Geri Jewell knows what kind of acting jobs she'll be offered, even before she picks up the phone. Could she come audition for the part of a woman in a wheelchair? How about a woman with mental illness? Does she do MS?
"Yeah, I can do multiple sclerosis," Jewell will tell them. "But I'm not going to drop the cerebral palsy."After being in show business for 13 years, four of them as a sometimes regular on the TV show "Facts of Life," Jewell still can't get Hollywood to see past the disability she was born with. In those 13 years, she has been called to only 12 auditions.
In a sense not much has changed for her since she was a child - when she longed desperately to be mainstreamed into her neighborhood's elementary school instead of being segregated in a special education class.
With acting jobs a bit scarce, Jewell has gone back to what lured her into show business to start with: Stand-up comedy, an equal-opportunity profession.
Jewell was in Salt Lake City last weekend performing at Johnny B's comedy club at the Marriott Hotel.
"There's one thing I've noticed about being a stand-up comedian," Jewell explained in an interview. "The audience doesn't care whether I have cerebral palsy. What matters is that I'm funny. It's the one place I'm accepted for what I am - if I do my job."
"Her audience will give her about five minutes for the cerebral palsy," agreed Johnny B's owner Johnny Biscuit. "Then she has to be funny."
And she was.
"I used to have a real complex going out in public with my makeup job," Jewell told her audience Saturday night. "And then I saw Tammy Faye Baker (pause). I didn't know she had CP."
Many of Jewell's jokes are about her disability, in the same way that a single man might tell jokes about being single or a parent might use his children as material. But Jewell also has a method to her monologue.
"I try to get people over the hump of CP by seeing the humor in it," she says. "Nine out of 10 times - OK, nine-and-a-half out of 10 times - I get on stage there's this discomfort. I can get them out of the discomfort by letting them work through it humorously. I want to educate every time I perform.
"I look at comedy as open-heart surgery. I open their hearts up with the humor so there's room for me to leave a message."
When she was born, doctors told Jewell's parents that she had "severe" cerebral palsy, might be mentally retarded and should be institutionalized. Instead, her parents sold their living room furniture and bought orthopedic equipment to strengthen her muscles so she could learn to walk.
She was kept in special education classes until she was 15. "My social skills were zero, and emotionally I was about 10 years old," Jewell remembers. She had never been to a party, never had a best friend.
Like many disabled teens, she was ignored, and when people weren't ignoring her they were asking her about her health. "Nobody talked to me about their boyfriends, about what went on after school."
The one bright point in high school was drama class. Her classmates still didn't invite her to any parties, but she did get parts in plays. Her first was as a 98-year-old Japanese alcoholic woman in "Tea House ofthe August Moon" (the alcoholic feature was written in just for her, to help explain why she jerked her body and slurred her words).
Jewell had wanted to be a comedic actress since she was a little girl. At 10 she wrote to her idol, Carol Burnett, to get advice. Burnett eventually wrote Jewell more than a dozen letters, encouraging her to give acting a try.
In college, though, when she tried to enroll as a theater arts major, she was told she should try accounting, so she could get "a CP job." Stop being foolish, they told her, and they were both wrong and right.
She did end up being an actress, landing the part of "cousin Jeri" on "Facts of Life" for four seasons. But that was before "Life Goes On" proved that a TV series whose main character had a disability could flourish.
In 1985 her contract was canceled and there followed six low years that proved to Jewell that the hard part was not surviving CP but surviving Hollywood. Now, at 35, she sees that if she had continued to ride "the fantasy wave" of "Facts of Life" she would not have grown up.
"I had to do a lot of soul-searching. That's when I had to find my strengths." Those strengths, she decided, were her ability to teach people and to make them laugh, often at the same time. Now she travels the country doing stand-up and conducting workshops, like the one she did last week for the United Cerebral Palsy Association of Utah.
This summer she is getting married. And she's still hoping, though not expecting, that Hollywood might learn to see past her disability. "My dream is that the CP would just be incidental. That I'd get a role because I'm good."