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David Wolf (pictured) always wanted to dance. The owner of the Saratoga Savoy dance studio says when he was kid, he used to be in awe of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and wanted to be just like them.
It wasn't until college that he first donned a pair of dancing shoes.
"It was sort of a bad date gone amiss," he says. "I realized I did not want to spend anymore time with this woman but she brought me to a swing dance and I realized this is exactly what I want to do."
While the date may have been short lived, he's still in love with dance.
David opened the Saratoga Savoy in 2002 after realizing that dance was becoming more than just a hobby for him. But what some people may find most interesting, is that this man who glides across the dance floor was diagnosed with a condition sometimes associated with difficulty differentiating right from left.
Dyslexia.
"I don't like to think of it as suffered," he says, "I like to think of it as 'I had'".
He says dyslexia never held him back.
He just found ways to dance around it.
"I have a hard time with certain text but I've gotten around it by using different modes of education and how I look at things."
It's an attitude that has spilled over to his clients. The attitude that nothing should ever hold you back.
"I've taught 2 people who were blind how to dance," David says. "I've taught a man to dance swing who's missing an arm. So people say 'Oh, they couldn't learn,' but they can always learn."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.