ROLL WITH IT: Auti Angel stars with three wheelchair-bound friends in series (
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Talk about hot wheels! Tonight, the Sundance channel shines its rays on four gorgeous, ambitious women in LA.
All four are hot, sexy, looking for love and working to build their careers. They have attitude and they have swagger. When they enter a dance club, everyone notices — and it’s not because they are all wheelchair-bound. It’s because, as Angela Rockwood-Nguyen, one of the four stars of the show says, “If I can’t stand up, I can still stand out.”
Rockwood-Nguyen is a former and now-aspiring model who was married — after the accident — to “21 Jump Street” actor, Dustin Nguyen.
The other women are hip-hop dancer (yes) Auti Angel, actress/model Tiphany Adams and graphic designer Mia Schaikewitz.
Of the four, only Schaikewitz’s injuries were not the result of a car accident. In fact, she was paralyzed after suffering a spinal rupture at age 15, which left her paralyzed a few hours later.
Also of the four, only Rockwood-Nguyen is a quadriplegic (she has some use of her arms but not her hands, the other three are paralyzed from the waist down), and Adams is the only one who is bisexual.
The unusual series is the brainchild of Gay Rosenthal, who brought the world “Ruby,” which chronicled the life of a 500-pound Southern belle, and “Little People, Big World,” about a married couple of little people with both little and normal-sized kids.
While Rosenthal’s productions focus on folks with physical issues and could have turned into exploitative, freak-show environments, these series have instead simply shined a light on the similarities we all have rather than the physical limitations of her subjects.
And that is the case here, too. That being said, make no mistake, all the harsh realities of life for these women are laid bare. And it can be very, very difficult to watch.
When Rockwood-Nguyen, now split with her husband, decides, for example, to get her modeling career back in gear, we watch her dialing a phone with the limited use of her hands. Right off, you wish that this was really a scripted show and a miracle will happen to cure her. But that’s not real life.
When she goes to get photos taken and her legs start to spasm so badly that she can hardly stay in her chair, it is tough to watch as the photographer, used to shooting perfect specimens, looks miserably uncomfortable.
But then there are the women’s nights out, which are great. We watch the gorgeous Adams who earlier was out with the girls having cosmos and crying over her almost-ex-boyfriend. Instead of moping, she wheels into a lesbian dance club and starts making out with an equally gorgeous, able-bodied new conquest.
Interesting, too, that two shows premiering tonight, “Push Girls” and “The Real Housewives of New York City,” feature women with disabilities who are making life work in very big ways for them.
But “Push Girls” is more “Sex and the City” than “Real Housewives” — and more real than they’ve been— at least up until now.