Four
years ago she shaped her stand-up routine into an autobiographical play
called "Now Hear This!" Imagine the Book of Job written for
laughs. Ms. Buckley described how she was incorrectly labeled retarded as
a child, told she had cervical cancer when she was 27, and was run over by
a lifeguard's jeep while lying on the beach.
Now
PBS is presenting "Kathy Buckley: No Labels, No Limits," a
one-hour program tonight based on her play. She's an extraordinary
performer who unabashedly indulges in shtick and sentimentality as she
slyly probes her unusual world view. Her rendition of her life is
fascinating, even when she lapses into her other professional role —
that of motivational speaker — with jokes like, "I've put a deaf
ear on negativity."
Ms.
Buckley's autobiographical material is funny and painful in part because
it's so recognizable. What child hasn't been cruelly treated by a teacher
or a classmate over a misunderstanding? But in her case, the
misunderstandings were catastrophic: her hearing impairment was
undiagnosed for years, a problem that affected her schoolwork so severely
that she was considered retarded.
"I
was 8 years old when they caught on it was a hearing loss," she
recalls. "And they call me slow?'
Her
mother becomes part of the punch line in a story about a hearing aid Ms.
Buckley's parents bought her when she was a girl. It so distorted and
amplified sound that the swish of corduroy trousers became a distracting
noise. "All I could hear were my pants and my mother," she says
in her routine, explaining why she threw the hearing aid away. Later, as
an adult, she benefited from a hearing aid, though she found
disadvantages, like traffic noise.
Tall
and skinny, Ms. Buckley speaks in the sluggish rhythms of someone who had
to learn speech without hearing it. Her fierceness is most palpable when
she blows up a balloon and puts it against her throat to demonstrate that
she has figured out how to sing. She proceeds with "Over the
Rainbow" and stays remarkably on key.
KATHY
BUCKLEY: NO LABELS, NO LIMITS
WLIW,
tonight at 9 (Channel 21 in New York)
Produced
by TPT St. Paul/Minneapolis. Richard Hudson, Jay Bakerink and Kathy
Buckley, executive producers; Lee Carey, producer; Jeff Weihe, director;
Allison Brown, editor; Gerald Richman, executive in charge.
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