DREAMS OF FLIGHT
And her naiveté? “If you call someone naïve, it’s usually not a compliment.” But it was naiveté that allowed her to think anything was possible, even for a girl missing half her legs. She credits her large family, especially the women.
“My mom is one of 11 kids, nine girls and two boys,” she said. “Tere were many great things about having that kind of an army of family around. But one of the best things is this extraordinary network of women, very matriarchal. My grand- mother was the head of the gang. She was 96 when she died, and just an extraordi- nary—you know, that generation of people just lived—she saw horse-pulled carts and she saw somebody land on the moon. So the competition that I think a lot of young girls grow up with, that they see amongst women, I never had that. … Te fact with
our family—my mom and her sisters, it was like they really pooled their resources. Any victory for one of them was a victory for all of us.”
Did she ever feel discouraged, or picked on by other kids or their parents? Tat she shouldn’t be on the same playing field as “normal” kids?
“I think they said it more to my parents. … I really didn’t hear it. I just was not going to let anybody tell me what I couldn’t physically do. I really believed in my own capability. It was something— I think it was because my parents didn’t shelter me from people staring, pointing, making fun of, that kind of stuff. Tey really made me fight those battles on my own, and I had to learn how to stand up for myself from the get-go.”
Her mother, in fact, was a Franciscan nun for five years, leaving the order just before she would have taken her final vows. But giving up all her worldly possessions and taking a vow of poverty did leave some gaps in her daughter’s life. Her mother “definitely missed the ’60s,” Mullins said. “Like, the only album we had in our house, we had Simon & Garfunkel and we had like an eight-track tape of Helen Reddy. I was like, ‘Tis sucks.’ My friends had the Beatles. Te Stones. Zeppelin. My parents had none of that.
“But one of the really good aspects of that is that she really had no vanity, my mom. … I remember when people would kind of vocally notice somebody’s body part. ‘You have really nice shoulders,’ or, ‘You have really nice whatever.’ Tere was some- thing about someone’s feet, ‘Oh, they’ve got beautiful feet.’ I was like, ‘What do ugly feet look like?’ I mean, in my case, ‘Hey, you’ve got feet!’ … I feel very, very, very fortunate that my mom did not size me aesthetically, and I do think a huge foundation of me being confident comes from that.”
As she’s moved from athlete to inno- vator to model to actress to Hollywood producer, what has given her the greatest adversity: her physical disability or being a woman in a business run mostly by men?
BE CURIOUS; START SOMETHING
”You do better just starting something than you do thinking about start- ing something,” Mullins told graduates at Northeastern University, Boston, in 2018. (Photo by Billie Weiss, Northeastern University)
“In my life thus far, I would say the first half, it would have been definitely the physical disability, if you want to call it that. But, man, I’ll tell you. As a work- ing actor. … For decades, for a century of moviemaking, most women’s roles were just ancillary to tell the story of the men.” She tells of a meeting for the production she’s working on, that her husband will direct. Tey’d given the studio execu- tives the names of the actors they wanted to play the male and female leads. Te
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Army AL&T Magazine
Summer 2020
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