Darius goes west…
You don’t hear the name Darius very often…at least I don’t. Before this morning the only Darius I knew was Darius Rucker, the golden-voiced (and handsome!) lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish. Gene Veith mentioned Darius the Great on his blog this morning, so I headed over to Wikipedia to learn about that before heading off to work. I happened to stumble upon a link to a website, Darius Goes West, and my morning came to a heavy stop for a few minutes.
Darius Goes West is the title of a documentary made by Logan Smalley. Be sure to watch Logan explain how he came to make the documentary on the Today Show last fall. Then visit the Darius Goes West Store and consider purchasing a copy of the DVD to share with those you know. To me, equally interesting was watching the faces of the young people helping Darius. I wondered how many of them had seen the sights Darius was seeing. It was new to them, also. It would be wonderful to know, say ten years from now, how knowing and helping Darius affected the courses of their lives. To date, the documentary has run in twenty-four film festivals and raised over half a million dollars for the fight against Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.
Here’s the promotional blurb from the website:
Darius Weems, a 15-year-old with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, had never left his hometown of Athens, Georgia. In the summer of 2005, he and a group of young college students traveled across the country in a wheelchair-accessible RV to test accessibility in America. Their ultimate goal was to reach Los Angeles and convince MTV’s hit show, “Pimp My Ride,” to customize Darius’s wheelchair. Along the way, they found joy, brotherhood, and the knowledge that life, even when imperfect, is always worth the ride.
Other links:
Georgia Magazine: Darius Goes West
plus many more…just Google his name.
OK, but you DID pick up that the Darius I was talking about was the King of ancient Persia, when it really WAS the most powerful nation in the world, who nearly DID conquer the West, until the Persian hordes were stopped by those plucky Greeks, didn’t you?
Yes! Of course, not until I researched King Darius because I knew you were trying to make a point that I wasn’t immediately picking up on.
What are the chances, though, that the young director of that documentary chose his title as aptly? I think yes, based on his educational background - University of Georgia at Athens and an internship at Cannes. I think he chose a very witty title, Darius Goes West, that very few people catch on to.