Don’t Tell Ethel Rush What She Can’t Do--She Can Do It All

For most of her life, Ethel Rush says, people have been trying to tell her what she can’t do, and she has been paying no attention. She insists that she is perfectly capable of deciding that herself.

“I know who I am, what I can do and what I can’t do,” she says.

Rush, 74, lost her leg in a Red Car accident when she was 29. She was on crutches until a few years ago. Now she uses a wheelchair. Still, she drives a car, which is specially equipped.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world. Any darn fool can do it. I just use my hands instead of my feet. A lot of old people are scared to death of something new but I’m not,” she says. She has had plenty of experience. When she was 45, her husband, Ted, died. Their son, Andy, was 8 at the time. She raised him alone, on crutches.

“You can’t give in to circumstances,” Rush says. “I didn’t have anyone who said, ‘I’ll be there.’ ”

Rush acknowledges that she sometimes intimidates people with her sharp tongue. But underneath the gruff exterior is the pain and beauty of a woman who took life and decided to rumble with it.

“Everybody told me I had no business getting pregnant if I had one leg. But I felt marriage wasn’t marriage unless I had a child,” she says.

Once Andy grew up, Rush turned to volunteer work. She talked to people who were shut-ins, answered phones in senior centers and did office work for the Another Mother for Peace organization. It was there that she met a woman who encouraged her to take an acting class.

“I called the teacher and told him I was in a wheelchair, and he said, ‘You can talk, obviously,’ so off I went. You know, the only time I feel handicapped is when people make me feel I’m in the way.”

She took her first class at Hollywood Senior Citizen Multipurpose Center and later found classes at other senior centers and at Lorimar Studios.

She also took a class at the Westside Center for Independent Living, and that’s when she was “discovered.” She was asked to appear in “Available Light,” a reading consisting of original scenes with music, based on “King Lear,” about people with disabilities. The production was sponsored by the city of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

“It was a stretch,” she says. “I played King Lear from a wheelchair in a musical even though I couldn’t sing anymore.”

Her scene was called “Wake Me When It’s a Musical.” Afterward, the casting director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center asked her for a resume and a head shot. “My response was, is he leading me on? But I figured it’s time for someone other than Meryl Streep to have a chance, so I never go anywhere without my head shots now,” she says.

Ethel Rush takes her acting seriously, and she hopes that more juicy parts come her way. In the meantime, she does readings at convalescent hospitals and senior centers. She approaches life with the enthusiasm of a person whose only reward is the possibility of great accomplishment. She attributes her spirit to her mother, whose life was tough but who never gave up without a fight.