Los Angeles is a much different place before nine a.m. on a bright Sunday morning. It’s almost human. The noise is gone. The cars and trucks on the freeway are gone; you control the time it takes to get anywhere. The air is cool, the mountains rise up, and your focus changes from that idiot in the Prius in front of you to the place you actually live.

On the Sunday morning of the big ADA Photo Shoot, you entered the open gates of Dodger Stadium, a vast cut-out in the middle of LA, and you felt like you owned the place. The parking lot was like an abandoned air field. With a forty foot mural of Dodger first baseman James Loney staring down at you, you choose one of three million empty parking spaces and join the only congregation in sight: 400 or 500 people, about 200 of them in wheelchairs, loitering around Section G. It looked like either a big family reunion or maybe an outdoor tent meeting. Or the monthly gathering of people who collect Cabbage Patch dolls. It struck you as something small town and local, far from LA-style grandiosity. They now have a flea market once a month at Dodger Stadium. It probably has the same non-urban feeling.

I know that there were several potential spots for this ADA celebration, but as luck would have it, the baseball park was the perfect choice. Sure, there was a little sewer scent in some areas, but in a rural setting, that could have been the drainage ditch down by the county park in Watch Out, Iowa. I grew up in a small town and every year the Boy Scouts would go on a door-to-door paper drive and then dump all the papers in the American Legion parking lot for some truck to haul off. It was about this size and about this level of excitement.

The first thing I saw as we pulled up to this revival were the kids in wheelchairs. Every stripe of humanity was there, but my eyes kept looking at the children. This stunt photo/Guinness World Record-shattering occasion, I started to think, was really a kids’ affair and the rest of us were just there to fill in holes in the human “ADA” letter formation. The kids were having a great time, eating sweet rolls and watching Gary Karp juggling on stage, and if they were very lucky, having the winning number to win a flip camera or a vintage baseball card of Roy Campanella, a gem thrown in by the Reeve folks. The youngsters got a little restless waiting for the photos to be taken by the guy way up on the crane, but they snapped right back for the congo line of wheelchairs moving across the concrete like a snake in the woods.

If you are a six or seven year old girl in a chair watching Ali Stroker singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a cappella, and realizing she had so much grace and power in her voice, she didn’t need the amp system – that’s got to make you feel good. Or the dance troupe, bobbing around on stage like the regional finals in “Glee.” Or just the buzz of the crowd. When Sam Maddox and others started passing out the sun umbrellas – another clue to how well the event was organized – the whole day seemed like a day at the fair.

Among all the fine speechifying about the ADA and how it has changed us, I think Jesse Billauer, the “Life Rolls On” founder and not much more than a kid himself, made the most pertinent point of the day: if you have friends in wheelchairs, get them out of the house. And get yourself out of the house. Out in the world. It’s good for us and it’s good for everyone around us. The hiding out phase is way over. Presence will make as much or more of an impact than politics.

Especially for the kids.

Copyright 2010, Allen Rucker