Page 24 - voices-2025-04

Quarter Note

Statistical Improbabilities

David Freedman

How often do you pay attention to statistics when you’re thinking about going out for a specific job or
activity? And what do you tell someone who thinks you shouldn’t be able to accomplish something
because so few people succeed at it?

Recently, for whatever reason, I started paying attention to statistics, especially pertaining to my own
life and how unusually singular my circumstances were. Case in point: I was born with an extreme-
ly rare congenital neurological disorder known as Moebius syndrome. This condition is so rare that
significantly less than 1% of the human population has it. Furthermore, at the time I was diagnosed,
approximately 300 known cases had been correctly diagnosed since 1900. Upon learning about my
condition, the doctors spoke with my parents, earnestly stating that I should be placed into an institu-
tion since the chances of me pursuing a normal life were very remote.

Thankfully, my parents decided against this course of action and took me home. By the age of three
I could play the theme song from the movie Patton on the piano note for note. That’s how we knew I
had perfect pitch. At the age of four, I taught myself to read which facilitated my entry into the tal-
ented and gifted (TAG) program. Regarding the prevalence of people with perfect pitch, 1 in 10,000
people have it, while 6% of all children in the United States participate in the TAG program.

When I entered high school in the early to mid-1980s, I discovered my love of acting and musical
theater and very much wanted to consider acting as a career. However, there were few actors with
disabilities on television and film in those days. It wouldn’t be until 2007 that I finally made the deci-
sion to consider acting as a viable career, and even then, I was wary of the statistics involved. Approxi-
mately 2% of all performers can make a living in the industry, and only 3% of all lines read from scripts
are given to actors with disabilities. I made it a point to learn about many performers with disabilities
and their contributions to television and film but was not at all surprised to discover that we were not
well represented in the media. I admit to being daunted by those figures, but I nevertheless persisted
in performing as a singer and occasionally as an actor.

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