(crossposted from Turning Aside)
As a Christmas present I had bought tickets to the touring The Great Gatsby musical. I’ve always loved the story, and while I know its continuing popularity can mostly be contributed to a nostalgic attraction to the supposed glitz and glam of 1920’s Jazz Age parties, its underlying themes are just as important as ever.
Most Broadway in Austin shows are produced at Bass Concert Hall at the Texas Performing Arts Center. There are a mere handful of accessible seats for each show and I was lucky to find a showing with some available. This is definitely a location where I need to use my wheelchair to navigate everything. Since the venue is on the University of Texas’ campus, parking is a mess. The accessible parking is still quite a ways from the venue entrance and there is almost no seating in the lobbies, so I’ve learned that in order to enjoy the production, I need to be in my wheelchair so as not to exhaust myself and collapse before the show even begins. But because the price of everything has skyrocketed, we could only afford nosebleed seats up on the second balcony. While there is decent elevator access to the various floors, the restroom options on those floors are not always the most accessible. Some of the floors only have restrooms that meet the bare minimum requirement for ADA compliance – i.e. they slapped a grab bar in a stall and called it a day, not bothering to care if a wheelchair could actually get into said stall.
So, when at intermission when I discovered that the restrooms on the floor I was on were not actually accessible, the ushers directed me to the floor below. That floor also happens to be where the members only access club lounge is. I didn’t think much of it, as I was just following the directions I was given. But as I was leaving the restroom a woman with one of those uncanny plastic mar-a-largo faces looks directly at me in my wheelchair with a look of disgust then turns to the attendant and loudly asks “Are you sure everyone on this floor is *actually* an access club member?”
I just gave her a long stare, laughed at the absurdity of it all, and then went to the elevator to go back to my cheap seats floor. But all I could think was, “Oh honey. Either you are weirdly really really committed to doing a Tom Buchanan cosplay for the evening, or (more likely) have no clue as to what the play is actually about.”
The Great Gatsby isn’t about the parties and the lavish displays of wealth, but the travesty of obsessively seeking after and valuing such things. Tom Buchanan is the asshole of the play, always putting down people who are different than him, or who have less money, or who weren’t able to use generational wealth to avoid the draft (WW1). And yet when at the end of the story amidst all the carnage and destroyed lives, Tom and his wife Daisy just walk away with no consequences despite being the cause of all the misery. As Fitzgerald summarized them at the end of the book, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Being disgusted by and assuming that someone in a wheelchair doesn’t belong on your “rich people who don’t want to mingle with the masses” floor, is so on-brand for the types of villains Fitzgerald was writing about that honestly all I could do was laugh at the encounter. And of course that woman just retreated back into her money and vast carelessness of which ableism is merely one symptom of the disease.
This is unfortunately a common story in our world, especially for those with disabilities. Try as we might to build a better world, if often feels like things keep getting worse.
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”