Frost/Nixon/Chorost

Last weekend, I got to see the play Frost/Nixon with my mom because someone in her season-ticket group had to cancel.  This was the second time I’d seen it; the first time was a very momentous occasion.

Brandt has a national conference that his school sends him to every year, and I always get to tag along.  Last year we were in Las Vegas, and two years ago we were in Washington, D.C.  A few months before the D.C. trip, we were complaining to Aunt Louise about the complete lack of anything captioned in our nearby Big City (we just got captioned movies last summer).  I asked her if there was such a thing as captioned theatre, and she said it unfortunately did not exist.  On a whim, I Googled “live theatre captioning,” and to my delight, I discovered the nonprofit group Caption Coalition, which captions live theatre [their website www.c2net.org is currently down]. 

Louise was thrilled to find out that captioned theatre exists; however, the closest showing to either of us was a good 800 miles away.  It’s all over the Northeast, West coast, and Florida, but nowhere in the middle of the country.  However, Brandt and I were going to D.C. soon, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts  had a captioned performance during our trip.  We had never heard of Frost/Nixon, and figured it would be really boring.  But we wanted to experience captioned theatre, so agreed to give it a try.  I ordered seats down in front of the 4-feet-wide LED screen, and got a $100 discount on the tickets because it was in the ‘special needs’ section!

When we found our seats, we wondered if anyone else was there just for the captioning.  I immediately saw a college-aged girl speaking in Sign Language to a friend (D.C. is the home of Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university for the Deaf in the world) and whispered, “there’s our answer!”  Then a man sat down in front of us; he had dark brown cochlear implants on both sides of his head, matching his dark brown hair.  I eavesdropped as his friend introduced him to a woman who worked at the theatre.  “This is Dr. Michael Chorost” (I paid close attention as she fingerspelled C-H-O-R-O-S-T), “he wrote a book about getting Cochlear Implants.”  My ears perked up.

In addition to my excitement over Dr. Chorost, the play turned out to be excellent.  As we walked out of the theatre, Brandt couldn’t stop talking about how great the play itself was, compounded by the captioning.  “I understood every word!  It was wonderful!”  I agreed 100%.

I never got up the nerve to talk to him, but as soon as we got back to our hotel, I looked up his book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (the subtitle of the paperback edition is My Journey Back to the Hearing World).  I ordered it the second we got home from D.C. 

It took me a long time to get Brandt to read Dr. Chorost’s book, even though they have a lot in common, down to their TI-83 calculators from high school and current iPhones, Dell laptops, and general techno-geekiness.  There were several reasons for his resistance.  First, he didn’t think his hearing was near as bad as it was (this was 18 months before his first appointment with Dr. Awesome).  Second, he was holding out for stem cell/gene therapy.  Third, and most importantly, if you haven’t had Cochlear Implant surgery explained by a good surgeon, the idea of it is terrifying.  So it wasn’t until after the HLAA convention that I could convince him to read it.  He said he liked it, although he “already knew most of the information on Cochlear Implants.”  I rolled my eyes and reminded him that he didn't know anything about them before the convention!