RICKY RAY
The daughter of the woman from the networking luncheon, Muffy, called and was curious about what we were doing. Things were beginning to hop, but there were two of us. There still wasn’t anything for another person to really do, since Brent was dealing with the hemophilia community, I thought. I was continuing to pursue Susan Resnik as a creative resource. We had gone so far as to shuffle a contract back and forth with her as a story consultant and possibly a historical narrator to fill in what wasn’t covered by our multi-generational interviewees who would be telling their stories. She had moved from Manhattan to Southern California, which didn’t seem like a major problem if we were able to get the thing off the ground at all. The hemophilia community is spread out around the country, and the plan was to go to them. Brent not being able to handle a full day on a movie set did, however, raise quite a few doubts as to whether he had the stamina to participate fully in our own production.
In July, 1995, a Senator Mike Dewine of Ohio and Bob Graham of Florida introduced the Ricky Ray Relief Act, a billion dollar bill that would compensate HIV positive hemophiliacs $125,000 each. In 1986 Ricky Ray an HIV positive hemophiliac from Florida and his brothers were banned from attending school in Arcadia, Florida. A court order reinstated them and wonderful Floridians burned their house down. When I heard this, Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts made perfect sense and I really felt like an idiot.