The Power of "Blindness Girl"

Among all the world’s superheroes "Blindess Girl" has the most misleading name.  You know, with your standard run of the mill comic book action figures you get what you’re promised: Batman looks like a
cave dwelling fetishist, Captain America looks like a cross between Buster Crabbe and Evil Knievel (at least he used to).  But Blindness Girl is suprisingly ordinary: she’s the "girl next door"– she looks like the young Patty Duke–except in fact, she’s not even blind.

The really really cool thing about Blindness Girl is that she can see but she doesn’t know how to think about the stuff she observes.  When she sees Dick Cheney she doesn’t perceive a man who looks like a gargoyle on a French cathedral, no, she sees the man’s inner beauty.  (Yes, this is a wildly improbable "power", one that only Blindness Girl possesses, but as you will see, it makes her very heroic.)

It is rumored that Blindness Girl got this power by attending Bard College and studying the contemporary art scene, but no one knows for sure.  Others say she got the power from hanging out with real blind people on the corner of 23rd Street in New York City.

It doesn’t matter how she got the power.  Blindness Girl is the one you need to call when you’re having a family reunion and you require someone who can see the inner beauty of your Uncle Mert who most days drinks a bucket of vodka and shoots rats in the barn with a German luger.  Blindness Girl sees that Uncle Mert loves genetically advanced roses and that he secretly loves the second inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln.  She convinces him to buy a new  pair of Hush Puppies and to trade his vodka for Zinfandel and she also gets him to swap the luger for a set of digitally remastered Montavanni records.  The Montavanni records are a "win win" because it turns out even the rats like the music.

Blindness Girl can go into a teenager’s bedroom.  She can ride mass transit in Philadelphia.  The sight of James Carville on "Meet the Press" doesn’t terrify her.  She doesn’t think that fat people are funny or that they have character flaws.  She isn’t impressed by your Rolex.  She thinks a few dandelions in the yard are nice.  Blindness Girl thinks Rosie O Donnell has a few saving graces.  She also thinks there’s some inner beauty lurking in "the Donald". 

Like I said, this is a rare power.

Blindness Girl can recite the Sermon on the Mount in every known language.  She can also read Braille and speak ASL.

She is a very good friend of the Dalai Lama and she likes hanging out with Whoopi Goldberg.

Children love her because she’s like Pippi Longstocking.  No one needs a bath and you never need to change your clothes.

S.K.   

(Caption: Our Blindness Girl is a cute cartoon of a girl with a round face, big eyes, a half smile.  She’s got red hair with bangs and she’s wearing a royal blue costume with a green emblem on her chest, a green cape and green boots.)

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto