Accommodating Desires of Disability: A Multi-Modal Methodological Approach to Terry Galloway and the Mickee Faust Club

In early November 2018, I hauled across the nation on a series of connecting flights to get from Fresno, California, to Tallahassee, Florida, so that I could interview Terry Galloway face-to-face. She had graciously agreed to dialogue with me about her past and current artistic work as it relates to themes of disability. As an intercultural communication scholar who is guided by performance theory, queer theory, and—of late—crip theory, I continually turn to Terry Galloway's work for wisdom and for inspiration. When anyone asks me to suggest books to read, her memoir Mean Little Deaf Queer¹ always makes my short list. Also, when anyone asks me about great performances I've seen, I always tell them about her performance of You Are My Sunshine: A Kind of a Love Story at the 2013 National Communication Association conference in Washington, DC. It is crucial to contextualize artists as connected to their art and as within their arts communities.² As such, I had timed my trip to coincide with the Mickee Faust Club's³ production of A Murderous Moveable Macbeth⁴—a Shakespearean play in which she was both a codirector and an actor.

The night before I was to interview Terry, I attended her play. Stepping out of my rental car and into an unlit, unpaved parking lot, I walked toward a warehouse building where I believed the play was to be staged. I began to pat my body so as to take inventory. I had my wallet; I had my smart phone; I had my pen; I had my notebook—the pages of which were already beginning to swell in the 96 percent humidity. Facing what I was sure was the Mickee Faust Club venue, I was unsure of where to locate the box office and the lobby. A tall, gangly white man, smoking a cigarette, stood on the street in front of the building. As I approached him, I noticed he was dressed in nothing but a belt of fifteen or so tanned minks that hung to create a short skirt covering a makeshift loincloth. I asked if he knew where I could buy a ticket. "Sure, honey," he said right before he gracefully bent over in front of me to crush out his cigarette butt on the asphalt. He then put his arm around me and, at his 6′5″ to my 5′11″, his armpit rested on my right shoulder. Barefoot, with pierced nipples, and with teased, shoulder-length, grey hair, he guided me around the side of the building to a card table staffed by two wide-smiling women selling tickets. Later I would learn that he was one of the three witches, but at that moment I only knew that the tone for the evening had been set. This was going to be an interactive, provocative, and prurient production.

Now a sexagenarian, Terry lives out an enviable career as a self-sustaining and successful performance artist. She shares her life with Donna Marie Nudd, her intellectual, artistic, and activist equal. Terry recounts: "In the early 1980's I was still doing theatre in New York City when I met the woman who would become my wife, Donna Marie Nudd. I moved with Donna to Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a professor in the School of Communication at Florida State University. There we co-founded the Mickee Faust Club, a mixed ability community theater for the weird, queer, and disabled community."⁵ Founded in 1987, the theatre company is a safe haven for Terry's own emotional and aesthetic survival: "I walk into a rehearsal of my theater company … and I see about thirty people—all the oddest of odd ducks—milling around, laughing, pouring over the scripts, swapping jokes. And I think to myself, 'I'm actually happy. How in God's name did that happen?'"⁶ As Terry is quick to admit, "How in God's name?" community theatre companies happen is with hard work and with vision.

Terry explains that the...