Never Walked In High Heels

Living in London with a wheelchair that can balance on two wheels means that I have a lot of conversations with strangers. I can usually tell from the first question that these strangers are all intelligent in some form or another and extremely curious. I like curious people—it’s one of the reasons why I went into acting—and there really aren’t too many people in London who want to talk to a redheaded woman in an animal print coat riding a wheelchair. Sometimes, however, I don’t want to talk to any of them. Then it doesn’t matter how ingenious you are, I will do everything to avoid you. But the problem with curious people, is that their curiosity means they have no limitations and so they hunt me down and ask me how I am able to make a 400-pound wheelchair balance on two wheels—regardless of the fact that I clearly don’t want to explain.

I was having one of those days when I decided to go into the National Gallery and look at a Turner landscape collection. Then I saw a stranger giving me that I’ve come to recognize as saying that someone is headed over in my direction, so I can prepare for a conservation. I looked back at the painting. Don’t bother me if I’m looking at a Turner! And then he asked the question of how my wheelchair works. I couldn’t ignore it so I answered. He asked me if I was American, followed by what I was doing in London, so I gave him all of the necessary information and in talking to him it became obvious that he was no Englishman either. So I returned the favor, and asked him what he was doing in London. This was his story.

“Freedom.”

I smiled because I knew exactly what he meant. It turns out that he had emigrated from Italy to the UK in order to follow his dreams of being a cellist during the 1940s when people’s rights were being stripped by fascists in Italy as much as one could imagine without the additional concentration camps. He was himself Jewish and recognized England as a place where he could follow his dreams and have an incredible amount of freedom compared to his home nation. Too often, my loved-ones will say that America is the only free country in the world, and while I think on some level this is true, on an individual level I have discovered that you are free wherever you are allowed to chase your dreams. For me this means going to England, as it did for a Jewish cellist half a century ago. It’s not simply political. It means finding the place where you will have to make sacrifices in order to chase your dreams, but where the sacrifices are worth every moment, and you can get to where you want to be.

“We are strangers and yet we are friends. We are both real people.” He said to me before he walked away. In a city where there sometimes seems to be a shortage of real people, it’s hard to imagine that this is the place where I have chosen to chase my dreams, and the fact that he and I are on opposite sides of the life spectrum but still chose the same place means that dreams do come true. Even outside of America. He and I are fighting for the same thing—the freedom to race towards our dreams.