parent stories

STORY 1.

WHY YOU NEED TO TALK TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT DISABILITY.

BY CATHY KAMARA

Picture the scene. It’s a cold, blustery evening in 2009. I’ve just arrived at Elstree, the studio location of one of the most popular TV shows of the decade: Big Brother. I’m brandishing an obnoxiously large badge that reads ‘MEDIA’, my notepad and my pen. I’m excited, but also extremely nervous.

That night, it was the press conference for Celebrity Big Brother 6, and in my then-role as a journalist with a focus on disability issues, it was my only chance to grill the late actor Verne Troyer on his life, his work and why on earth he kept accepting roles that belittle (excuse the pun) his size.

Unlike, I imagine, most journalists that interviewed him, I had something in common with Troyer: we both had dwarfism, albeit different types. He had cartilage-hair hypoplasia, and stood two feet, eight inches tall, while I have achondroplasia, and stand at about four feet. In essence, though, we were both much shorter than the average person, with some unusual limb features to boot. We were the butt of the same jokes and the same types of discrimination.

And I was annoyed with him. Very annoyed. Because I’d seen him in Jingle All the Way, in Men in Black, in the Austin Powers films, in all of which his size was the joke. And that played out badly for me. At the height of Austin Powers mania, people would call me Mini Me and mimic his character in front of me. It really upset me that this was what people thought of when they saw me, rather than just seeing me for who I am. The thing is, representation in film is much more impactful than we think for those who aren’t typically represented at all. If the only time we see dwarfism on screen is in Verne Troyer characters, the dwarves in Snow White, the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the little people