Recognize this original "Rosa Parks of the Disabled Set" ?
EDIT - Terrific.. (sarcasm)
a long-time friend who's known me on-line and met me long ago off-line as well who I'd never guessed to have a problem with this, amazingly has just asked me who that is a picture of, he thought it was Yoko Ono. He's given me permission to say who he is. Its CharlesR. He's becoming pretty visually impaired himself these days due to age, diabetes and his own vitreous hemorrhages (which quite frankly, are a bitch. I will have to go to U of M for mine which is non diabetic in nature and would be healing, save for my Ehler's Danlos preventing it as well as making me a huge general anesthesia/operation risk).
To me that's a huge compliment to be confused with Yoko and we are the same height, however, dimsighted or not, if even he couldn't tell who that was maybe I'd better clarify:
That's not Yoko Ono.
That's me in 1994 still at the halfway house group-home still getting ready to attend the university which I hadn't yet, and thinking I was 'Rosa Parks of The Disabled Set' (a phrase I used a short while later online in autism chats once I accessed them from the university's internet system) and yes I was dressed like John Lennon at his Madison Square Garden concert (sort've) the idea of being able on the same plane as, being the same or equal or to be like others was a real new one to me and I was working all of this out and so of course I decided naturally to be try to like John Lennon and so I was (or thought I was). I even gave a verbal speech at the DRC at right around that time that went:
"We are in your schools, we are in your jobs, we are in your universities and we are in your world because its our world too. Thank you very much"
I doubt anybody understood a word I said (looking back on it), but at the time I thought they had, and I had glared around the room as I said it, as if I was saying the most profound daring liberating equality invoking meaningful civil rights activist advocacy thing in the world. I was going to change the world too, or so I thought.
as the saying goes:
That was then, this is now.
