The Tallest Woman And Me
Back in 1995, I had signed on to write a freelance piece about the tallest woman in the world for a magazine called “Real People: The Magazine of Celebrities and Interesting People.”
I had met Sandy Allen at a local elementary school a few weeks earlier. Allen, who died today, worked a secretarial job for the city of Indianapolis, but she also went around to schools, teaching kids about accepting others who are different.
During her talk, she told the kids she could dunk a basketball without jumping. And that one time she broke a toilet seat just by sitting on it. (Yeah — that was kind of sad. But kids who don’t know better thought it was hilarious.)
Had she not had surgery on her pituitary gland, she told the kids, she would have kept growing, as did Robert Wadlow, who was nearly nine feet tall when he died in 1940.
Before she arrived at the elementary school, the kids were rowdy and restless. But once the 7-foot-7 woman strolled in on her wheel chair, they were silent, intrigued.
It wasn’t easy being a 7-foot-7 woman, she told them. But she was happy with who she was.
Since I worked for a small paper, I thought this would be a great piece for a national publication. So I pitched the story, and there was immediate interest. When I talked to Sandy, she was also interested. But as the day we were set to meet neared, I was told that she was going to have to back out. She had holed up in her house, depressed.
It wasn’t a surprise that she wasn’t that happy with who she was.
You can imagine the things people would say when they saw her. In fact, whenever I show people the above photo of Sandy and me, they wince a little. Many people make a comment that’s less than flattering.
And really — who’s going to love a 7-foot-7 woman?
Allen worked hard to stay positive, which makes us feel better about her predicament. But she’s a reminder that some people just get a bad break in life.
Here’s a nice little photo essay from the Indianapolis Star.