HandicapThis

HandicapThis is an excellent show. They are very funny and informative at the same time. I love how the two have such good chemistry together. Mike and Tim make it so easy to forget you are watching someone in a wheelchair with a developmental disability. They make it so funny and so descriptive that you focus more on what they are saying not what they looked like.

 

When Mike first began to talk I know a lot of people were having difficulty understanding him. A few minutes into the show Tim referred to Mike’s “accent”. Nobody knew what he was talking about at first. He was talking about Mike’s speech impediment because he has cerebral palsy and can not talk as clearly as someone without it. I like how he calls it an accent it makes him seem more normal. After listening to Mike talk for a few minutes it becomes gradually easier to understand him then after an hour you forget he is even talking any differently than anyone in the room.

 

My favorite part of the show is when Mike tells us about his high school life. He had to shout out that he knew the answer or something of that nature because he couldn’t raise his hand. Mike said most teachers got annoyed and told him to raise his hand like everyone else and wait to be called on. Well he is incapable of doing that and one teacher came up with a bright idea. He invented a switch to go on his wheelchair so when he knew the answer to  This shows that that teacher really cares about Mike, knew how smart he was and how much he could contribute to the rest of the class.

a question he could move his hand a tiny bit to hit the switch and a light would go off above his head.

One part of Mike and Tim’s story that stood out to me was when Tim ran from Disney World all the way to Chicago for Mike. This was so impressive to me that a person could care so much about another person to run such a long distance for them. In this case Tim ran to raise awareness about cerebral palsy. Tim ended up in multiple newspapers and on the news which got the word out to a lot of people. He did this in 2005 and in 2015 he plans to do another run from Disney World to Chicago. I hope this time the new social media will help generate more publicity of the run and more awareness.

Mike and Tim are a great team and have been working together for a long time now. The do many shows together for schools or anywhere that needs more education on how intellectual and developmental disabilities aren’t really that much of a challenge to overcome. Mike is a great role model and shows that just because someone looks like they have a disability doesn’t mean they can’t be one of the funniest or smartest people you have met.