I saw performer Terry Galloway's one-woman show, "Out All Night and Lost My Shoes," in Austin, Texas, about 25 years ago and still remember how excellent it was. I suspect her memoir includes her signature wit and insights about her visual and hearing impairments. Here's the product description from Amazon.com for Mean Little Deaf Queer:
Running with Scissors meets The Liar's Club in this edgy and wickedly hilarious memoir about one irrepressible, mean, little, deaf queer.
When Terry Galloway was born on Halloween, no one knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system. After her family moved from Berlin, Germany, to Austin, Texas, hers became a deafening, hallucinatory childhood where everything, including her own body, changed for the worse. But those unwelcome changes awoke in this particular child a dark, defiant humor that fueled her lifelong obsessions with language, duplicity, and performance.
As a ten-year-old self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury at her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater and performance, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, Terry writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.
