“I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

In winter 2024, Sop had a severe relapse of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), leaving them housebound in South East London.

That summer, in the days leading up to a friend’s birthday celebration, the artist rested carefully so they would be able to attend. The night before, they started taking what was touted as a “magic” pill for insomnia. They didn’t sleep at all and had to miss the party. But in a sleep-deprived haze, they wrote, as they described in a recent interview [1], “a solidarity rant, a kind of letter to other disabled people stuck indoors.” 

When Shape Arts, a UK disability arts organization, approached Sop with a commission, they decided to adapt the essay into a script for We Year, a mixed-media love letter to others living with energy-limiting conditions. The short film premieres at RestFest—a film festival and virtual space by and for the disability community—as part of a program co-organized by The Remote Body, Resting Up Collective, and Ort Gallery. 

With a poetic voiceover and ethereal soundscape, We Year immerses viewers in a chronic illness flare during a sweltering summer, blending decades-old archival footage from when Sop was well enough to move outside freely with recent phone footage shot at home. Shifting between past and present and between interior and exterior, the experience is at once isolating and unifying, claustrophobic and liberating. 

We Year also features 16mm direct animation, a technique that involves drawing and scratching moving images directly onto film stock rather than recording with a camera. Here, Sop used ink to overlay the orange stress bars from their Garmin watch across the entire film—a constant representation of their body that acts as a symbolic barrier between them and the audience. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did you begin to think of yourself as an artist? 

I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid, when I was asked, “What do you want to be?”, I was like, “An artist!” I honestly have never thought about doing anything else. I grew up in the deep countryside, and there wasn’t much access to contemporary culture, although I was obsessed with music and music magazines. There was this teen music magazine called Smash Hits that I loved, and I made collages and scrapbooks of pop stars. When I was 13, I went to a big retrospective of the massive British artist David Hockney, who just died, and it was the first time that I’d seen contemporary art. It blew my mind, and that’s the first time I remember thinking, “Oh, this is something serious that I want to do.” 

What questions or themes does your art usually explore? 

I find it hard to make work that isn’t about my life and the things that I’m dealing with. What I do always ends up being ultra-personal. That’s not something that a lot of people do, necessarily. The act of living as a chronically ill person means that you have to live in the world in a very different way from people who are not chronically ill. Chronic illness is a fertile area for ideas. You’re living the life and thinking about the life at the same time. If you’re an artist or someone who thinks about things in conceptual ways, you can’t help but try and interpret your life into art-making, projects, or ideas. Everything’s interesting. It’s like living life wonky.

As a chronically ill person,  I can’t do a 9 to 5. I can’t necessarily keep to plans, and I can’t always do basic things, like sometimes even look after myself in a normal  way. The agency that I have is to interrogate what this life means and the challenges that it poses and what is interesting about that. What can I say that’s beyond how I would perhaps describe being sick to a stranger? Like, what’s within that? All of the work that I make—even if it looks not about that—is going to be about that.   

And then the other part of it is that I grew up in the field and was a tomboy covered in mud. My understanding of the world was through nature, and now I’m in a flat without a garden. I can see some trees in the park just over there, but quite often, I’m not well enough to go and hang out in the park. I am pretty obsessed with nature and the fact that I can’t get to it. I can’t really have that life currently.  

In your bio, you describe yourself as “a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky.” Would you please elaborate on what this means? 

When I wrote that bio, I was making work about my body being the same as the microbiome in the soil. “A torn and crooked leaf” is being chronically ill. “A root embedded in the dirt” is really what it sounds like, within the context of that specific work. And the “shoot reaching to the sky”—my work deals with pretty hefty emotions, but there’s always hope. My life is not a miserable life; it is hopeful, and I do believe there’s something so crucial in being chronically ill that you absolutely have to keep hope alive. It takes a lot of work to do that and to get there. It’s not easy, but it’s super important. If you have this restricted life, you absolutely have to shoot for the sky. Because time just goes on.  

What does working in crip time [2] look like for you? What are your long-term goals as an artist? 

If you’re truly working in crip time, it’s fairly impossible to have long-term goals. You haven’t really got a choice when you work. You can do your very best to carve out time or space. Currently, I have about a couple of hours in the early morning when I can manage to do something. My afternoons and evenings—I simply can’t make work then. If you have such a limited time to make work, the amount of work you make is going to be low. It will have to meet your capacity, and that doesn’t fit well with current art market production timelines or expectations. Sometimes, you can’t make something for a year because the thing that you should be working on—and the thing that is your work—is your health. That’s your full-time job.  

I deeply believe that making in crip time actually is truthful to the world. We would probably all be better off if we did. Really, it means making work to your capacity, and that can mean a lot of things. You don’t need to be ill to make to your capacity. 

It’s a more authentic timeline of meeting yourself where you’re at, rather than forcing yourself to meet arbitrary or toxic timelines. 

You haven’t chosen to have chronic illness—you’re forced into doing that. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. Asking what would I like to do for my long-term goals—I find it very hard to answer because, first of all, I live, like, day to day and, second, when I think about what my long-term goals would be, it’s from the perspective of someone without a disability because I currently cannot see how I would be able to do more than what I’m doing unless I had an enormous amount of more support. 

How did you decide which media to work with for this project? 

Films and writing have always been the two mediums I mostly turn to, and actually they’re the most accessible things for me to do now, being housebound. When I was asked to make the film, I just didn’t have it at all in my means to film new work or leave the house, so I had to kind of figure out how to make a new work out of what I had, which was this personal essay I wrote about being stuck inside in the summer. I made the film throughout another summer of being stuck inside. A lot of chronically ill people turn their camera or phone or whatever onto their surroundings, so I had bits and bobs that I filmed. When I started making films, I would just film tons of different stuff. I had my little Hi8 video camera around the whole time, so I had lots of little clips that I hadn’t used, and I didn’t actually think that I was ever going to use them for anything. But that obviously wasn’t enough, and I didn’t really want to make a film which was just a film inside my house—there’s plenty of films like that. I had a whole bunch of old footage from the 90s. I digitized all of these tapes a few years ago, and they looked so great. A lot of that stuff was filmed out of the house, and then there were funny effects that I filmed which made it into the films. There’s a lot of blobs of color, which are actually motorway lights and ended up being this really nice kind of texture, which floated over and broke up some of the images.  

Hi8 and MiniDVs are the two cameras I was using in the past, so I have footage from both of those. And then there was 16mm direct animation. Each section of the film has a different animation running over it, but the animation is quite transparent, so it’s always there. It’s textural and has multiple meanings. And then I commissioned my friend to make the soundtrack. 

Would you elaborate on the meaning of the title of the film? 

The thing that’s turned me on most about this film is the fact that I can try and get “to year” and “yearing” adopted as a new way of describing spending all this time being sick. I think the word “year” is long enough for people to imagine, “Whoa, you are sick for a whole year. That’s a really long, unbearable time.” But then you make it into “yearing,” and then it could be even less than a year, but it’s probably closer to a year or multiple years. Then I was interested in what would happen if the years were then broken up with periods of being well, with relapses included as well.  

I find it really tiresome to have to explain the last five years of my life. So to not have to say, “Well, I was sick for a couple of years, housebound and bedbound, and then I got well again, and then I had a relapse”—it’s just like, “I was yearing.” I would love for it to become part of the lexicon of chronic illness.  

What does it mean to have “We Year” screened at RestFest? 

There’s this informal network of crip friends who work with each other. Not everyone works together, but we all know each other and there’s really close friendships within this group. They’re all small, crip-led organizations that have been made pretty much for the same purpose, which is remote events, screenings, and workshops. I was just really keen to connect and uplift all of these organizations. We created this program together, and I’m really proud of it. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s really nice making things with your friends. The access intimacy side of it all is real. Creating or programming with your friends is a very accessible way of making because we all understand each other and our capacities. I’ve said capacities a million times. 

You need to coin a new term for that as well. 

Okay, I’ll get on that for next time. 

We Year, through July 12 (if you start watching on June 28); RestFest Film Festival. “I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

[1] “Interview with artist-filmmaker Sop + a Special Screening of their New Film.” RestFest, 2026,
https://restfest.substack.com/p/interview-with-artist-filmmaker-sop. 
[2] In her 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, disability scholar Alison Kafer writes, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” 

According to actor and dramaturg Anne Gridley’s neurologist, humans can only consciously attend to walking for about eight seconds before the act slips into muscle memory. Yet Watch Me Walk, written by Gridley, challenges us to spend nearly two hours thinking about walking. 

The autobiographical play begins with the veteran experimental performer pacing the stage in rose-adorned combat boots—more useful, she later notes, than $7,000 custom orthotics—and near silence. The sense that something might happen eventually ebbs into boredom. Why turn foot drop, the dragging of the front foot, into a spectacle? 

Before long, Gridley deliberately falls and then asks the audience to offer help—and to accept her refusal. Later, she presents a slideshow on her 20 colorful walking sticks; some of their names are Dorothy Parker, Tonya Harding, and Gabagool. At one point, wearing a ballgown made of caution tape reading “fall risk,” she ascends a ladder. She sings, “I’m climbing on a ladder, and it’s making you feel nervous—and yes, that is the point.”  

Directed by Eric Ting, Watch Me Walk educates non-disabled viewers and invites them to confront their discomfort. “Maybe don’t say ‘spaz’ anymore; that word describes the way I walk,” Gridley told Culturebot. “So every time you just casually say, ‘I was spazzing out,’ I want you to think of me walking back and forth stiffly across the stage.” 

Gridley is having fun, too, even as she, at other times, fights back tears. Full of tonal turns, the production is at once cringey, candid, wacky, and whimsical. Through a series of loosely connected but ultimately moving vignettes, Gridley chronicles her life with hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), probing tragic family narratives, ableist encounters (“It was a woman, so I didn’t punch her in the face”), and health insurance struggles (“Viva Luigi!”). 

She dramatizes her neurodegenerative condition—shared by her mother and grandmother—by dressing as a gigantic purple nerve cell and as Little Orphan Annie, wryly highlighting the chronic disregard for so-called “orphan diseases,” whose rarity limits research and pharmaceutical attention. 

Observed annually on the last day of February, Rare Disease Day is an international effort to expand access to healthcare, diagnosis, and therapies for people with rare diseases. Although Watch Me Walk closed its in-person run on February 15, a recording of the play will stream for one week starting on February 28. The same day at 3:00 p.m. EST, the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation (SPF) will host a Rare Disease Day online forum on HSP and Primary Lateral Sclerosis, featuring patients, families, researchers, and advocates. 

Soho Rep, where Watch Me Walk was staged, hopes that streaming the play alongside SPF’s virtual event “will create a coordinated awareness moment,” showing how “storytelling, dialogue, and science together help humanize rare neurological diseases while advancing the pursuit of effective treatments and a cure.” 

Photos by Maria Baranova

WNYC: Under The Radar’s “Watch Me Walk”

In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the opportunity to speak with Margo Weishar about her play: 

Guy: 
Hello Margo. It is such a pleasure to speak with you. For anyone who may be deciding if they want to come to the reading, can you tell us a bit about the play and the subject matter? And about how you became interested in writing about Elizabeth Blackwell. 

Margo: 
What really interests me is people who break out of the norm. 
People who do things that are completely extraordinary, and what motivates them to do that, and what is their personal cost in doing that. 
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and then she had a career in promoting women in medicine. But I also wanted to show her as a human being. The only pictures we have are of an old woman, but she was a vital, curious, intelligent, daring, brave person who fought against incredible odds to get where she was. And so that’s who I really wanted to investigate. You know, we all rely on these pioneers to break barriers down so that people like me can walk through them. But what does it take from them to do that? What are the choices they had to make in your own lives to make that possible? So that was the question that really ended up fascinating me. 
 

I got a theater degree because it was something I’ve always done in my life, and I decided I really wanted to formally go and learn. And when I started working with playwright Michael Hollinger, I took a class on solo performance. 
I always loved historical fiction, and I liked plays that were based on historical women. And so, I thought I’ll look at Elizabeth Blackwell as a subject for this solo performance. I started researching and found there was a wealth of primary source information. Not only she, but also her sister Emily became a doctor, and then a lot of her other family members were prominent. There are letters between the nine brothers and sisters in collections at Harvard and at Oxford which I could read online. The more I read and the more material I looked at, the more I felt, wow…this woman had an amazing life! After I did the solo performance, I started developing it as a play. And I really liked where it was going and refined it to the point where I had a public reading at Villanova in May of 2024. 

Guy: 
As you know, I am also a physician-playwright. There are not all that many of us! Can you say something about what it was like as a doctor transitioning to becoming a playwright? Do you feel like you have a special perspective because of being a doctor?  

Margo: 
I feel like my life has had two parallel tracks because I grew up around theater and performing. My father was a scenic designer who was a graduate of Yale Drama School. I am the first and only doctor in my family. I was always that kid who was good at science, but also the lead in the play. I produced and directed the first musical production at Penn med school ever: Sondheim’s Company with a full orchestra, which we put on with all the med students. So, it was always part of my life even during my medical training, although there was a time when I had to kind of put it on the back shelf. 

As far as playwriting, I feel very passionate about telling certain stories that haven’t been told. And now as a woman who has lived a life, had a career, raised three children, and now has a grandchild, I have a lot of life experience. I felt like that kind of voice is somewhat rare in the playwriting world, especially telling stories about women. And especially about women in science. I’ve had the opportunity to play on stage Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is credited with developing the first computer and the first computer language. 
I’ve played Maria Sibylla Merian, an artist and biologist in the 1700’s, who drew beautiful studies of insects and plants.
I directed a play about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a Harvard astronomer in the early 1900’s. I’ve always been fascinated by these incredibly accomplished women who history has ignored. I really felt like that was my impetus for trying my hand at it. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it. But having my work read by others I could see it was starting to reverberate with people. People were liking it and I was liking what I was hearing. The whole skill was very new to me and quite surprising. 

Guy: 
One of the things I don’t think people who are outside the theater world realize is just how long the development process of a play can take. In what way do you hope the reading at the College of Physicians will help you, and what do you expect will happen next? 

Margo: 
I have another amazing mentor, Ed Sobel, a professor at Villanova and a professional dramaturg. Ed has been working with me on focusing and refining the play. And it is just an amazing thing for me to work with somebody who is so great at what he does. Because he’s asking me questions and really trying to focus on what the essential story is that I want to tell. Having good actors is another good thing. The way people say things will help me to streamline.  

And of course, the last and most important element is how it plays to an audience, somebody who’s seeing it and hearing it for the very first time, what they will come away with and whether I can achieve the emotional impact of what I’m trying to say. As you know, things can be back to the drawing board after that experience. I might hear certain things that really hit perfectly or other things I never even considered. It’s not like a novel, where you finish it, you publish it, and it goes out in the public. You can have multiple full productions before you publish a script because sometimes something doesn’t work in a production. Maybe it’s just the wrong actors. And then you go see it somewhere else and you think, no, that scene was great. You have to see it. It’s a collaborative art, and we need all those people, designers and directors, to interpret what we wrote before we can say, yes, this is the final version. 

It’s interesting. I was in London last week and I got to see a Tom Stoppard play called Indian Ink. This play had been produced 30 years ago. 
And when Stoppard went back to it, he changed the ending. 30 years later! So even Tom Stopford can say yes, I think I can do it better now. 

Guy:  
Thanks for talking to me today, Margo. And best of luck on the reading. 

Margo:  
Thank you! 

“That was a barrier I wanted to address because I know I’m not alone in that experience,” says Miriam, who lives in California. 

And so, in the spring of 2023, they founded RestFest, described on its website as an online “gathering space and virtual film & video art festival created by/for the Disabled, Deaf, Chronically ill, Neurodivergent, and/or Mad arts community worldwide.” 

This year’s festival is available to stream anytime in February—and viewers are invited to watch from bed. RestFest operates on “crip time,” recognizing the different pace at which disabled people may go through life due to their sensory, physical, or cognitive needs. Crip time rejects ableist productivity norms and offers inclusivity and comfort instead. 

“This Werewolf Complex,” one of the 27 short films and video artworks, adroitly dramatizes an epileptic aura through hallucinations of SpongeBob SquarePants and Rorschachian patterns that morph into human silhouettes. Another work—shifting the meaning of aura from a focal seizure’s onset to aural gestalts—deftly considers how Deaf people access sound in their minds through sight, touch, and imagination. 

While all of the works screened are made by disabled or chronically ill artists, not all of them are about disability or illness. Nor are they intended to educate non-disabled viewers (though RestFest is open to everyone).  

Rather, RestFest taps into an “inherent mutual understanding between community members,” Miriam says. “I’ve had filmmakers who showed films reach out to me and say that they could tell the audience understood their work in a way they hadn’t seen before, which is really special.” 

Similarly, Sammy Holden says that if they were to submit their work “Night Holding Still”—which dreams a path through the shame of their chronic illness—to an experimental film festival, “it might be fine.” 

“But reaching audiences who will potentially understand it more directly is just something that I think can only happen at a festival like RestFest.” 

Beyond Words 

The realities of disability are often ineffable. Reflecting this, many of the festival’s works are experimental, which “leaves space,” Miriam says, “for sitting in the uncertain and the unknowable.” 

“Verbal language isn’t accessible for everyone,” adds Georgia Kumari Bradburn, a British filmmaker whose “A Brief History of Circles” uses sounds and objects to capture how she processes sensory information as an autistic person. A voiceover narrates the history of circles as flowers, logos, and other structures in that shape appear onscreen.  

Eventually, hyperfixation escalates into meltdown. Objects blur and merge as the voiceover reverberates and multiplies, mirroring how euphoria can turn into overload for Bradburn. 

And then a new, calmer obsession takes hold. It is a mathematical law that two perpendicular sine waves, moving in step, form a circle; the voiceover repeats the word “sine,” followed by shots of a shoreline. Bradburn’s fingers trace the water’s surface—a subtle yet powerful act of self-stimulatory behavior, or stimming. “That’s me transferring my sensory experience to the audience through something as intimate and simple as touch,” she says.  

As part of the festival, Bradburn will lead a workshop on the “autistic camera,” which proposes the camera as a tool for autistic expression. A camera might stim, for instance, by circling a scene. 

Not Explaining—Exploring 

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal, an architect and artist, didn’t discover he was autistic until his 30s. “It was the best thing that had ever happened to me,” he says, “because it gave me a language with which to write myself back into my own life.” 

His relief exemplifies the phenomenon of metagnosis, whereby “one becomes newly aware, in adulthood, of a lifelong ‘condition,’” writes narrative medicine scholar Danielle Spencer [1]. This recognition catalyzed a profound exploration of urban space, perception, and accessibility—an inquiry rooted in his lived experience and often overlooked in conventional architectural discourse. 

Heiredal’s documentary short “Not Included—Embedded” explores his “Autistic architectural approach,” a framework that posits disability as a generative force rather than a limitation. 

Raised in a small town in Denmark, Heiredal currently lives in Taipei. “The way that public space is being used is beautiful,” he says. Through mimetically arranged clips, some of shopfronts doubling as dance studios, his film presents a disabled reading of the Taiwanese capital’s traditional informal architecture—buildings and structures designed by residents, not as high-profile projects, but emerging organically. Heiredal depicts the metropolis as a symphony of its residents’ spatial voices. 

Drawing on theorists like Erin Manning, who frames neurotypicality as a system that decides whose lives matter and whose do not [2], Heiredal challenges inclusion that ends with ADA-compliant ramps, arguing that disabled knowledge should more broadly shape how we build the world. For example, he suggests in a recent essay [3] that hosts create spaces where guests can retreat from overstimulation and craft environments that foster shared-interest interactions. To those ends, a host might furnish a quiet corner with cozy chairs, or intentionally spark a conversation between two guests who don’t know each other but both love, say, experimental films. 

“I’m not interested in dictating what an Autistic architectural approach is… it must be co-created,” continues Heiredal, who will expand on these ideas in a talk at the festival. 

Even before he developed this concept, he had been guided by intuition in his work. “The teachers around me encouraged me to just explore what is there without always needing to explain it, and I feel very lucky in that,” he says. “It’s allowed me to do a lot of things that I didn’t necessarily know how to explain.”  

RestFest embodies this sentiment. And, in that spirit, when he found his grandfather’s old 35mm film camera, he started photographing Taipei. “It felt right to do it this way.”  

Access and Care 

The films and video artworks are grouped into categories defined by the sensations they may evoke: “rumbling,” “inside/outside,” “spaces/routes,” “reverberation/held,” and “mid-air/suspended.” All provide closed captioning and audio description, written or recorded, in many cases, by the artists themselves. One vivid example: In her short film “Song Without Words,” deaf visual artist Olivia Ting plays with typeface and lettering to echo the partial inaccessibility of hearing devices and sign language, and to portray listening as a bodily, interpretive act. 

The festival also features 17 virtual events—among them Bradburn’s and Heiredal’s aforementioned programming, as well as a discussion with Holden and another U.K.-based artist on transgressing genre and gender in film. These events incorporate captioning, transcription, and audio description, along with low-sensory breakout rooms, live access support, and permission to stay comfortable—whether that means lying down, staying off-camera, communicating via chat only, leaving early, or something else. RestFest’s film and readings clubs and arts gatherings, held year round, also offer these accommodations. As disability scholar May Chazan writes, “In our care-filled, artful practices, we slowly make our next world.” [4] 

The first event is a workshop on processing pandemic grief, and the final event will be a screening of a collective film created during the workshop. Facilitator Kit Blamire, a self-identified “anarcho-sicko” artist living in Berlin, organized the same event last year. Participants made one-minute films, which were later assembled together. 

“Folks were talking about how, since they became very ill, they hadn’t been able to make films anymore—and then, coming into this space, they were inspired to make films again,” recalls Miriam, the RestFest founder. 

“I’m disabled,” these attendees said, “but all these other disabled people are making films in these creative ways that are comfortable for their minds and bodies.” 

RestFest Film Festival, through Feb. 28; restfestfilmfestival.org. “No need to get out of bed or off the couch. No worries if you’re half-asleep. You are always welcome here.” 

[1] Spencer, Danielle. Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity. Oxford University Press, 2020. 
[2] Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press, 2016. 
[3] Heiredal, Troels Steenholdt. “Autistic Architectural Approach.” PLAT, vol. 13, “Alchemy,” 2025. static1.squarespace.com/static/611838bd3f0e670d00f832f5/t/6796f49bc98eac6ba1880af5/1737946272880/Heiredal-Troels+Autistic+Architectural+Approach.pdf.  
[4] Chazan, May. “Crip Time and Radical Care in/as Artful Politics.” Social Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2, 2023, pp. 59-75. MPDI, doi.org/10.3390/socsci12020099. 

Web image from RestFest Trailer.

On September 9, 1982, on her 25th birthday, Julie Ridge became the 242nd person to swim from England to France. On April 11, 1991, Ridge was hospitalized for 21 days and unceremoniously received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder I. Julie’s one-woman show Bipolar & The English Channel tells the story of how a casual mile-a-day pool swimmer became an English Channel swimmer in nine short months and her 17-hour, 55-minute zig-zag journey across those grey murky seas. It also tells the less glamorous story of a world-record holding endurance athlete who wakes up one not-so-fine day floridly manic, locked down on an unforgiving New York City psychiatric ward – and her arduous journey back to sanity and a fulfilling life.  

On March 26, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia presented a performance of Julie Ridge’s one-woman show: https://collegeofphysicians.org/events/bipolar-english-channel-one-woman-show In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the pleasure of speaking with writer and performer Julie Ridge about her work. 

Guy: Julie, I had the privilege of seeing your show Bipolar and the English Channel a couple of years ago in New York. It was informative, entertaining, and inspirational. As you know, I help arrange programming for the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. As a psychiatrist and playwright, theatrical representations of mental health issues are right up my alley. I am so glad it is working out to have you bring it to the College! 

The very striking title of your piece brings together two images that seem completely unrelated, but you fuse them together so convincingly. Can you say something about your background that sheds some light on the title, about your life as a swimmer, and then your discovery of your diagnosis? 

Julie: With the title, I’ve tried to conjure the image of how my life with bipolar disorder and my unlikely swim across the English Channel run parallel to each other and are symbiotically intertwined. My decision to the swim the English Channel came on as spontaneously as a manic episode. I tell the full story in the show, but the germ was planted when a friend who swam two miles-a-day broke his wrist, and I doubled my casual one mile a day in empathy for his mandatory pool abstinence. At the time, I was an actress performing in my first Broadway show and swam for peace of mind and to stay in shape. The story of learning I had bipolar disorder is the subject of the second act of the show – so, I ask your readers to come see it to hear the tale. 

Guy: Can you tell us how and why you decided to turn your story into a show? What is it like for you to perform? What has the reaction to the show been like, especially from the mental health community? 

Julie: After my diagnosis in 1991, I went back to school to get my master’s degree and became a psychiatric social worker. Over time, I’d developed a seminar that told the story of my English Channel swim and bipolar diagnosis. The decision to turn the informal seminar into a show first arose when I discovered I was a single hour shy of collecting my Actor’s Equity pension. I asked all my friends who were still in the theater if they could write me into a contract show, maybe as a person lying behind a couch or something, even just for the first act of one show, and I’d refund them my salary – I just needed that single hour to collect a lifetime pension. A couple of years went by, no offers were made, I was getting closer and closer to 65, so I decided to do it myself. I wasn’t going to lose my pension over one measly hour.  

On the 5th Anniversary of the non-profit organization I founded in memory of my dad, I pulled together the least expensive Actor’s Equity contract possible that would get me that hour. That contract was four staged readings at the Studio Theater on Theater Row off Broadway in New York City. It was the first time I’d disclosed my bipolar disorder publicly and, frankly, I was terrified. But community members, family, buddies from high school and college, and colleagues were incredibly warm and receptive.  

That four-day run led to performances in the United Solo Festival off Broadway for two consecutive years. A performance at my sister’s temple outside of Boston was seen by a friend with connections to the Sedona Festival, which led to another gig at the JCC in Hartford Ct and so on. It’s my hope that I will be able to perform the show each year in venues across the country.  

As for how it is to perform it – I actually have acute social phobia and get terribly anxious every time I perform the show. It’s odd, because performing when I was an actress was easy and highly enjoyable. But those shows were written by other people and not about my life. Doing something so intimate and personal is quite different. I never know how it’s going to land and be received.  

Guy: I see that in addition to Bipolar & The English Channel, there is a documentary film about you. Can you say something about how this came about?  

Julie: Seems there’s a story behind everything! Zac Norrington, a film student at the New School in New York City needed a subject for his Capstone project senior year. Long distance swimming and cold-water swimming was something of personal interest to him because of a near-death experience his grandfather had. Zac brilliantly thought to contact Ned Dennison, the Director of the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF) for recommendations on swimmers he might interview in New York. Turns out that swims I’d done in 1983 and 1985 put me in the record books. My athletic resume in the 1980s was out of the ordinary, and to my amazement, I was inducted into IMSHOF in 1985.  

Ned recommended me and a couple of other swimmers. Zac interviewed a few of us, showed his preliminary work to his class and professor and they all said “forget about the other swimmers. Focus on Julie’s story.” He did. His short documentary BREATHE, is about the intersection of my double swim around Manhattan Island and my bipolar disorder. He submitted the doc to several festivals, we got showings at many of them, including the prestigious ReelAbilities Film Festival. At our last festival, The Greenwich Village Film Festival, we won Best Short Documentary. Zac was a wonderful director, cameraman, editor and producer. He completed the entire movie during the pandemic. I’m very impressed with the work he did culling together our interviews, still photos and archival footage. It’s been an honor attending talk backs to represent the film. 

Guy: Can you tell us about the organization you founded, the Frank Ridge Foundation? What its mission is, why you decided to start it, and about some the foundation’s projects?  

Julie: Ah, the subject nearest and dearest to my heart. Thanks for asking. Frank Ridge is my dad – one of the kindest and most loving dads a girl can be fortunate enough to have. Dad died in 2013 after 90 full years, rich with adventure, and community involvement. Pops supported everything I ever did, unquestioningly and unconditionally. He was by my side stroke after boring stoke for all of my swims, was in Hawaii melting in the heat with me when I completed the Ironman Triathlon and rode side-by-side with me as we biked 3,700+ miles across America. Dad was also a pretty smart businessman, and he left me and my sisters some money. I’ve never had much money – I chose lucrative fields like acting, writing and social work – so what he left felt like a fortune. I took almost half of my inheritance and founded a non-profit in his honor, the Frank Ridge Memorial Foundation, Inc. (frankridgememorialfoundation.org), dedicated to living well with mental health conditions through awareness and understanding. Our primary work is:  

• Creating and facilitating resource-rich topical seminars, using accurate compassionate movies as the springboard for conversation, for community members and mental health practitioners required NY continuing education.  

• Maintaining our resource-rich website. 

• Providing meaningful part-time employment for individuals living well with mental health conditions.  

• And performing Bipolar & The English Channel whenever the opportunity arises. 

I’ve loved working for myself running this organization for the past 12 years and hope to keep on for as long as I am able! 

BREATHE TRAILER: 

VIEW THE FILM HERE: 

https://www.docnyc.net/film/doc-nyc-u-life-in-the-big-apple/breathe/

It is one thing to read about bipolar disorder in a textbook, and another thing to observe it firsthand. Some of us have friends or family members whom we have seen in the throes of a manic episode. As a psychiatrist, I have witnessed mania at close range literally hundreds of times. But to be an audience member and to experience it in a way that manages to be both educational and entertaining is a rare privilege. And to do so as a multimedia event, fusing theater with visual arts, is surely unique.  

Sam Kissajukian’s one-man show 300 Paintings is a must-see that is currently enjoying a return engagement at the Vineyard Theatre in New York. (It is purely a coincidence that the theater, just off Union Square, is a block away from my former psychiatric office of eighteen years.)  

Kissajukian is an Australian stand-up comic. In 2021, during the pandemic, he experienced a five-month bipolar manic episode. During that time, despite having no previous background in visual arts, he decided to become a painter. Moving into a warehouse, he began to paint. He barely slept, frequently turning out multiple works a day. By the end of the episode he had created three hundred paintings, documenting his mental state.  

Kinssajukian has created the show he calls 300 Paintings as the culmination of his personal and artistic journey. The show has won numerous awards, including Best Comedy at Sydney Fringe 2022 and 2023, and the Mental Health Awareness Award at Adelaide Fringe 2024. It has played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and it first came to the Vineyard last fall. He has also had several exhibitions of his paintings, and has come out as a strong advocate for mental health awareness. 

While 300 Paintings calls on the author’s experience as a comic, it is no mere stand-up routine. At 80 minutes it has the dimension and scope of a play. There are serious undertones, yet there are many undoubtedly funny parts: We hear how at his most grandiose Kinssajukian thinks of himself as a “Pisscasso” who goes through a blue period in days, rather than years. At another point he describes how he affected a beret. Funny or serious, he is always charming and engaging, and he breaks it up by showing projections of his work.  

There are times when the dialogue takes on the rapid, pressured speech of a person who is manic, and his thought process shows the jumping from topic to topic that a psychiatrist refers to as “flight of ideas,” But this feels intentional. At no time do you worry that the performer does not have it under control. And he readily attributes this to his rapid diagnosis and treatment by a psychiatrist.  

At the end of the performance, Kissajukian announces that a curated exhibition of his paintings is on view in the lobby, and that he will be available to meet the audience.  

Two Paintings by Kissajukian

Podcast

Web image provided by Sam Kissajukian

The Center for the Study of Tobacco in Society is ready for the 2024 Election. Check out their new exhibit: A Vote for Cancer: Tobacco Advertising and Presidential Elections and read an interview with the Center’s founder, Dr. Alan Blum, in conversation with Jack Coulehan.

Tobacco was America’s first cash crop and a mainstay of the US economy for 300 years. So it’s no surprise that manufacturers of cigars, chewing tobacco, and cigarettes have had a presence in presidential and other electoral campaigns since the mid-19th century.

The first Presidential campaign buttons appeared in 1896 – promoting Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan — and were given away by Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company to promote its Sweet Caporals cigarettes. By the mid-1900s, cigarette advertisers would distribute whimsical presidential campaign buttons featuring advertising icons such as Philip Morris’s bellhop Little Johnny and Brown and Williamson’s Willie the Penguin. The button gimmick culminated in RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company’s nationwide “Vote for Joe” advertising campaign in 1992 for its cartoon character Joe Camel.

Toward the close of the 20th century, the combination of restrictions on cigarette advertising and the approval of political action committees by Congress enabled cigarette makers to donate directly to Presidential candidates and lessened the need for cigarette product advertising.

Alan Blum, MD
Introduction to A Vote for Cancer: Tobacco Advertising and Presidential Elections

Interview with Alan Blum

Jack Coulehan Oct 24, 2024

The battle against smoking evolved from awareness campaigns to challenging a profit-driven industry, using humor, irony, and persistent activism to drive cultural change.

One of the most successful patient-artists was Auguste Forestier, hospitalized at Saint-Alban at the age of 27 after placing pebbles on a train track and causing a train to derail.  After his discharge from treatment, Forestier remained at Saint-Alban for the rest of his life, where he worked in the kitchen. He began to create toys for the children of hospital employees using discarded materials, even butcher’s bones.  In this exhibition we see not only a boat created by Forestier from scraps of wood but also a print of Tosquelles proudly holding up one of Forestier’s boats.  

The work of Saint-Alban artists came to the attention of French artist Jean Dubuffet, who, after reading the 1922 book Art of the Insane, had founded the Art Brut (also known as Outsider Art) movement.  Dubuffet’s attempts to collect it were at first greeted with skepticism by Tosquelles.  However, the success of Forestier (eventually he even came to the attention of Picasso) was such that the profits from his work were used to help fund the hospital.   

At its previous venues in Europe (the show originated in Barcelona) a larger number of pieces from Saint-Alban were displayed.  At its US venue, the show has been augmented with work from American asylums, which prove to be a highlight of the exhibition.  Even without a Tosquelles to inspire them, these patients created beautiful and fascinating art.  

We see, for example, a coat made by Myrllen, a schizophrenic patient from Tennessee.  The patient had reportedly worsened in response to such few treatments as were available at the time.  In desperation, she was given discarded rags and threads.  What she produced gives us a window into her condition, with strange words and figures whose meaning was known only to her.  Ironically, after making several such pieces the patient lost her creative impulse and stopped sewing once put on Thorazine, the first antipsychotic medication.   

Another piece, a watercolor entitled “An Antarctic Scenery,” is one of the earliest known American asylum paintings (c. 1816).  The patient-artist, Richard Nisbett, in his paranoid imagination has chosen to depict “a fleet of murtherous Pirates” invading Antarctica. Nisbett was a patient at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia under the treatment of none other than Benjamin Rush, often considered to be the father of American psychiatry.  

Although the exhibition closes in August, a book (which will be for sale at the Museum and online) is expected to be released in November 2024.  The link to a virtual conversation with the show’s curators is given here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9j3fMn0xJA (1 hour 19 minutes).

Francesc Tosquelles is frequently mentioned in The Rebel’s Clinic, by Adam Shatz,  a recent biography of the psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon.

A Tosquelles Glossary from the Barcelona exhibition is also a helpful tool: https://www.cccb.org/en/exhibitions/guide/francesc-tosquelles/237849 

Illustrations: 

Auguste Forestier (1887–1958, France) Untitled (Boat), 1935–1949, Wood, fabric, metal, leather, nail, 29 1/2 x 45 1/4 x 9 1/2 in. Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, ART BRUT/Gift of Bruno Decharme in 2021, AM 2022-43. 

Romain Vigouroux (active mid-20th century, France), Francesc Tosquelles on the Roof of a Building at the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital, Holding a Sculpture by Auguste Forestier, 1947, Gelatin silver print, 7 x 4 7/8 in Collection Family Ou-Rabah Tosquelles. 

Richard Nisbett (1753 England-1823, United States) An Antarctic Scenery, 1816, watercolor.  Collection of The Library Company of Philadelphia.  

American Folk Art Museum  
Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023
Folkartmuseum.org