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OUT ALL NIGHT
AND LOST MY SHOES
with TERRY GALLOWAY
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Frank's Place at the Dallas Theater Center
October 8 - 10, 1998
Terry Galloway is nearly blind and deaf, the result of an experimental antibiotic given to her mother during pregnancy in Germany. This largely autobiographical whirlwind show has been described as being "like an hour spent with a fascinating but improbable dinner companion. She tells a life story whose autobiographical basis is spiced with outrageous and farcical flights of fantasy ... Anger, fear, and the aftermath of a self-loathing childhood are never far from the surface ('no ears, weak eyes, teeth broke, fat butt and these legs') but, transformed by humor, they become the tools of her daring break-out into a world where danger is compounded by being 'deaf, weird, and a woman."
Galloway herself seems to sum up best the human connections her show creates when she says, "We laughed. Sometimes it's too damn late to do anything else."
FAR FROM DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND,
LESBIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST TERRY GALLOWAY PLAYS DALLAS
by J.H. Johnson , Theater Critic, Dallas Voice
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Performance artist and poet Terry T. Galloway seems to have cornered the market on minority status. Nearly blind, completely deaf and very out there as a lesbian, Galloway performs her one-woman show at Frank's Place at the Dallas Theater Center Oct. 8-10, hosted by Echo Theatre. The autobiographical Out All Night and Lost My Shoes is a play full of humor and spiced with true tales of being "deaf, weird and a woman." Because of Galloway's hearing loss, the interview was conducted via AOL instant mail.
"My mother was given experimental antibiotics when she was several months pregnant with me," explained Galloway. "So throughout my childhood I had hallucinations. I was going deaf, but nobody knew. I just thought it was the way life was."
Galloway was born to American parents in Stuttgart on Halloween in 1950. "I loved my childhood in Berlin. It was always theatrical. It let us play the most amazingly intense games. Our favorite was 'Scare.' My sisters and I would turn off all the lights and go hide. We'd have until the count of 10, and then one of us would come creeping after. Our mother would whisper things like, 'Come to mother. Mother needs her babies.' But it was our father who truly terrified us. He played the monster perfectly.
"One time this little girl came over to spend the night and played Scare with us. She fell into an hysterical fit and peed in her pants. She was screaming and yelping and gulping, and my parents had to call her parents to come get her. I whispered to her 'If this hadn't been a game, then you'd be dead.'"
Galloway's hearing loss was gradual. Asked what she misses most, she admits it can be maddening, but her answer reveals a practical but positive attitude. "Do you mean like when I was nutso? Or do you mean what do I miss all the time about being a kind of Helen Kellerish type? My eyes are not that bad. I can see with glasses, and when I am not having a bout of this thing which is called 'arthritis of the eyes' I am your every day bespectacled Joe.
"So the hearing loss is more - what's the word? Disabling? Crippling? Shitty? Yeah."
During our internet discussion, I asked Galloway if people are more intimidated by her physical challenges or being an open lesbian? But we were suddenly disconnected by America Online.
"This is weird," said Galloway after we reconnected. "I was just typing to you that 'the secret fear of any performer is that the audience would take an inexplicable dislike and then suddenly disappear, and you did.
"I love that question about audience reaction to deafness and queerness, because it's somewhat of the same kind of discomfort. If the audience is unsophisticated - if they have no emotional grace - then deaf or queer, they'll treat you like a freak. I think the winning over has to be mutual, because I am also up there judging the audience just as they are judging me."
Galloway insists that it isn't necessary for her audiences to know she is deaf or lesbian - at least not at first. "I am interested in presenting the complications. I want them disarmed. In the first 20 minutes neither deafness nor lesbianism come up. Deafness is introduced in the context of my hallucinations. Lesbianism is put in the context of the 'Lions Camp for Crippled Children' - when I had a huge crush on a girl who was paralyzed from the neck down. The line is 'Our kisses were the purest love I've ever known.'
"Right before I put on drag to become Jake Ratchett, Short Detective, I say, 'It's a vicious world out there, and I'm still deaf and I'm queer and I'm a woman. What is your only protection in a case like that?'
"Then I whip out my eyeliner and say, 'Eyeliner' and proceed to put on fake stubble - again, a gender complication. So if they are inclined to hate me because I'm deaf or a lesbian, I want them to be confused about what and who they are hating and why."
There's also seems to be an affinity for the downtrodden in Galloway's act. "Hey! I am the downtrodden," she responds. "The disabled, no matter how talented, are notoriously underemployed," she defends herself. "I've allowed the world to hold me back plenty. But I have fought out of its grip enough to breathe. The reason I love the world is because it's such great theater."
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Reprinted from © 1998 Dallas Voice
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