Tsuruoka came to Canada as a baby. Both were diagnosed with cerebral palsy as children: Tsuruoka's makes it difficult for him to speak clearly, walk and gesture, while Kagansky uses leg-braces to get around, but has no speech issues. She missed the s. He lived them. Most of the counsellors came from Rochdale.
Kagansky holds a B. She is a founder of a new theatre company, Toronto The Good, which aimswhose aim is to tell diverse stories from the city β told by residents themselves. Tsuruoka founded a disability educational program through the Toronto District School Board in the late s. He worked at it until , when the travel and hours burned him out.
The program's funding was later cut. This raises one of Tsuruoka's big beefs: If disabled individuals are forced to rely on government programs for employment, even ones they create themselves, they are at the whims of political will. When the winds change, the program gets cut, and they are unemployed again.
She looks like a cross between Snow White and Anna Paquin. She smiles, her big brown eyes encouraging her friend. Kagansky crawled until she was 12 years old. I literally had the world and kids running around me, but I felt like I wasn't a part of it. And a lot of what I became was because I had to self-direct my own path. Not only do I know who I am and what I want, but I see the world through different colours.
My disability, in a way, serves to amplify my ambitions, sensitivities, desires and aspirations; making my creative spark that much greater, that much more real. They've been studying with internationally renowned, Dora-award winning vocalist and composer Fides Krucker. It toured Canada stopping in Whitehorse and Regina. Kagansky played Tsuruoka's love interest in some of the shows. However, at the end of our interview, Kagansky tells Tsuruoka that despite spending her entire life under the shadow of the CP diagnosis, her doctors have just determined that she does not, and never did, have CP.
