As I emerged from the accident, I learned there was more to recovery than focusing on my own healing. There was a world of people out there I had to consider—all who had their thoughts about who I should become. Two years of high school drama paid off well. I already had the skills to portray myself on the outside as something completely different from how I felt on the inside. I was also quickly figuring out how to align myself with other people’s expectations.
When I was home recuperating after my hospital stay, one of Mom’s friends gave me a copy of Reader’s Digest with a page dog-eared, pointing to an article about an amputee who had scaled a mountain. In an attempt to give me hope, many people had begun to relay such stories to me of amputees they knew or heard about who had defeated the odds in one magnificent way or the other. But I wasn’t inspired by those stories or by the Reader’s Digest article at first; instead, I was privately horrified that anyone would dare compare me to a mountain climber. What people assumed would be motivational stories only served to mount the pressure of who I was apparently supposed to become. Another of Mom’s friends knew an amputee, a college girl, who offered to talk to me about her experiences living on one leg. She came over a few weeks after I returned home from the hospital. When she walked into the room, a slight hitch in her gait, I wrote her off immediately: she was gorgeous, blonde, and thin. When she told me she had been a cheerleader in high school, my jaw dropped. How did she jump around for her routines? This was who they wanted me to model myself after? There was no way I could follow in her footsteps. Where was the demented crazy person who has torn all her hair out in anger and frustration? Now that would be someone I could emulate. No one expected anything special from me when I had two legs, but now that I had lost one, I had to be the Disabled Role Model of the Universe? Before the accident, I didn’t like running on two legs, and now I was supposed to be superhuman on one? Was this fair? I didn’t appreciate those stories, because I didn’t want to play the part of an inspirational amputee. But I could tell people didn’t want me to go back to just being me—minus a leg. Everyone saw this as an opportunity for me to finally be something special.
And as much as I balked—as terrified as all this pressure made me feel—some small voice inside me was buying in. My situation did make me special. And what adolescent girl doesn’t want to be extraordinary?
The morning of my first day back at school, I was sick to my stomach with fear. I had been away for four weeks, and I didn’t know what to expect. Everyone I knew from school had been supportive. I’d received cards from so many people at school: the entire drama department, the cheerleading squad, and even the football team. Even so, I wasn’t assured that people wouldn’t treat me like a freak when I walked around school on crutches with a metal pylon—my temporary leg. When I went back to school in eighth grade after Dad died, I felt like people avoided me like the plague. If people reacted that strongly to death, how would they react to dismemberment?
Mom drove me the three miles to school. My first greeting was on the school’s big reader board: “Welcome Back, Colleen.” In a school of 1,800 students, it was unusual to see anyone’s name on the reader board, let alone just one student’s. “Oh look, Colleen, look at the sign! Isn’t that so sweet?” Mom was absurdly cheerful in her typical manner. The sign did make me feel special, and my stomach settled down a bit, but I also wondered if most of the students at the school were wondering who the hell Colleen was, just like in The Wizard of Oz, when the witch inscribes in the sky SURRENDER DOROTHY and the munchkins all wonder, “Who’s Dorothy?” I shared a kinship with Dorothy, lost in a new land with only the most basic of instructions on where to go or what to do.
I clumsily got out of the car and walked into the foyer of the school. I felt like a celebrity immediately. “Hey, Colleen, welcome back!” “Way to go, Colleen!” These words were offered by staff, friends, and strangers. A gush of warmth filled my chest, and I couldn’t help but smile. Other people, the ones I was afraid of, the ones I tried to ignore, stared at me, pointed indiscreetly, and whispered out of the sides of their mouths to their friends. I could tell that suddenly everyone knew who I was, not because of my theatrical experiences, not because I had coordinated homecoming-week activities or because I was on the yearbook committee, but because I was the girl who had lost her leg in an accident. I had morphed into the school sensation. The secret part of me that felt I deserved this kind of attention, loved it. For once, there was a reason for people to remember who I was. I wasn’t just a wallflower. I was special.
The one place I wouldn’t be treated as special was in the presence of Beth Lewis, our drama teacher. Play rehearsal began directly after school and ran until five. Miss Lewis always sat in the back of the auditorium. She was a tall, thin woman with big lips and jowls. She wore the stylish oversized brown glasses of the late ’70s, and with those on and her short, wavy, brown hair, she looked like a bug. Miss Lewis wasn’t a warm, fuzzy woman. She was practical and methodical, and she took her job as director of two plays a year quite seriously. All of us high school actors joked, “You don’t mess with Beth.” She sat at a table littered with pastel-colored papers bearing the name of each character, her glasses dropped to the end of her nose so she could simultaneously watch us on stage and quickly jot praises or admonishments about our performance. At the end of practice, cast and crew would gather around her as she either scolded us on a bad rehearsal or praised us for a good one. When practice ended, she yelled out our character’s name and, with a flick of her wrist, tossed us our feedback sheet.
Half the fun of rehearsals was hanging out backstage among the other cast members and stage crew, waiting for a cue. There were plenty of real “characters” involved in drama; I wasn’t one of them. I was the giggly girl who was entertained by them and stroked their egos by laughing at their antics. Our whispered tones increased in volume over the course of every two-hour practice, interrupted only by scene changes and Miss Lewis barking orders from the cafeteria floor: “Quiet! Down!” During my first rehearsals for Funny Girl, everyone was very nice to me, but something had changed. I didn’t feel the same kinship with these people anymore. I wanted to blame them, but I wasn’t sure what to blame them for. I felt removed from the conversations and the jokes, like my four-week absence had distanced me from the intimacy a play usually inspires.
Onstage, I felt awkward. My crutches were cumbersome and hard to maneuver around the set. Following the script was difficult, words weren’t coming out the way they used to, and I often forgot my lines. From the sides of their mouths, my cast mates cued me by whispering the first few words of my next line. I had played various speaking parts in previous plays, and memorizing my lines had always been easy. Now, when I read the Funny Girl script at home, I had a hard time concentrating on the words.
About three weeks after I’d been back at rehearsal, I received a shocking feedback sheet. “Strakosh, learn your lines,” Miss Lewis had scribbled with a hard hand and lots of underlining. “Time has come when you must know them well. I’m seeing absolutely no character development growth—or growth in concentration. You just must learn your lines and begin to focus in on what is and/or should be happening on stage. You are pulling down your scenes.”
My body reacted immediately and without my consent. I looked at the page to read the remarks again, but my tears made the words too blurry. The sounds in the background—the jostling of backpacks, the gossiping of my cast mates, the shuffling of feedback sheets and scripts—were sucked from the room as if by a vacuum. A fuzzy fog enveloped me.
I had been raised to respect my elders, to not question authority, to do as I was told, and to follow the rules. It wasn’t in my makeup to throw that piece of paper back in her face and tell her, “Back off. I’ll memorize my lines when I’m good and ready.” Instead, the words pierced my brain like jolts of electricity, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to assimilate them gracefully.
Internally—but only internally—I gave way to an explosion of protest. I have to focus on what’s happening on stage? I can hardly focus on what’s happening in my life. I don’t know where I am or where I belong.
Memorize my lines? How about memorizing a new way to walk? How about memorizing the twelve-inch scar on the leg that was saved? How about memorizing the image of the man who ripped a part of my body away from me?
I’m pulling down my scenes? She doesn’t know what it’s like to have a pulled-down scene. Just seven weeks ago, I had one hell of a pulled-down scene.
No character growth? Aren’t I doing enough?
I looked up at her, begging the tears in my eyes to evaporate before she saw them, but they didn’t, and she did. Her eyes widened, and she took a step back as she noticed the intensity of my reaction. “Opening night is three and a half weeks away, Colleen.” Her eyes held a desperate plea. Please be okay. We all need you to be okay.
I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to put the rest of the cast at risk because I wasn’t memorizing my lines. These people had all been so generous, kind, and supportive since the accident. The least I could do was memorize my lines. This play was what mattered most right then.
I decided to do what I was told even though this play was a bigger commitment than I really wanted. What I really wanted was to cry and scream, to throw things, to be alone with Harvey, the man who hit me, in a small room for a whole day so I could rip him apart, limb by limb. But good Catholic girls didn’t act vicious, let alone think evil thoughts of violence. Good Catholic girls did what they were told. And so I gulped down my hostility and got ready for my performance.
Opening night of any play was always a big deal. The stage crew often decorated the casts’ hallway lockers, sentimental notes were shared among the cast and crew in the dressing room, Miss Lewis always wrote an encouraging note to each member of the cast and crew, and my family always had flowers for me and signs reading BREAK A LEG! But opening night of Funny Girl was something special. As well as getting all the normal opening-night kudos, I received so much more. Rob was there to sit beside my family and cheer me on. My physical therapist sent me a dozen roses, my aunts and uncles came to my performance, and even Miss Lewis sent me flowers. Though Sandy, the girl playing Fanny Brice with full comedic force and a lyrical voice, was the leading lady, I felt like the star of the show opening night. While I loved all the attention, something kept nagging at me. Something elusive, irksome, and true. Why am I receiving such praise now? And what am I really receiving praise for? Why are people so proud of me? And what does their pride really mean in terms of what is expected of me?
I made it through our performances the best I could. Each night we received a standing ovation, and I smiled and waved at the audience with the rest of the cast. But after our final performance, when we were finally striking the set, I realized that I couldn’t strike this new role from my life, not entirely. I wasn’t Mrs. Strakosh anymore, but I had set a precedent for being the brave survivor.
Two weeks before graduation, I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to study for a final exam, and I was having a hard time focusing. The front door opened, and Mom escorted the parish priest and two of my high school teachers, Mr. Sanders and Miss Lewis, into the room. I was stunned and confused. Though Father Dave visited often, having teachers in the house was a rarity. They all sat down around the table and handed me a letter.
I glanced around at all their expectant faces, wondering what was going on, and when Mom nodded that I should open the envelope, I obeyed and took out the hand-written note inside. As I read it, I realized what was happening. Mr. Sanders had talked about this last fall, but I had completely forgotten about it. He had planned a summer trip to Asia for students, to be led by him and his wife. What I slowly started to put together was that people from school, church, and the hospital had all donated money to enable me to go on this thousand-dollar trip. I tried to hide the panic. I tried to mask my fear. As I was learning to do, I revealed only excitement and joy. I could see the pride and happiness on all their faces. They were so pleased they had kept this a secret from me over the past two months. Through shared laughter, they all told stories of how I had walked in on conversations they were having about the trip and how they had each almost ruined the surprise.
But under my smiling face, I was wondering, How will I do this? Won’t this require a lot of walking? I had never left home for a month before or traveled outside the United States. No one asked me if I wanted to go! The good girl in me felt guilty for even thinking such ungracious thoughts. The trip was so huge and unknown, though. My life already felt so huge and unknown. I was barraged with kindness and good intentions, and I felt the mounting pressure to perform once again. The play was over, but now I felt like I was playing a part in a life-play. This part had been thrown into my lap—the role of a lifetime.
I knew I didn’t want this part. I hadn’t auditioned for this part; I hadn’t rehearsed. This part had no script—in fact, the script was being written day by day, moment by moment. I didn’t have control over where the script was going. And people around me had creative license to add whatever scenes they pleased, like a four-week trip to Asia. Being the star of this play, I had to ad-lib my way through each scene. My family, friends, teachers, and doctors were like audience members, observing my every move, smiling, clapping, laughing, crying, watching me play my new part—so invested that I didn’t feel I could let them down. And so I knew I would perform, whether I wanted to or not.
One of these new parts was playing the Golden Girl of the senior class. Because I survived the accident and resumed normal life so quickly, I received multiple end-of-the-year awards: the Girl of the Year award from the Signet Society; one of the top ten seniors of the year as chosen by the senior class; the distinction of being in the National Registry of top seniors; and three college scholarships. The accolades kept coming, and the praises boosted me up, all with the veneer of a promise that I was something special. But deep down, a hollowness whispered to me when I was alone and told me I wouldn’t have received any of these awards or scholarships if I hadn’t lost my leg. I dared not admit it to anyone for fear of being ungrateful, but I knew if I were truly standing on my own two feet, this wouldn’t all be happening. I wouldn’t even have my deepening relationship with Rob. I was just beginning to figure out that who I was on the inside didn’t matter—only who I was on the outside. I had to lose a part of myself to be something special.