BUT I AM STANDING!

I stop, mouth open, at the slogan on the T-shirt.

An impish blonde man with tattoos and piercings peers across the table and points gleefully to his other designs. 

    GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES AND KISS ME.

    LI'L STUD.

    OH MY HECK IT'S A DWARF!

His badge says Danny, owner and operator of www.ShortDwarf.com: "Where Size Meets Reality".

I've flown direct from the land of rampant political correctness (Eugene Oregon) to the land of rampant Mormon worship (Salt Lake City, Utah), host to the ultimate public celebration of small is beautiful: the Little People of America Conference 2002. I am simply unprepared for this breezy, self-effacing humor around a genetic variation that results in short stature, otherwise known as dwarfism. And I am instantly disarmed.

Bike Friday attended the conference for the first time ever, sending the two littlest people in the office, Gaylynn and Lynette (relative giantesses at
a shade under 5-foot nothing) to offer the dwarf community an alternative to riding a clunky kid's bike for travel and exercise. BF had already built custom road bikes for dwarf customers, Dan Okenfuss and Wendy Sarratt, and it was their suggestion that we go along and um, pedal our wares.

"Dwarf people often have joint and hip problems, we have to stay active," says Dan, who commissioned Bike Friday to make him a bike to ride the 115-mile El Tour de Tucson, alongside his 6-foot brother Chuck.

OUR JOURNEY to the seat of the Mormon faith was blessed by the hospitality of BF owners Bob and Susan Weirick, whose garage indicates they possibly have more Bike Fridays than Bike Friday.

The hills of Salt Lake City near the Weirick's place

Salt Lake City is hot, dry and landlocked, conducive to serious contemplation of one's politely covered naval. The Mormon Temple rises from its scorched-concrete piazza like a wedding cake, iced with florid spires, thick walls, calm pools, manicured turf. Teetering atop one of the spires is a golden angel blasting on a bugle, steering the way to salvation. I peek into the dome-like structure housing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but no-one has the mike. The Mormons don't escape Danny@ShortDwarf.com's dig in the shins either:

    ONE WIFE, SEVEN DWARFS, WE HAD THE IDEA FIRST!

Danny is making a mint selling dish cloths and handtowels stencilled with this Mormon-centric guffaw. Some of his peers shake their heads in bemusement and comment that they never know how far this cheeky entrepreneur will push the boundaries of etiquette. Running a close second in Danny's dishcloth sales is an in-quip, "Oh my heck, it's a dwarf!"

I ask Gaylynn to enlighten me on the latter.

    "It's a SURVIVOR joke," she says. "One of the contestants was from Salt Lake City and On My Heck is what she said every third word."

Spot the golden angel.

I HAD PACKED my tiny 9-speed Crusoe and Gaylynn her tiny SatRDay recumbent, confident that with my seat dropped way down and her seat shunted way forward, the Little People could test ride our bikes. 

No way.

The height of the average delegate ranged from 2'0" to 4'10", considerably littler than little ole us. Fortunately, Dan generously had offered his green Pocket Rocket and charismatic presence to educate his peers.

The first day started out humorously enough. Gaylynn and I tried putting the Family Tandem together and got one of the center tubes round the wrong way, making it impossible to put on the timing chain or indeed, pull the bike apart to fix the problem. We eventually had to sheepishly enlist the help of the only other bicycle manufacturer present, Gary Atherton of
Atherton Cycles, a veteran custom builder for the Little People market.

"We're not mechanics, we're just the Littlest People at Bike Friday," I
mumbled inanely as he wrestled the crank off, thus saving our posteriors.

Such is the camaraderie of the niche bike industry.

Then they came:  on foot and on hi-tech electric scooters, with and without
walking frames, canes or a supportive arm, standing on tippy toes to fill
out a card, to shrewdly and skeptically peruse our brochures. If a delegate towered over the rest we soon realized he or she was a parent or friend of a newborn dwarf child, carefully investigating the options for their tiny offspring.

At first I felt like a big flapping fish in a bowl of tiny tetras, apologetic for my comparatively regular stature. I found myself involuntarily hunching myself over to talk to people, like a 6'0" debutante with size 12 feet.

This initial feeling vanished by mid-morning, when the various compact body shapes and sizes  suddenly seemed perfectly normal. In fact, whenever a regular-sized body glided up to the table my mind bleeped, "excess packaging". After all, our brains are around the same size, why the need for all that brawn?

Dan and brother Chuck ride el Tour de Tucson, 110 miles on Dan's custom Pocket Rocket. "I wanted something I could keep up with my friends on, that was going to last me a long time. Bike Friday was the only one I really considered."

    "The way we see it, we're the fortunate ones…"

Aiden is one of 1200 delegates who have traveled to the convention from as far as the UK, Australia, Europe and even Albania.

Two of Aiden's sons are of regular height. His third and adopted fourth
child were both born with achondroplasia, one of over 200 different forms of dwarfism, and characterized by a disproportionate body and limbs. However, judging from the kids I saw racing breathlessly around the Hilton lobby, dwarf children are as energetic, loving and tiring as any.

    "She's a little bundle of energy, she tires us out" says Aiden of Jessica, his adopted dwarf daughter.

    "Her birth parents could not see beyond the problems," he said. "All we could see were the good things."

The birth parents had since separated, despite subsequently raising a normal height child. Little Jessica was, perhaps, the luckier of the two.

All day, delegates shuffled between seminars and activities designed around their concerns: medical issues, intermarriage with a  regular height person, acceptance in the workplace, dwarves rights, discrimination and so on. I wondered about discrimination, and was inspired to hear that if anything, it tends to the positive. Because dwarfism rarely affects the brain, Little People have been able to achieve great standing in all fields of endeavour, even sport, as evidenced by the annual Dwarf Olympic Games.

Aiden and his family were just one of the many inspiring people I was privileged to meet. Here, I salute a handful more:

John and Chuck are a couple of burly tank-topped lads, 4'10"and 90lbs each. Chuck is a self-confessed backslid Amish who drives a "repo man" truck for a living. I automatically visualize this pocket-sized wrestler base-jumping from the driver seat to the ground. An earlier stroll around the exhibitors booths revealed why Little People do not necessarily drive little cars: driving is made possible by the pedal extender, of which there are different designs and styles, aggressively marketed by two or three Little People-powered enterprises. The extender is a metal arm of appropriate length bolted or latched onto the gas and clutch pedals.

Chuck tells me he drives about 20 minutes to go clubbing outside his
village with his non-Amish friends. He sports tattoos and a shaved head and if I kneel to meet him eye to eye, I could get scared.

    "Got no email," he says, when I invite him to fill out a card. "No phone,
no nuttin'."

    "I think I'd like to become Amish," I say wistfully, adding, "don't you
think the world is just too commercial, too stressed, mailboxes overflowing with toy catalogs to replace human connection with Internet connection, human beings becoming human doings...? "

He plants his hand on my shoulder.

    "You wouldn't want to be Amish. Trust me."

The pair makes a running leap for the Family Tandem, despite Chuck nearly castrating himself on the too-high seat. "We wanna take it out on the street!" they say. I want to take out a hacksaw immediately and let this dynamic duo take it out and take on the world.

"I wanna take it for spin round the city!" says Jodi

Jodi is a 24 year old with real attitude, a 4'10" dwarf in the non-genetic
sense. As a child she contacted viral meningitis, suffering lengthy and
painful operations to reshape a pair of legs growing outward at 90-degree
angles, resulting in a normal upper body but short legs. This calamity has
not stopped her from winning the gold medal in every snowboarding category of the Oregon Winter Games for 2 years running - against regular-height competition.

    "I've got a crappy 24-inch wheel kids bike that doesn't fit," she says, swooning over Dan's bike. "If I had that Bike Friday I'd ride instead of drive, which would keep me fit."

She describes the fearless way she approaches a rocky trail - and life in general - on her crappy kid's bike: "I don't mind going over the handlebars - I just roll." (Jodi has since ordered a Bike Friday Pocket Llama mountain bike with front suspension).

I note that Little People have big dreams. They want front suspension even though designing a bike to include this can be a challenge for a tiny rider. They drive normal cars, they want a normal bike. They're adults, not kids. And the kids are, well, kids.

Dan and Ronna are a couple with a type of dwarfism called SED, and in their case they are perfectly scaled down to 4'10", with limbs, torso and head in perfect proportion. They are the only little people here able to fit on our standard Family Tandem, due to their longer legs. "We want one," they
say. "We want to ride together."

Before I jump to the conclusion that SED's are the luckier of the
syndromes, Dan explains: "SED is characterized by a number of things, typically a slight barrel chest, slight curvature of the spine, long arms and fingers." He points to a barrel-shaped gentleman who is mostly head and torso, and a distinguished head and torso at that. But little else. "He's SED too."

I mention that all of the Little People I have spoken to seem really knowledgeable about their type of dwarfism and that of others.

    "Oh yes, typically when one dwarf meets another, it's 'show me your hands and ears'. We try to work out what kind of dwarfism they have."

Just like the rest of us, on meeting a stranger, say or think,  'what do you do for a living?', I think ruefully.

Matt Roloff is the newly elected president of the LPA. Square-jawed and
handsome, he looks every bit the film star from a dignified past era, a
scaled-down Robert De Niro or Tony Curtis, smaller than life. His hardcover autobiography is selling like hotcakes. I run to catch him as he zips about on his little electric scooter, so he might dedicate my copy to my boss, an avid collector of books by and about extraordinary people. We talk about developing a pedal assisted scooter so a little person can get more exercise than pushing a button. He thrusts a finger at me.

    "That's IT! A bicycle with three wheels and no motor, three wheels so I
could stop and talk and not fall over, and no motor so I could stay
fit….build it and I'll sure as hell promote it." I know he means it.

As we talk, numerous peers politely approach and interrupt with
agenda items for the 2pm meeting. Elected president just this morning, Matt's
already in the hot seat. At one point a colleague approaches and alerts him
about "some suspicious woman who's come with a group to see the freak
show."

Matt rolls his eyes and waves a hand as if to say, "yeah whatever - there's always one of 'em".

I am in awe of the self-esteem and quiet assuredness exuded by these
people. They have been dealt one of nature's harshest blows, and had to come to terms with it in this height-oriented, image-conscious world. Learning to overcome it right from birth seems to develop an acute sense of self-worth in every little person I meet. The suffering they have endured, both physical and emotional, is obvious. By the time they make it to adulthood, nothing seems an issue.  They simply don't sweat the small stuff. I find it refreshing. I want to be around these people, and what they emanate, every waking day.

The toughest rite of passage a Little Person must endure must be the teenage years, where appearance is everything.

Michael, from New York, is a hip and cool 20-year-old with a goatee beard, silver python chain and a T-shirt that reaches to his knees that says,
'DISTURBED'. I ask, and to my relief discover, it is the name of a band not the state of his mind. He speaks softly, hesitantly, admiring the bike and saying he has never ridden one. Like so many, his head, torso and arms are of normal length, but his legs are a mere 15" long. His mother Miriam, part
Haitian, part Italian, has tired eyes and a gentle face lined with years of
concern and at times, she admits, despair, at the "cruel treatment" her son
has suffered from his peers.

    "I tried to get him to come to this convention for years," she confides
when he is out of earshot, "but he never would."

I think, perhaps he could not face those who would be a mirror to the unlucky roll of the genetic dice that had made his young life hell.

    "Friends, little people we know all said to him, you gotta go, so at least
he's here," she says. "He's overwhelmed, his eyes are wide open, he's not saying anything to me, I am staying out of his way and letting him just be here."

I am stilled by the enormity of her unfailing love.

Angela is a tiny lawyer who is selling her book "Dwarfs Don't Live in Doll Houses." She is a shining example of Little People making a giant mark on the world. Her book jacket says, "Born and raised in New Zealand, Angela Muir Van Etten is deeply committed to the cause of short-statured individuals, having served as President of the Little People of New Zealand, and as a spokesperson on many regional and national talk shows, including the Phil Donahue Show." You can contact Angela on angelvan@adelphia.net.

She is married to Robert, who makes and sells tiny swivel gas-lift office chairs to a ready market. I discover that these chairs fit me well, as many chairs in airplanes, cinemas, you name it, seem designed for a minimum height of 5'2". I can tell this by the way my feet always dangle ever so slightly annoyingly. Angela gently dispels my starry-eyed notion that Little People have the small stuff all sorted out.

    "They seem just fine," I had said, after watching Angel, a tiny woman with a head the same size as her body and a wicked sense of humor, doing brisk business from her perch selling furniture scaled for little people, cellphone clamped to one ear and a ring glimmering from every tiny finger.

    "Well they're not," smiles Angela. "And we have our issues too, maybe not the same issues, but we've got them."

Thus reassuring me that Little People are not superhuman, they are human.

~~~

I SLIP OUT of the room and spot a handful of tiny, reed-thin children with little triangular faces and bird-like features: large, leaf-shaped eyes, small mouth, arms and legs the diameter of chicken bones.

    "Primordial dwarfism," explains Angela. "Very rare. Those families must have located each other on the Internet and met up here."

The kids laugh and run and tumble, and I worry about those bones.

IN THE LOBBY the delegates lounge and party, the girls gorgeous in sexy, tight fitting spangly tops and jewelry, boys in hip threads, cavorting and flirting together. They pair up in their own world, a micro-society where folk taller than 4'10" loiter at the perimeter, looking in.

It is a special world. Occasionally a dwarf will marry a person of normal stature. We meet a young woman 4'6" who is married to a 6' man. There is even a seminar devoted to that kind of pairing.

I walk upstairs and look down upon the delegates mingling in the lobby. At this altitude, everyone, 2'6" to 6'6", look about the same. I take a photo
to toy with the notion that this is how a "God" up on high sees all creatures great and small. All of equal stature.

IN THE BOCCE ROOM a tournament of this curious Italian game of carpet bowls is in hushed progress.

"It's popular because it's non-injurious to our joints," says Dan. I notice how he and others use "we", "our" when referring to self.

I sense that to be a Little Person is to know that wherever you go, despite stares and unsolicited pity, you have something that is missing from the lives of many of those doing the staring and pitying: you are part of one big understanding family.

Cheeky Danny has the last word. He is also selling some long barbecue-type tongs alongside his controversial t-shirts.  I think about it, imagine they are for reaching for things, and finally ask him what they are for.

    "Bottom wipers," he says unfazed, wrapping toilet paper round the ends.

The onlookers discuss the apparatus matter-of-factly, as if it is a new kind of salad spinner or nose hair plucker. I realize that the only person fazed, but just for a moment, is me.  

Copyright 2003 Lynette Chiang All Rights Reserved.