Anne Sullivan

Hmm

... which is about the relationship between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller.

Hmm.

And, you know, Helen Keller had scarlet fever as a child and she wound, wound up losing her hearing and her eyesight, and because it happened when she was so young, she couldn't really speak at the time it happened, so she didn't have words.

So she kind of was like roaming around her parents' house almost like a little an- wild animal, you know, kind of grabbing food off of others' plates and everything like that.

So they, they, you know, they, there were these new ways of communicating so that the family hired Annie Sullivan to come and, and Annie was kind of f- ferocious.

She was fierce.

Hmm.

Right.

From historical legends like Ann Sullivan finally breaking through the darkness with Helen Keller at the water pump to pop culture icons like Hemi Escalante teaching calculus to marginalized kids in East L.A. in the movie Stand and Deliver.

We absolutely idolize the brilliant self-sacrificing teacher.

We construct them as the ultimate societal role model.

And it was a teacher who persisted and made it through.

She had far more than a broken window, Anne Sullivan.

I mean, Helen fought her and it was more than thankless for so many years.

And here is this brilliant child inside.

And she would have grown to be nothing more than a vegetable if she had been left alone.

She was so unruly that her family hired a teacher named Ann Sullivan to mentor her.

And their goal was to simply enable Helen to become healthy so she wouldn't damage the family or their furniture or their house or herself.

And But then Anne entered into Helen's life and early on, and she began to work with her on her vocabulary, on personal habits, her recognition, her perception of things, her manners, her speech.

And Anne's inspiration was Helen's own growth from a disabled blind mute to a valuable citizen in society.

When they first met, young Helen was kept in a cage and would only growl at her new mentor.

And by the conclusion of Ann Sullivan's work in her life, Helen was communicating effectively, eating on her own, taking care of her own personal needs.

She had been transformed by Ann's mentorship in her life.

Like trying to communicate with this person and kind of asking everybody, absolutely everybody else that he's encountering to be like, can you put yourself in this kid's shoes? Like, what do you think this feels like? So it's so interesting because more so than it is about this murdered sex worker, which we'll get back to, it's about having to learn how to communicate and teach this young man how to communicate.

So Paul Servino is really ostensibly kind of doing the Ann Sullivan to Helen Keller thing here.

Right.

It's not about this murder case.

She was deaf, dumb, and blind.

How stupid do you have to be to believe that this woman had thoughts of her own, expressed thoughts of her own, and wrote books about I mean, literally, how stupid are you? There was a woman named Ann Sullivan who was her...

Oh, she was her assistant.

No, she was...

Basically, Ann Sullivan used this deaf, dumb, and blind girl from Alabama to promote communism, which is what Ann Sullivan was all about.

And Helen Keller's writings...

Just mysteriously stopped when Ann Sullivan died.

It's amazing.

It opened in 1854 and is still operational today.

It began as an almshouse and housed Helen Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, as a child during this era before becoming a hospital in the 1880s, and that's also the decade when shit hit the fan.

In 1883, the Massachusetts governor investigated the hospital.

There were allegations of physical and mental abuse, poor living conditions, all the stuff typical of the time period, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Um, I just listened to your episode about the community in IHOP in Kansas City.

And, um, I went to a church when I was in high school.

My parents had just divorced, and, um, my art teacher actually invited a group of us high school girls to her church.

And, um, the higher-ups in the church-- Okay, let's just call it a cult because it was a goddamn cult.

Helen Keller? Helen Keller.

Annie Sullivan?

Okay.

And it was just really remarkable to totally take on this thing of not being able to see nor hear and to just sense things.