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True to my style and flow, I forgot to post about Alice Wong’s live-streamed Celebration of Life before it happened. Fortunately, it’s available for replay on YouTube anytime, and I strongly suggest a replay. Enormous thanks to San Francisco’s Disability Cultural Center and Calling Up Justice and everyone who planned, hosted, and participated in the gorgeous ceremony.
The disability-love-focused service was led by Rabbi Elliot Kukla. For the layout of the live stream, there’s large window with a view of a stage. Up there are two microphones on stands at different heights and a stand for people to place written remarks. Beside the microphones is a small table with a candle. A separate window played the ASL interpreters. Below the two videos was an area for real-time open captions. The whole thing has a vivid lemon-yellow background. Around the edges are the ornate and very happy-looking tiger and flower blossoms that adorn the cover of Alice’s memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life. And when I say the tiger looks happy, I mean this exquisite beast has its mouth open and looks to me like it’s laughing, likely at one of Alice’s classic snarks. It’s also got its front paws extended. It could be preparing to pounce on a treat or maybe be taking a pre-nap stretch. Alice liked to evoke both snacks and naps, so I’ll just picture that this slinky, stripey feline is about to have both.
Besides Year of the Tiger, Alice edited anthologies, including Disability Intimacy: Essays on Care, Love, and Desire. All of these are by and for her beloved intersectional disability community. And she infiltrated the non-disabled world in amazing ways, too, from her columns in Teen Vogue to her role on Season 2 of Human Resources on Netflix. This was not an awareness-raising campaign to get the sympathies or understanding of non-disabled people. She was reaching out to her community in as many creative and bold ways as she could think of. Many of her more hard-core activist activities, like fighting for masks in healthcare settings and supporting Palestinians were definitely aimed at everyone, disabled or not.
There’s never enough room to list all of Alice’s professional activities and accomplishments in a blog post, so follow up on the Disability Visibility Project website. If you wanna hear some of the ways she touched the hearts of family, friends, and colleagues, this Celebration of Life is for you. Bye, Alice.