by Crystal Carreon
(Reprinted from “The San Jose Mercury News,” December 7, 2002.)
Madelyn Dovano helped the blind to see. Not through magic or miracles, but simply with her voice.
As an “audio describer,”' her words — spoken softly, yet with authority — helped those who could not physically see mentally visualize the world around them. Whether describing San Francisco Ballet’s “The Nutcracker'” to blind patrons, or “Schindler’s List” to moviegoers, or even the size and shape of a room, it was Ms. Dovano’s voice they heard until cancer eventually took her voice away.
Ms. Dovano, who founded The Visual Voice in Los Gatos to provide “audio describer” services for the blind, died Nov. 20 after a year-long battle with cancer. She was 66.
Born during the Great Depression to Italian immigrants in Akron, Ohio, Ms. Dovano grew up learning the value of hard work and the need to nourish curiosity and education. She took a few classes at Kent State University, married and had four children. But life as a wife in Ohio came to end in the early 1970s when her marriage ended.
She packed up three of her youngest children and headed to California to join her brother, who had left Akron years before and always boasted about the beauty of the Bay Area, recalled Ms. Dovano’s daughter, Melanie Dovano Volpicella.
Her mother, she said, was selfless, juggling several jobs to support her family. With the children finally grown, Ms. Dovano harnessed her industrious energy into her own business, The Visual Voice, which she started in the late 1980s.
The inspiration for such a business was not obvious, Dovano Volpicella said. No one in the Dovano family is visually impaired. But when Ms. Dovano was selected to participate in a pilot project to describe an opera performance to the blind, something clicked. And her mother, she said, became a “one-woman show, literally.”
In March 1995, Ms. Dovano earned kudos for her detail-rich, yet seemingly effortless, description of the Academy Awards telecast for members of the Silicon Valley Council of the Blind. In December of that year, she led a group of the visually impaired through downtown San Jose’s Christmas in the Park, allowing them to walk beyond the white picket fence and feel the mechanical dolls and musical instruments. Two years later, Ms. Dovano and her Visual Voice staff described the San Francisco Ballet’s production of “The Nutcracker.”
“Madelyn was a bustle,” said Mark D. Messersmith, Visual Voice’s lead audio describer and Ms. Dovano’s friend. “She was very much a life force. . . . She invested a lot of herself into the things she loved. One of the things she loved was The Visual Voice, the people and the service.”
Messersmith, who worked with Ms. Dovano for the past five years, said her love of dance and theater melded viscerally into her descriptions. She was not afraid to bring feeling and color to her work and “to remember the human element,” he said.
“We’re talking to people who are there to experience what we experience,” Messersmith said. “We’re there to describe to the best of our ability, and that in itself is a service.”
To those who knew Ms. Dovano, she was a rare soul whose love of the theater, art and science led to boundless adventures across the globe. In 1994, Ms. Dovano started another business, The Migrant Traveler, to enrich world travelers — not tourists — with journeys, ranging from archaeology expeditions in Latin America, to “chasing” solar eclipses, to river and canal barging in Europe.
In June 2001, Ms. Dovano led a group of travelers to the eastern edge of Chisamba in Zambia, Africa, for the world’s best view of the first total solar eclipse of the 21st century. A five-continent expedition, including a solar eclipse sighting in Madagascar, was scheduled for this month. But Ms. Dovano, for the first time, had to cancel months in advance.
She grew tired and was eventually confined to bed in October.
“I knew there was a race,” said Dovano Volpicella, who was pregnant with her first child when her mother fell ill. “It was a day-by-day situation. Every day counted.”
On Nov. 6, Ms. Dovano’s grandson, Marcus Volpicella, was born. Marcus was about four weeks premature, Dovano Volpicella explained, but that gave his grandmother enough time to see him.
“She held him, and played with him to some extent,” Dovano Volpicella said. “She had purposely told them to take her off the pain medication, so she could fully enjoy him.”
Ms. Dovano died two weeks later.
After the funeral service, a visually impaired man approached Dovano Volpicella. “He said my mother was one of those people who could describe a sunset,” she said. “But she, she was indescribable.”
Madelyn T. Dovano
Born: Jan. 4, 1936, in Akron, Ohio
Died: Nov. 20, 2002, in Los Gatos
Survived by: Sons, David Huntsman of Cleveland, Mark Huntsman of Akron, Ohio, and Scott Huntsman of Dublin; daughter, Melanie Dovano Volpicella of San Jose; mother, Ada Dovano of Los Gatos; brother, John Dovano of Campbell; and grandchildren, Samantha and Marcus.
Services: The family is planning a service next month at which they’ll scatter her ashes.