"Music Within": the story of Richard Pimentel and the ADA

I had overlooked, in my own memory, the title “Music Within” when I ordered it from Netflix, and indeed I saw it a couple years ago and reviewed it at doaskdotell – but the MGM film about Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston), the Vietnam veteran whose speeches and demonstrations helped launch the Americans with Disabilities Act needs noting again.

The DVD includes a 20-minute motivational speech by the real Richard Pimentel, who, however hefty, is surprisingly funny, suitable for comedy club if not so serious. A nation that demanded “sacrifice” of its young men to stall Communism in Vietnam, treated its disabled citizens with apartheid, even when they were Vietnam veterans. He starts out by mentioning how the urine of diabetics was loaned to perspective draftees, although that didn’t work for him. He spends some time talking about a veteran friend of his being thrown out of a restaurant for being "too ugly", a harrowing scene in the film.

The film was harrowing enough, and he lost most of his hearing in a bunker implosion. He was the only soldier with any hearing left at all. In fact, I left Basic Training in 1968 with a slight tinnitus in my right ear, that needs masking with white noise (a fan) when I sleep, at around 4000 cps. That occurred on the rifle range, where the M14 blast when “coaching” went right into the right ear, while the earplugs issued were inadequate. (You could buy a molding kind that worked better.) Then, while on permanent party at Fort Eustis, we had to requalify once a year; I would have tinnitus when it was over – the ears would ring when you bit down on your teeth to eat.

The DVD has some interested deleted scenes – one of corporal punishment by a vindictive teacher for chewing gum (the little girl really screams), and another scene where Richard admits to a girl friend that he’s never been responsible to another person before.

The ADA has made many people productive at work, sometimes made them indispensable. At one workplace, the most productive computer support analyst was legally blind, but accommodated with a super-large terminal monitor. We went to him as the last resort to solve almost all problems that no one else could figure out. We used to say “the instantiation of D.T.”