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Push Girls Episode 2 review: Watch Me
After a great intro on the four girls in Episode 1, the show gets deep and dirty. SPOILERS AHEAD **** “Once a dancer, always a dancer,” Auti says in the second episode of the series, after revealing her tragic injury story (on the night of her injury, she sold herself for $500 to a male friend to pay rent). And Mia shares she might be too strong. “Sometimes I don’t think I have any tears left to cry.” Gotta love Angela’s meditation sounds. Maybe it helps her deal with her paralysis? And in a scene at Tiphany and Angela’s house (they’re roommates), Tiphany transfers out of her chair onto a…
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Why I Run My Site
I received a beautiful letter validating the very reason why I’ve been running this site, Beauty Ability, since 2003. It came from the mother of a 17 year old girl who recently found my site. Having “up there” confidence and thinking you’re beautiful is never easy when you’re a teenager, let alone when you’re in a wheelchair. Hi Tiffiny, I found you through my daughter Leanne. Leanne has Spina Bifida and uses a chair. We live in the country and she is the only person here that uses a chair. She has gone through all of her life with no true peers and now that she is 17 and watching the world go…
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Push Girls: Reality TV Finally Finds Us
I wrote more about what “Push Girls” means to me for Easystand. Check it out: Push Girls premiered last Monday, the new reality show on the Sundance channel profiling four “hot babes” in wheelchairs. As a babe in a wheelchair myself (hey I’ve been called that), this show is the televised messiah I’ve been waiting for. The show’s premise – showing the world that you can still be beautiful, have a full life, a great job, have men that want you, and still drive a fabulous car (has been my personal goal since my injury). You have no idea how frustrating it is for people to be shocked when you can achieve any of…
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Locomotor a waste of time?
Maybe I’ve been paralyzed too long, but there are a bunch of new therapy programs out there that I question. Let me preemptively say that locomotor training has a lot of great benefits (it’s good for weight-bearing, making your muscles move, organ-hanging party time). It’s a pretty intense therapy where they strap you into a harness (that’s attached to a bar above your head) and hang you above a treadmill. Read this entry
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SCI Superstar: Jesse Billauer
The ocean can be a dangerous place. Sharks, big waves with multiple personalities, fugly Man o’ Wars, but you don’t have to tell Jesse Billauer this. He’s a born and bred Cali boy who came out of the womb with a surfboard attached to the hip. Jesse, at 17, was living the semi-charmed life of a California teenager – young, athletic, gorgeous (still is) and staged to be one of the next big surfers; it was an idyllic life. But his world turned upside down in 1996 when the crest of a wave threw him off his surfboard. Jesse hit his head on a sandbar and became a C5-6 quadriplegic…
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A spoon, a girl and a cell phone
Long ago when I was a newbie in rehab, they sent me home with a reacher as my designated method for picking up stuff on the floor, and then life happened. Sans-reacher, you have to use a lot of crazy stuff – a broom, a stick, a grocery bag, even a big saggy purse – to pick up stuff from the floor (people with disabilities are ninjas of creative solutions when they have to be). And in this video by Annemarie Hopkins, a wonderful woman who founded 3eLove.com (and sadly passed away in ’09), proved you can do a lot more with a kitchen spoon than just stir tomato soup.…
