Hearing loss once rendered Redmond’s Ashley Bruce nearly deaf. That’s never stopped her from performing, though; soon, she’ll be on stage singing Ashley, 11, stars in Redmond High’s production of ‘Annie’ this week

By Nicole Santa Cruz
The Bulletin

Published: May 3, 2009

REDMOND —

The first time Ashley Bruce stepped on stage, she stopped the world for a moment.

People quit talking. Cooks peered from the kitchen. The wait staff froze.

A moment before, the 3-year-old had sprung from her seat and hopped on stage. She anxiously waited for someone to lower the microphone for her small frame and sang an old Southern blues song, backed by her father on guitar.

No one at the crowded restaurant in Asheville, N.C., knew how such a big voice could come from such a small girl.

“Her voice was so sweet and young and clear,” said her mother, Tanya Bruce.

Though her voice may have been loud and clear to those around her, it wasn’t to Ashley.

She was nearly deaf.

But that didn’t stop her then, and it doesn’t stop her now. The spunky sixth-grader recently beat out 110 other girls for the title role in Redmond High School’s production of “Annie.”

To Ashley and her family, she’s just a normal 11-year-old girl. To others, she’s an extraordinary role model who is known as professional and courageous.

Since Ashley belted out that first song on stage, she’s come a long way. She won her first-grade talent show, has participated in four plays and is a ballet dancer, a guitar player, an aspiring photojournalist and a top-notch student.

Ashley, who was born with perfect hearing, started having problems when she was 3. In dance classes, she relied on vibrations and meticulously watched the teacher and other students dance, then mimicked them.

She learned to deal with her hearing loss by teaching herself to read lips. Although Ashley was quiet and reserved, she could still communicate.

But she couldn’t hear when her parents called from another room. She always needed the television turned up loud, and the car radio, too. Her hearing started to get worse. And her teachers started to notice something was wrong.

Cut to a parent’s nightmare: several audiologists, multiple hearing tests and nine surgeries. Ashley had a condition called sensorineural hearing loss, which means the nerves in her ears are dead and cannot transfer sound waves.

Doctors said the problem wasn’t going away. It was permanent.

Tanya and Greg Bruce had to make a heart-wrenching decision.

They needed to get their only child, 6 at the time, hearing aids to wear for the rest of her life.

“That’s a really hard thing for a parent to hear when their child is so young,” Tanya said.

Tanya was scared. Her child had a disability. Questions raced through her mind, and she spent many sleepless nights wondering if Ashley would be teased at school.

“It’s the furthest thing from the truth,” Tanya said.

The sun comes out

On Ashley’s first day of school this year, she pulled her long brown hair into a ponytail, showing off pink hearing aids.

After moving from Asheville to Redmond this summer, Tanya Bruce said she was nervous Ashley would have a hard time adjusting to a new school. Before Redmond, she had gone to a small private school, surrounded by peers she had known since kindergarten.

Now, she was going to step foot in a large middle school in an unknown city all the way across the country.

“I just walked into school,” Ashley said. “I’m just like a regular kid.”

She compares her hearing aids with glasses.

“To me, it’s just like everyday life; I don’t really think about it.”

Though Ashley said she sometimes forgets the aids are there now, they changed her life when she was 6.

The TV didn’t have to be so loud. Greg and Tanya had to lower their speaking voices at dinner. The radio in the car could be turned down because it sometimes was too loud for Ashley.

Greg and Tanya no longer could talk freely in the front seat of the car. If they were wondering out loud whether to grab ice cream on the way home, Ashley could hear them in the back seat.

She’d chime in, “Ice cream?”

When Ashley first got her hearing aids, which cost about $3,200 for each ear, she said it was like a “whole new world.”

“She turned them on, and it was like seeing Santa Claus for the first time,” Tanya said.

She heard traffic for the first time. In Asheville, which has no shortage of thunderstorms, Ashley got to hear the sound of thunder.

The once-reserved 6-year-old was suddenly talking nonstop about anything and everything.

Ashley came home from first grade with new slang and started cracking knock-knock jokes to her mother.

“It was a really positive thing,” Tanya said. “We never talked about her hearing impairment in terms of a disability.”

But there are caveats to wearing the devices.

For example, if Ashley rests her head on another’s shoulder, the hearing aids make a waa-waa sound.

“I call it my built-in alarm for when she’s dating,” Tanya said.

Ashley’s hearing aids are a conversation starter.

When she started at Obsidian Middle School, students were curious to know what was behind her ears, so she would calmly explain. “These are hearing aids, and they help me hear because I can’t really hear as well as you,” she told her classmates.

‘Annie’

Soon after Ashley started, she made new friends — the same friends who pushed her to try out for the role of Annie after showing her a flier for the play.

When Ashley and her family arrived to audition in late March, they didn’t expect so many people.

The audition started at 9:30 a.m. Ashley arrived at 9:45 and got in line behind 60 other girls.

Ashley, who had never done a cold audition in front of strangers before, waited more than four hours.

Finally, the time came, and once again, Ashley was on stage in front of unknown people.

Then, she belted out the famous song from the musical: “Tomorrow.”

Ashley didn’t know it, but she impressed Phil Neely, the theater teacher at Redmond High School.

“Her voice was just what I had imagined for Annie,” he said. “She sounded like Andrea McArdle” — the original Annie, on Broadway.

Ashley found out about the role a day later, online.

She and her mother scrolled down on the computer screen.

“I just kept telling myself, ‘Some other girl’s dream is going to come true, and you’re going to be happy for her,’” Ashley said.

But that girl was her.

“I was amazed,” she said. “I was just shocked. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’”

Neely said working with Ashley, who had her lines memorized by the first rehearsal, was a surprise.

“She’s really a born leader,” he said. “She doesn’t see it yet.”

And as for the hearing aids?

“We didn’t know she had anything unusual about her until the first rehearsal,” he said.

And it hasn’t been a problem.

“Every actor has their uniqueness about them, and things they can and can’t do,” Neely said. “She’s no different.”

Scott Carroll, who plays Daddy Warbucks in the play, said Ashley is professional at rehearsal, which runs about 15 to 20 hours a week.

“She’s a phenomenal little girl,” said Carroll, an 18-year-old senior at Bend’s Summit High School. (Auditions for some roles were open to students from several schools around Central Oregon.)

Natalie Miller, a 17-year-old Redmond High senior, said Ashley at first was actually giving Miller cues for her lines.

“She had the entire thing memorized,” Natalie said. “I didn’t know she had hearing issues until halfway through the play.”

Often, understudies are rivals. But not in this case. Ash- ley and her understudy, Sofie Johansen, an 11-year-old fifth-grader at the Waldorf School of Bend, get along perfectly — so well they even have a secret handshake that concludes with, “Boom, boom, shappa clappah, yo.”

Ashley continues to impress those around her, just as she did that first night on stage in North Carolina.

“She just came in and belted it into the microphone,” Tanya said.

The difference is, this time, she can hear the clapping loud and clear.

Copyright (c) 2009 The Bulletin. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission.