Blind People

A blind couple here have filed suit in federal court, charging an area bus company with discriminatory practices. The complaint, filed in Philadelphia, charges that Werner Bus Lines refused to allow Barry O'Brien and Sharon Burk-O'Brien to board a company bus to Atlantic City in 1992 because they are blind and rely on guide dogs. The driver, the complaint alleges, told the couple that blind people with guide dogs were supposed to take a separate bus - and that he would request such a bus if they desired.

Thunder and Wendy were off. The two horses weaved between orange safety cones, and the young boys riding them each shot three baskets from horseback. Then, the horses circled metal drums at the end of the course and began to trot toward the finish line. In the end, after two other horses and riders had run the course, Thunder was the victor. But this was a race in which it did not really matter who crossed the finish line first. All the riders were greeted with cheers of encouragement and high-fives by those watching.

The Delaware County Blind/Sight Center will close its on-site manufacturing plant by mid-December, idling 41 employees, most of them blind. Robert Nelson, the center's executive director, announced the action yesterday. He said the plant was closing because of hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating losses and because of a general shift away from separate employment facilities for blind people. Nelson said the center would continue the other services it provides to blind and visually impaired people, such as job training and counseling.

Amanda Reighn, 59, sits hunched over the table, carefully fingering the pin-size dots in the Braille reading book. She is blind in her right eye, and is slowly losing sight in her left. Andrew Bemesderfer, 84, sits at a another table, learning how to use the Braille typing machine. He suffers from a degenerative eye disease and expects to lose his sight. These two, along with 20 or 30 others, come to VISCOP three days a week in a room in the Pitman Church of the Nazarene to get out of the house, meet friends and prepare for blindness.

Some thought that the elevator had stalled, and that the chimes were sounding an automatic cry for help. Others thought they heard a telephone ringing somewhere. One guy said a bird was loose in the courthouse. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The chimes jingling for the first time Wednesday in one of the three elevators in the Bucks County Courthouse are to aid the blind. Sighted people can tell which floor they've stopped on by glancing up at a lighted panel above the inner elevator doors.

It would seem impossible to imagine a more unusual dance than Motion Without View, a piece Michael Mao created for blind people. Yet he did come up with the impossible in the concert his troupe, Michael Mao Dance, performed at the Drake Theater last night as part of the NextMove Festival. Wittily titled Trespassing, this little solo is set to Saint-Saens' The Dying Swan, the music made immortal by Anna Pavlova. Mao trespasses on the dance by turning it upside down and inside out. For starters, it is performed by a man, Tim Martin, who is accompanied not by a violinist, but a boom box wheezing out the soulful music.

Choreographer Michael Mao didn't know what to call his six guest dancers. Sight-impaired? Physically challenged? "There are a lot of issues about political correctness here," he said with a bemused smile in his New York studio. One of those dancers soon set him straight. She said to Mao, "When I get up in the morning and I open my eyes, I can't see a thing. I'm blind. " The same matter-of-fact attitude pervades the rehearsals for Motion Without View, one of several dances that Michael Mao Dance will present Friday through Sunday night at Philadelphia's Drake Theatre as part of the NextMove Festival '93. When you lose sight, you lose your sense of direction.

George C. Scott, who polished up his Old Curmudgeon act in last season's On Borrowed Time, tries it out again in Wrong Turn at Lungfish, which opened last night at the Promenade Theatre. That's the best that can be said for this preposterous comedy by Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz, a pair of old Hollywood hands, but this time the master hasn't a chance of salvaging the evening. The play gives us Scott as Peter Ravenswaal, a blind former college dean dying of an unnamed illness in a New York hospital, and Jami Gertz as Anita Merendino, the barely literate young woman who comes to read to him every Friday.

For a few hours every Tuesday, you can find a Justice at the Upper Moreland Library. Not just in the law aisle, between Blackstone and Warren, but in the back room. There you can find Linda and John Justice, their hands tapping dimples into plastic labels with tiny styluses. The labels are then affixed to cassettes that are part of the library's collection of 185 recorded books and instructional tapes. The raised plastic markings speak volumes to the sightless, because the labels are in Braille.

Uma. The name conjures an image of exotica, of something untamed - even slightly ferocious, capable of purr or pounce. The actress lives up to it. It is a Sunday, and Uma Thurman, 24, blows into a Four Seasons interview lair with a phalanx of public-relations assistants who sit a couple of feet away from the young star, soaking up her every nuance as she talks about her new movie, Jennifer Eight, her career and her thumbs (details later)....