'd say he is a cutie-pie but if one were fifteen it would be fair to call him hunky. I'm hoping that we will see him in more roles after this one.

Watching the first episode, there was some debate in the Impossible Universe Household as to whether he had a disability or not. The matter was settled a few weeks later when I ran into him at a drugstore around the corner from my house (actor-spotting: a perk of living in LA, I guess). I wanted to tell him that he was great on the show, but I decided not to bug him because he's just a kid (14 or 15 I think). He was ahead of me in line patiently trying to buy a toy for his tiny outspoken sister, who was bouncing all around him making various demands. He did have CP, but a more mild form of it that his character Walter Junior-no crutches and somewhat clearer speech. So he does have a disability, but he is also 'acting' his disability. Unlike many tv actors, he was very handsome in person.

R.J. Mitte in USA Today
R.J. Mitte in LA Times
R.J. Mitte on the Breaking Bad website

I'll leave you with a quote from the LA Times article about him:

The people that are the guardians of storytelling in America claim to be the most creative people that there are. Yet, if you remember in elementary school and kindergarten, most kids had the eight Crayola box. That’s what most of the people in Hollywood are using. Eight crayons. They have the nice, handsome white guy, the beautiful white girl, sidekicks, a couple of others. I’m saying if you are really going to tell the story, you need the 64 Crayola box.

Image: R.J. Mitte as Walter White Junior. A handsome white teenager with shaggy brown hair looking away from the camera.