For the second straight year, the Amputee Coalition’s National Conference has gone virtual. We learned a ton at last year’s conference, which was the best-attended in the history of the event. This year’s event (which starts today) will break a different record: It’s going to extend over an entire month, from today through the end of October. There will be sessions daily from today through Saturday, October 2, which represents the original four-day schedule. But the community submitted so many strong session ideas for conference sessions this year that the Coalition added another four days to accommodate the overflow. So the fun continues on Saturday, October 9; Wednesday, October 13; Wednesday, October 20; and Sunday, October 30.
Amplitude will be leading a session on the first auxiliary day, October 9, at 1 pm Eastern time. It’s titled “Lights, Camera . . . Amputees!” Here’s the abstract:
Able-bodied screenwriters tend to write flat, uninteresting amputee characters, and their cliched depictions of amputees harm the community by promoting myths and misperceptions. We’ll discuss what’s missing from these one-dimensional depictions; what well-rounded amputee characters would look like on screen; and why those characters would be more entertaining and more relatable for all audiences. We’ll hear from three amputee writers who are developing scripts that depict limb difference more authentically.
Our guest panelists are all familiar to readers of this newsletter. We’ll be talking to Katy Sullivan, who’s developing a TV series called Legs that she describes as “Sex and the City with a disabled Carrie Bradshaw”; Dan Aid, who’s played a bilateral amputee assassin on television and played a bilateral amputee assassin on network TV and has written two screenplays that feature limb-different characters; and Todd Domingo, a union actor who’s doing character work in Canada’s TV and film industry.
If you haven’t registered yet for the conference, sign up at this page. Hope to see you on October 9!