I had gone to a dance for handicapped people. I didn’t have my camera. At first I’d come in and I was incredibly bored. I was sort of holding myself very in and really dreading the whole evening. I couldn’t photograph and there wasn’t even much I wanted to photograph. There were all different kinds of handicapped people. In fact, one woman told me this terrific thing which was that the cerebral palsies don’t like the polios and they both dislike the retardeds. Anyway, after a while somebody asked me to dance and then I danced with a number of people. I began to have an absolutely sensational time. I can’t really explain it. One sort of unpleasant aspect of it was that it was a little bit like being Jean Shrimpton all of the sudden. I mean you had this feeling that you were totally sensational suddenly because of the circumstances. Something had shifted and suddenly you were a remarkable creature. But the other thing was that my whole relation to people changed and I really had the most marvelous time.

Then the woman who had brought me pointed out this man. She said, “Look at that man. He’s dying to dance with somebody but he’s afraid.” He was a sixty year old man and he was retarded and visually he was not interesting to me at all because there was nothing about him that looked strange. He just looked like any sixty year old man. He just looked sort of ordinary. We started to dance and he was very shy. In fact there was something about him that was left over from being eleven. I asked him where he lived and he told me he lived in Coney Island with his father who was eighty and I asked him if he worked and he said in the summer he sold Good Humors. And then he said this incredible sentence. It was something like, “I used to worry about”—it was very slow—“I used to worry about being like this. Not knowing more. But now”—and his eyes of lit up—“now I don’t worry anymore.” Well, it was just totally a knockout for me.

waddap.