The AC Story

Congratulations to all the performers in A Year with Frog and Toad.  You made the production an outstanding success.  All week people have been asking me, “What inspired you to want to do a production with students and individuals with disabilities?” 

To fully answer that question, I want to tell you a story about a girl named Nora.

I first met Nora nine years ago. For both of us it was our very first day at the University of Miami Summer Theater Academy.  Nora was a student and I was the new director.  The Summer Theater Academy is a six-week intensive theater program for kids ranging from 1st grade to 11th grade.  They attend classes from 9:00 am – 4:00 pm and at the end of the summer we produce a spectacular, spectacular for all the parents.

I was introduced to Nora after first period.  One of my teachers, John B., came to my office with a problem.  John is an actor and rather good looking (this is important for the rest of the story.)  Apparently, after he introduced himself to his first period acting glass,  a girl in the front row started saying under her breath, “Hubba, hubba, hubba!  Hubbba, hubba, hubba!  Hubba, hubba, hubbba!” and she wouldn’t stop, no matter what he did for the full forty-five minutes.  

This is how I met Nora.  Nora has autism, and at eight years old, had not yet learned to control all of the impulses she felt.  Nora was also entertaining, brilliantly funny, and a bit of a handful.   At school she had a one-on-one aid and many of her classmates attended camp and brought with them a great deal of animosity from Nora’s behavior in school.  “Crap.” I thought.  “There is no way we can handle this.”  I spent the rest of my first day trying to come up with a good way of explaining to Nora’s parents that there was just no way we could accommodate someone with Nora’s special needs.  There were so many reasons: my staff wasn’t properly trained, Nora was a disruption in the classroom, I was unsure of how to discipline someone with a disability.  Mostly, I was just afraid. 

Luckily for me my fears did not win out that day.  As the kids lined up to go home at the end of the day, there was Nora with her headphones on, singing at the top of her lungs to the music from the musical Hairspray.  And there was no way I was going to send someone with that much enthusiasm for theater and life away.  For the next eight years we made it work. We had our systems of discipline and Nora had her routine.  Every day as her mom picked her up from camp she would lean out the car window and shout, “So long suckers!”   

Even Nora’s classmates came around.  When I first met them they were frustrated and uninformed and had turned into Nora’s tormentors.  But one afternoon I asked them, “Aren’t you the weird theater kids?  How are you treated in school?”  I could tell by their faces that the answer was “not great!”  “Then how can you treat someone who is different badly?”  They didn’t have an answer, but their behavior changed overnight.  No longer were they getting Nora to eat old gum off the bottom of desks.  Now they had become her protectors and with each successive year of camp they taught all the newbies to respect Nora as well.

Eight years later, Nora is attending an audition-only performing arts high school.  I hope to see her on American Idol or Broadway any day now.  Eight years later and I look back on the decision to keep Nora as part of our summer theater family as one of the best in my life. 

So how could I not want to do “Frog and Toad.”  The performance was wonderful, but for me the highlights were watching the students back stage helping the Sunmount consumers into costume, or wishing them good luck, or laughing that in their nervousness about performing they had bad gas.  This is the power of performing arts for me.  It brings people, no matter how different, together in the common mission of creating art.  And from that ability to express ourselves as an inter-dependent group, magic can happen.  I’ve seen it.

Thank you Nora.

 -Stephen Svoboda

Executive Director