Many people have asked me if my resolve to be an actor was diminished after I broke my neck five years ago. If anything, it strengthened.
The summer after my freshman year of college I worked as a counselor at a summer camp in Maine. On a day off, a bunch of the counselors went on a canoe trip down a river. When a group of us pulled off to the side of the river for a break, a friend and I were playing around in the water. He flipped me up over his shoulders, and I hit the bottom.
I broke my neck, shattering the C4 through C6 vertebrae. Maybe there was a rock that I hit, maybe it just wasn't as deep as he thought, who knows. I was conscious the whole time. I was lucky that we were all camp counselors, because three of the people who saw it happen were lifeguards. They stabilized me and I was rushed to the hospital.
The tale of my physical recovery is a story for another time. The tale doesn't end with me getting my body back. I have function through C6. That basically means that I'm paralyzed from the upper chest down. My shoulders, biceps and forearms up to my wrists work, but I don't have use of my hands or triceps.
I took a year off from school. When I returned to Skidmore College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, I kept my theater major. I graduated from Skidmore in May 2009 and went out to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.
I've done all right so far: I have a guest-starring role on Tuesday's episode of “Glee.”
The part that I'm playing was written as a character with a spinal cord injury very similar to mine. In a blog post for the Christopher Reeve Foundation, I wrote about how I got the part. Here, I'm going to write what I'm able to say before the show actually airs about my day on set.
I was told to be on the set at 11 o'clock in the morning. When I got there, I had my own trailer waiting for me. It was a Winnebago with a wheelchair lift. I got my makeup done in the trailer, changed into my costume and went to the set for rehearsal.
I'm in two scenes in the episode. The first is with Finn and Rachel, played by Cory Monteith and Lea Michele. We met, and about 30 seconds later jumped into rehearsal. We rehearsed the scene a couple times before the director got what he needed in terms of understanding where to set up the cameras, and then we took a break while everything got set up.
Aside from one commercial that I filmed, this was my first professional acting job. Other than one class in college on film acting, I had never acted for the camera before.
