NEW YORK — In an inspiring moment that local disability organizations call a “triumph for stereotyping,” local woman Ava Dudley, who has cerebral palsy, made an exciting announcement: She does know your boyfriend’s neighbor’s cousin who uses a wheelchair after all.
Dudley, 32, didn’t think much of it when first asked if she was friends with this wheelchair user because, she mused, “It was the same tired shit. ‘She has one of those chairs too. Blue, I think. Maybe purple. She looks a lot like you,’ and a photo quickly shoved in my face at the supermarket.”
But soon after that fateful exchange in the produce aisle, Dudley remarked, “Everything clicked.” Your neighbor’s boyfriend’s cousin, identified as 33-year-old Alyssa Ferdinand, boasts a special connection with Dudley. They were traumatized by the same unwelcome clown at the physical rehab hospital thirty years earlier.
“Of course I know Alyssa!” exclaimed Dudley. “She didn’t look familiar at first, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered.”
After spending her afternoon scouring the social media accounts of literally every young disabled person in the Tri-State area, Dudley found Ferdinand’s profile, admitting she felt spooked at the mere thought of a peer-aged gimp she didn’t at least recognize from a harrowing paratransit ride.
“They say not all disabled people know each other,” she said with a sigh, “but the truth is, we kinda do. If we don’t go to the same PT clinic, we’ve likely given each other The Nod at the mall once or twice.”
Dudley confessed that she couldn’t rest until she explored all possible ways the young women’s lives may intersect.
“I started where I always start,” she said, beaming. “By combing through people who also follow the Permobil Instagram page. When that didn’t yield any results, I looked through the Facebook friend lists of all my comrades from crip camp. Before I knew what was happening, I was deep in the discussion threads of the Neurogenic Bladder Babes group, and there she was.”
Dudley’s epiphany came when flipping through Ferdinand’s public Facebook album titled “Childhood Memories.” Among the photos was a snapshot featuring a group of disabled toddlers gathered in a hospital playroom with a disturbingly cheery clown. There, cowering beside then-three-year-old Ferdinand, was then-two-year-old Dudley.
When Dudley noticed the picture, she said, memories hit her like a tidal wave. Mr. Giggles the clown had visited every Wednesday while she was inpatient in 1996. She recalled that she and Ferdinand felt equally terrified of the donor-funded circus demon and spent those afternoons warding off his unsolicited “I Am Special” stickers.
Upon friending each other, the duo discovered their connection doesn’t end there.
A bitchy bunkmate from Dudley’s childhood crip camp is the same girl that bullied Ferdinand at adaptive swim lessons, a mutual resentment the reunited pair called “magical.” The women, who in fact look nothing alike, plan to meet for lunch soon, and shared that they look forward to being accidentally called by each other’s names, a rite of passage for any vaguely associated disabled people.