Bill Brogden stood on a ledge at Detroit’s Renaissance Center today, about one flight up from the pavement, and planned out his leap, as friends egged him on from the ground.
He figured he’d jump onto a metal box sticking up from the ground, then climb down, just for the heck of it.
A security guard, rightly, spoiled his plans … and then insulted him.
“No,” she yelled to Brogden, an 18-year-old man of short stature from California attending the Little People of America 2008 National Conference. The guard laughed, and called him a “bow-legged dare devil,” Brogden and his friends said.
The teen and his friends, also attending he conference, shrugged it off.
“I’m probably more used to it,” Brogden said.
These are the issues the 51st annual conference is meant to combat, organizers say. LPA Vice President of Public Relations Gary Arnold said discrimination and negative, stereotypical portrayals of little people in movies and TV shows can affect a young person’s self-esteem.
Dawn Downing, chapter president of LPA in Grand Rapids, said it’s important to exude confidence.
“People are always going to stare, it’s never going to change,” Downing, 25, said. “There are always going to be questions. … If you can’t learn to accept it, it’s going to make it harder.”
The conference will also provide medical screenings.
Arnold said the LPA board of directors has been taking about such issues as health care. He said some insurance companies have made it difficult for people with dwarfism to get care, including crucial leg-straightening surgeries because some consider dwarfism a pre-existing condition.
Arnold said the board is still strategizing what can be done to better address these problems.
It’s a right “that we should have,” he said. “Yet sometimes they’re making it difficult to get care that we need to stay healthy.”