Reuters News Service
Wednesday August 8
Comedian Kathy Buckley's Life No Barrel of
Laughs
By Sarah Tippit
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - She drove off a bridge and
erroneously received last rites. She lay on a beach and a lifeguard ran
her over with a jeep. Paramedics mistakenly pronounced her dead and
doctors told her she might never walk again. She found a boyfriend. Then
she got cervical cancer.
What more could happen to comedian Kathy Buckley?
A lot more. Buckley walked away from illnesses,
injuries and a wheelchair, to create a critically acclaimed one-woman
show, write a book, and create a comedy special based on her life, which
airs from Aug. 4 to 12 on PBS stations across the country.
Oh, and did anybody happen to mention that Buckley
is deaf?
``I'm not deaf, I just don't listen,'' the
irreverent Buckley, who bills herself as ``America's first
hearing-impaired comedienne,'' quips at the start of her new PBS special,
``Kathy Buckley: No Labels! No Limits!''.
In a telephone interview Buckley, a fortysomething
who resembles actress Paula Prentiss, explained (with help from a hearing
aid) that her show aims to inspire people by telling how she turned a life
of hell into a joyous, love-filled existence.
If rave reviews in the world's top newspapers and
laughing audiences are any indication, she seems to have turned her
illnesses, disability and bleak story into the stuff of comedy.
Born with a hearing loss that neither her parents
nor her doctors recognized until she was 8 years old, her teachers labeled
her as retarded and routinely gave her failing grades.
She stole candy and money to give to other students
in an effort to make them like her. They didn't.
FLUNKS OUT OF GRADE SCHOOL
Explaining a ``poor'' rating by a second grade
teacher in the category of ``using time profitably,'' Buckley quips, ``We
all know (that) is the cornerstone of second grade.''
Although she learned to speak and lip read, teachers
placed her in a special school for mentally and physically disabled where
she encountered a little boy who had no arm.
``He ticked me off,'' she tells her audience. ``He
kept that one arm at home just to make me mad. I got stuck with him every
day for 'Ring Around the Rosie.' It was bad enough I couldn't hear the
music. I had nothing to hold onto!''
Meanwhile, she traded lunches every day with a blind
girl, only realizing later that the girl never saw her make the trade and
quietly accepted her discarded peanut butter sandwiches as if they were
her own.
In the sixth grade Buckley got her first hearing
aid, during an era when technology was still quite rudimentary, and
quickly refused to wear it because all she could hear were her ''corduroy
pants rubbing together and my mother.''
In high school she grew to 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall
and later she didn't date because she ``couldn't hear the phone ring.'' At
19 she was run over by a lifeguard's Jeep while sunbathing at the beach.
``I finally did get something on top of me and it was a Jeep. I guess the
lifeguard didn't see my speed bumps.''
After the accident she was in and out of a
wheelchair for 2-1/2 years and told she might never walk again. Then she
was diagnosed with cervical cancer and underwent surgery.
When the cancer recurred she rejected a second
operation. ''I decided to take that incredible gift called choice,'' she
said, and embarked on a healing journey that involved changing her diet,
lifestyle, attitude about herself, and forgiving the people who hurt her.
She has remained cancer free for 16 years.
It was also at that point that Buckley's luck
changed. There had been numerous brushes with death, she said, and
although they were not self-inflicted, she felt that subconsciously she
may have been causing them. ``I just wanted to go. You want to go. You
just want the pain to stop,'' she said.
MAKING ``GOD'' PROUD
But suddenly she realized she had to rise above all
the labels and the hurts and learn to like herself to ``make God proud of
his creation'' and find her place in the world.
``I was looking in the mirror and didn't have a clue
who I was,'' she said, because she had so hated herself and, because she
was so severely judged by the world, she had spent all her energy focused
on trying to make others like her. Suddenly she became very angry at this
realization.
``I thought, 'How dare you say I cannot talk, I
cannot walk, I cannot have a (full) life. How dare me for listening to
you. There were constant negativities all over me and I bought it. I
believed I was retarded, dumb, deaf. It took that incredible gift called
choice to find out who I really was in the light of God.''
In 1988 Buckley entered a comedy contest on a dare
from a friend. Not only was she nervous because it was her first time
before an audience, she realized she was competing against scores of
seasoned comedians, and she was unable to hear the audience respond
because she didn't wear a hearing aid.
She won fourth place in the contest, got a hearing
aid, and proceeded to tour, playing major venues in top cities such as Los
Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Hollywood.
Did she encounter any disasters as she embarked on
her new career? ``It's been great for me but I'm deaf, what do I know?''
she shot back. ``The only bad show I had when batteries went dead in
Vegas. I told the audience 'Where's that freaking little Energizer Bunny
when you need him?''' she said, referring to the unstoppable bunny in
Eveready Battery commercials.
``I told them ... in the deaf world people 'applaud'
by raising their arms over their heads. They raised their hands over their
heads,'' she said.
Once, she said she was heckled by a blind man in
Hollywood: ''Leave it to a blind man,'' she said. ``I beamed my flashlight
on him and I go, 'Would you please put your lips in my light so I can read
them?' and he said, 'I can't -- I'm blind.'''
A 1991 documentary of her life, ``I Can Hear The
Laughter'' won an Emmy and her one-woman Off Broadway show, ``Don't Buck
With Me,'' won rave reviews in the New York Times.
During a recent motivational speaking engagement she
met motivational author Suze Orman, who urged her to mail a tape to PBS
and write an autobiography. So she did.
The book, ``If You Could Hear What I See: Lessons
About Life, Luck, and the Choices We Make'' (Penguin Putnam) was published
last month to coincide with her PBS special, which is not only marked by
stories of hardships but punctuated with the joyous moments.
For instance, in her 30s high tech enabled her for
the first time to hear detailed sounds such as the crinkling of paper, the
beep of an alarm clock, the chirp of a bird.
``A parrot! It talked to me!'' she tells the
audience. ``I was so amazed at this bird. I talked to it for a half hour.
By the time I was done with this bird it had a speech impediment!''
Her old alarm clock, which she placed under her
pillow at night and woke her with vibrations, she said, she ``strapped to
my thigh.''
Today Buckley lives the single life in Los Angeles,
and works her daily encounters with men and women into her comedy
routines. Recently she ran across a quadriplegic woman who despite being
completely paralyzed was able to operate a computer by blinking her eyes
toward electronic sensors.
``She writes two top-selling books by blinking her
eyes into her computer and she's married. ... I said, 'I hope you get pink
eye!'' she said.
The moral of Buckley's story, she said, can be
summed up this way: ``Don't pass judgement on people. There really are no
limits to what we can do with our lives. I appreciate my past now and
wouldn't change a thing because if I did I wouldn't have a routine right
now.''
Back to "In the
Press" |
