Community Spotlight: Allen Rucker

Allen Rucker became paralyzed on a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles when he was 51 years old.  Three days later, he asked for his laptop and began to write. 

Over the bewildering weeks and months that followed, Rucker chronicled a world turned upside down. He described the burning sensation that suddenly erupted in his waist and the moment – just ninety minutes later – when his ability to walk slipped away for good. He catalogued the drugs he was taking and the dreams he had and the sadness that arrived each morning when he woke and pinched his legs only to feel nothing. He researched the rare neurological disorder – transverse myelitis – that triggered the T-10 injury, and wrestled with the question that permeated his days: What am I doing here? 

“I just wanted to get the experience down,” he says. “There are lots of ways to do this, but writing is the only way I know.” 

Sentence by sentence, Rucker wrote his way through the shock and into a newly shaped life.  

It wasn’t easy. There was grief and frustration and the kinds of health crises, from pressure wounds to pulmonary embolisms, familiar to many people living with paralysis. But even on the worst days, Rucker discovered that his love of language and trademark sense of humor, honed across decades of work in Hollywood, remained intact. And that was enough.  

In the years that followed, he would channel his inner wise-guy for a series of best-selling companion books for the beloved mob drama, The Sopranos. He conjured the challenges of living with paralysis in The Best Seat in the House, his hospital journal-turned-memoir whose most painful moments are often spiked with comedic narration. (“Was this the healthy nerves in my back telling the damaged nerves in my legs, “Hey, you only have a few minutes to keep functioning, you idiots, so don’t sit around a bathtub. Walk! Move! Tap-dance!”) And, in hundreds of columns for the Reeve Foundation’s Voices from the Community blog, he delivered sharp-eyed observations and much-needed laughs to thousands of readers.  

Writing was, and remains, Rucker’s anchor.  

“The experience of writing was even more valuable than the words on the page,” he says, adding. “I'm sitting here typing, and I'm not really paralyzed anymore, am I? I'm not thinking about my legs. I'm not thinking about walking or getting in and out of the car. It's just my mind and this keyboard. And that was the really important thing.” 

Rucker grew up in Oklahoma with dreams of becoming a writer. After college, he made his way to the West Coast where, in 1972, he helped found TVTV, the groundbreaking San Francisco-based video collective that pioneered the use of portable cameras in guerilla filmmaking. From there, he partnered with comedian Martin Mull to write mockumentaries for HBO and began developing television pilots and movie scripts. 

But despite the early accolades and success, Rucker found himself constantly hustling for work. His financial difficulties grew as his creative fulfillment slowly disappeared; by the time he became paralyzed, he felt like “the world had come and hit me on the head.” 

“It threw a loop into everything,” he says. “But becoming paralyzed – and I hate to overstate this – but paralysis, in some ways, saved my life.”  

Suddenly, he had to learn to sit up again. To use a catheter. To transfer in and out of a wheelchair.  

“I started to feel like if I could lick this thing, maybe I could lick all the other problems,” he says. “The other problems seemed smaller all of a sudden. This was a big problem. So, I worked my way out of it.” 

He wrote with a new sense of urgency, not only for his family’s financial survival – “The mortgage company didn’t care if I was paralyzed or not” – but to free himself from a rut that had nothing to do with his injury. When David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, tapped him to write the companion books for the series, he didn’t hesitate. 

“That's what I mean by it changed my life,” he says. “Because if I hadn’t become paralyzed, I would have just kept doing what I was doing.” 

Rucker’s sense of purpose expanded. In 2010, he became co-chief executive officer of the Media Access Awards (MAA), an organization that spotlights disabled characters, storylines, and actors on television and in films and administers the Christopher Reeve Acting Award. Around the same time, he helped launch the Reeve Foundation “Voices from the Community” series.  

Nearly 15 years and thousands of words later, his columns have served as a beacon to readers and a reminder of the distance he’s travelled since the injury. With heart and humor, he’s tackled everything from the isolation that defined his early days to the physical and mental fears of falling from his wheelchair. (“I wasn’t worried about dying from a head wound. I was worried about the damage to my self-worth. “What happened? Did he die from the fall? No, he loathed himself to death.”) 

The first moment of the day – that instant when he remembers he is paralyzed – is still hard. But there is life to live and work to do. These days Rucker is busy planning the annual MAA show, hoping to build on a decade of momentum that recently nabbed the show a 2023 LA Area Emmy and 2024 nomination. He’s gathering essays for a possible new book, writing a tribute to legendary humorist Will Rogers for a short film, and getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday.  

“I still get up and write every day,” he says. “It’s made a huge difference in my life. It’s not for everyone, but if you can express yourself, it’s definitely therapeutic and could be more than that. It could be salvational. Otherwise, learn how to square dance in a wheelchair. Find the thing that gives your life focus and meaning.” 

In 2023, Allen Rucker appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to receive the Media Access Norman Lear-Geri Jewell Lifetime Achievement Award. To read more of his work for the Reeve Foundation, please visit https://www.christopherreeve.org/.