The Night I Almost Screamed “Helen Keller Is Real” at Chateau Marmont

I’m standing in the entry hall at Chateau Marmont last weekend wearing this lacquered leather trench coat. Me, Sophia and Paul are meeting Bella and Casey for dinner.

Casey looks at my coat.

“Is it real?”

My brain wants to tell a joke.

“As real as Helen Keller.”

A laugh. The kind of beautiful laugh you hope for and people swing heads for to see what they’ve missed.

I knew it would land because Casey is Gen Z, like my kids and they were the first generation to call shit on Helen Keller.

Sal, my oldest child came home one day in middle school. “ Mom do you know who Helen Keller is? Helen Keller wasn’t real. That’s impossible, Anne did everything.”

Apparently they’d learned about Helen Keller around the same time her lore became legendary meme as fraud.

These kids are more apt than us.

Why did we believe Helen Keller was possible? For the same reason we thought it was okay to wear house keys around our necks at age seven.

Are we to believe Anne Sullivan put her hand under running water, spelled W-A-T-E-R into Helen’s palm, and suddenly this kid could communicate? That Anne then spelled out every single word in the English dictionary? Then moved on to French. Then German. Then Latin. Then Greek.

Are we to believe Anne Sullivan sat there spelling entire Latin dictionaries into Helen’s palm? And Helen just remembered all of it? Had to spell it all back into Anne’s palm or into Braille?

Look, questioning this particular story and the evidence isn’t ableism. It’s asking how the mechanics actually work.

Devil’s advocate, she had time. There was no internet. Nothing to do. It was all nothing. And it isn’t even dark when you’re blind because you don’t see blackness. You need eyes to see blackness. So whatever blind feels like, plus whatever deaf feels like, plus no entertainment. No books. No music. No Netflix. No scroll hole at 2am.

Maybe Helen Keller really did just learn multiple languages because what the fuck else was she going to do.

I’m sitting there at dinner with all of them. Sophia, Paul, Bella, Casey. And I start spiraling.

I’m spiraling because nobody believes in miracles anymore.

Now I’m at the table sipping a Paloma, trying to convince myself Helen Keller was real:

Latin isn’t that hard to remember, right? It’s a dead language. The words just sit there waiting to be learned.

And Helen had nothing but time. No distractions. Just Anne Sullivan’s hand spelling everything into her palm over and over until entire dictionaries lived in her fingertips.

Actually, that’s the perfect learning environment. No visual noise. No audio interference. Just pure tactile repetition. That probably works better than staring at a textbook.

And she was blind and deaf, so her other senses were heightened. Everyone knows that. Her sense of touch was probably superhuman. She could probably feel the difference between Latin conjugations through vibrations alone.

Plus she was motivated. When you can’t see or hear, learning to communicate becomes your entire purpose. Of course she mastered multiple languages. What else would she do? Sit around? She had decades of uninterrupted study time.

And Anne Sullivan was allegedly a genius. The best teacher in human history. If anyone could teach a deaf-blind child to master four languages through hand spelling, it was her. She probably had revolutionary swirly techniques we don’t even know about.

This all makes perfect sense!!!

I’m about to stand up and scream to the entire hotel HELEN KELLER IS REAL. We have to keep miracles alive!! Gen Z needs to believe in miracles!!!

But then I look at Casey sipping her cocktail, laughing with Bella and I leave them out of my spiral.

Because I have friends of all ages, what I know to be true is every new generation is more apt than the previous. Not smarter. That’s genetics. That’s evolution, baby.

I keep my mouth shut. Like Helen would want me to.