Sally Greenhouse

About the Project

Standard podcasts are either one person speaking for a set amount of time or interviewing another person, or a few speakers, also for a programmable length, discussing a particular topic, to inform or illuminate, sometimes with humor. Secret Lives of the Disabled featuring Performance Artist, Video Artist, writer Sally Greenhouse expands the territory into documentary style audio-focus podcasting during the 24 hour/weekly/monthly cycle of the 20% of New Englanders living with physical disabilities encountering all manner of challenges they face on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. Those who live with chronic pain, who became catastrophically disabled after decades of physical capacities that most take for granted, and the fall down the metaphorical Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole of a backwards American dream, in which housing instability, food insecurity, and FOMO is the continual normative of their new status quo, will be seen through the darkly satirical perspective of Greenhouse, a former high level “elite athletic” professional dancer & distance swimmer, downwardly mobile at midlife. Conversational in tone, recordings will be broadcast at various points, unedited, day & night, with universal experiences underscored by the highly particular aspects of her disability sequalae, augmented by reminiscences from her Before-Broken-Neck existence, reflections on inhabiting a broken body that cannot be unbroken, ruminative memories that recur in the imposed isolation of disability, juxtaposed against onerous onslaughts of paperwork demanded to attain services to stay alive, how the able-bodied relate to the dis-able-bodied, overt/covert discrimination resulting from ignorance ranging to malice, the nearness of death those disabled feel moment-by-moment, faith regained or lost….nothing is left undisclosed.

Weekly/Monthly edited versions will be incorporated into the programming, more tailored toward non-disabled listeners who want to tune in, and yes, no other way to say it, get “woke” as to the realities of what their neighbors, former friends, or how this overlooked demographic copes. This Docu-Podcast will include those who are medically vulnerable and have had to continue isolation during CoVid, as well as the newly disabled from Long CoVid. This is not at all an educational broadcast, but a highly individualistic version of one artist’s existential, theological, psychological interpretations of her dilemma, along with the mundane, like walking into walls, literally, doing laundry (or not), how to get your underpants on (or not), structuring each day as if your life as a disabled person is not expendable, in the midst of a world in which too often, disabled people have become relegated to expendability.