Three years ago I received an email from a woman who was experiencing progessive hearing loss. She told me a story of her life as a pianist and the impact of losing her hearing. She and her young daugther, Haley, loved music theatre and going to shows. However, when they went to the shows they could not enjoy them without ASL interpreters and when they did have them they were off to the side, which meant they missed the action. It was then and there that they decided to crea

There is some evidence that Laurent only made it to Paris and then to America due to him being part of the gentry of La Balmes-les-Grottes. We know that his father was the royal notary or mayor of the village until his death. He survived the Revolution but did not have the money to send Laurent to the school in Paris, requiring that his godfather, Laurent, fuding his first year there in 1797. Laurent certainly resembles a landed gentry of the times, here portrayed in 1822 by

In 1813 there is an account by two military men that met on occasion in Paris to reminisce about their experiences of the past. On one such visit they visited the National Institution for the Deaf-Mutes. “But while chatting, we climbed the Rue Saint-Jacques and arrived at the former Saint-Magloire seminary, where the National Institution for the Deaf-Mutes is now located. A good, stout concierge-upon whom nature had been a little too liberal with the gift of speech it had ref