#WomensHistoryMonth
Dame Judi Dench has been a presence on TV and film screens for 60 years, and at 86, she's not planning to stop acting anytime soon.
That enough would be inspiring, but Dench is currently battling an issue that makes it positively extraordinary: She's losing her vision.
Currently suffering from age-related macular degeneration, which affects nearly 11 million people in the United States, Dench recently told The Guardian that while she may have to adjust her life and work styles, she's not going to retire.
"You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult," she said. "I've had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again. So I have to learn through repetition, and I just hope that people won't notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!"
The petite, white-haired, no-nonsense actor is familiar to American audiences from her turns in films like "Shakespeare in Love" (for which she won her Oscar); "Mrs. Brown," "Victoria & Abdul," "Skyfall" (and several other modern James Bond films) and "Philomena," among others.
She's also delighted us in recent years by getting a tattoo at 81 and being the oldest person on the cover of British Vogue at 85.
The loss of her sight, Dench explained, appears to be genetic: Her mother also had some sight loss; her daughter, Finty, "goes and has her eyes checked" regularly.
Still, she noted what she considers an upside: "It does enable you to do one thing and that is that you have to get very close to people before you can recognize who they are. During lockdown I made a film and I was up close addressing people wearing masks during rehearsals, nothing to do with any scene I'm in. It's kind of exquisite if you can do that and that's the good side of it, and you have to look at that side of it."
And you have to admire that Dench can even laugh a bit at the way her body is changing.
"I was doing 'The Winter’s Tale' with Ken Branagh a couple of years ago, playing Paulina, and after we had been running for three weeks or so at the Garrick (Theater) he said to me — I have a long speech at the end — he said: 'Judi, if you were to say that speech about eight feet to your right, you'd be saying it to me and not to the (proscenium) arch," she said.
Then she laughed: "I rely on people to tell me!"
https://www.today.com/today/
Did readers know, without using the search bar on this blog, that Dame Judi is a QUAKER?
RantWoman could just leave this moment of admiration for Dame Judi here and leave things at that. But since when has RantWoman been known to quit just because everyone else thinks she should. Instead RantWoman needs to riff, yes again, on a number of topics.
Long ago in a previous Meeting effort to talk about disability, RantWoman made a list of 13 people in Meeting dealing, some more openly than others with vision lost. Three were women in their 90's all suffering from Age Related Macular Degeneration. They have all since passed on. And yet, blindness...? Meeting Conversation...?
RantWoman wishes Friends to consider a number of terms, some of which have gotten repeatedly edited out of Meeting conversation by well-meaing ableds who think they knoew better than RantWoman does about what needs to be said.
--Vocational Rehabilitation, ie what changes and accommodations are needed so a person can continue to work or to do new work?
--Spiritual accompaniment or walking alongside: if there are things that no one can fix, now what?
--Inspiration porn. Okay, okay, RantWoman has not been trying to use the term "inspiration porn" but uh, one form of ableism, when say a journalist, eve n a very well-meaning one about "oh, wow, someone can do something I think is impossible..."
RantWoman will now return to admiring Dame Judi for all the reasons there are to admire Dame Judi and try to dial her own inner blowtorch to somewhere below "singe" about matters of blindness closer at hand.
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