While appreciating how other cultures are less goggle-eyed over the disabled, Longley had found that the poor in Egypt and Mexico often don't, however, have funds for mobility equipment. In fact, he's seen rehabilitation centers where someone would be wheeling around in a chair - but then have to be carried home because it wasn't theirs. That made him decide that SOWOHO might best help by providing funding for chairs, crutches, and the like. Earlier this year he held a "make your own fajita" fund-raiser in New York City and netted nearly $6,500. Last fall he returned to Mexico City and made his first SOHOWO donation of $2,000.

So where do modeling and acting fit into all of this? Longley says he imagined being an actor since he was five, and did the usual school plays and such. But the accident put those dreams on hold. Watching TV in the hospital, he hadn't noticed anyone acting from a wheelchair.

But after he returned from Egypt, he had a burst of good fortune that was right out of a Lana Turner-discovered-at-Schwab's Hollywood fantasy. He met an associate of Ralph Lauren through a friend; she saw and loved the photos of Longley frolicking in a Manhattan fountain and passed them on to famed photographer Bruce Weber. Before you can say "Now smile ...," Weber was photographing Longley for a Polo ad. As soon as that appeared, in September 1991, Another World called.

"It happened incredibly fast," says Longley. Too fast, perhaps. Although some might have willy-nilly accepted other offers that came their way, Longley was careful. He posed for People and wrote an article for Interview, but he said no to the fifteen talk shows that wanted him. He also purposely signed a short contract with the soap opera. And he didn't continue modeling. Indeed, he looks on the modeling world with a sort of bemusement.

"I've been through so much physically, that what somebody looks like ... it's kind of ludicrous," he says. "Sure I like looking at someone who's attractive. But I like looking at pretty dogs, too!

"I knew that what I had done, and what was being offered, wasn't my ultimate goal, but was a steppingstone to get there," says Longley of the whirlwind experience. He stepped off the fact track almost as quickly as he got on, but that doesn't mean he's given up on acting. He moved out to Los Angeles to get serious about his career again, but now wants to work in film, not television. He also sees acting not just as an end in itself, but as a means to generate more interest in SOWOHO.

"If and when my career as an actor moves forward," he says, "my name might become more recognized. It's kind of silly, but it's a powerful thing, too. So I want both things, acting and SOWOHO, to move forward simultaneously."

Longley might downplay his thespian ambitions, but according to his mother, he has looked for center stage since birth.

"When he was in a play," says Betty Longley, a nurse who now administers a doctor's office, "he wanted to be the star. When he played tennis, it had to be singles. He'd do whatever he needed to get attention, even if it was being naughty. But he'd make people laugh when he should have been disciplined. He'll win you right over."

He wasn't a selfish kid, though. A bit of a top dog himself, with his good looks and talent in sports (especially tennis, where he thought he might be a pro), he showed a perhaps prescient compassion for underdogs. "He certainly took wounded things under his wing," says his mother of her second son (the older one is a graphic designer). "He made friends with people others would reject."


The night of his accident, he'd been out partying with friends, bragging about an affair he was having with a woman twice his age. He drank a couple of cocktails, maybe three, and then half a beer. But it was hours after that last beer that he got behind the wheel of the car. He was a kid, after all, but a good kid.

"I was often the designated driver," says Longley, adjusting his legs more comfortably across the chair. "My nickname was Mother Mitch because I was responsible. After I got hurt, the saying going around my town was: 'If it was going to happen to anybody, it wouldn't happen to him. But if it did happen to him, he'd be the best person to deal with it.'"

He was seventeen years old, and he could have just thrown a blanket over his legs and become embittered. Instead, he found reasons to be grateful. At least he had his life. At least his injury was quite low on his spine - T-12, L-1, in medical terms - and thus his paralysis didn't extend up to his neck, as it did for his roommates in the hospital. Betty Longley remembers that even when he was in rehabilitation shortly after the accident, her son cheered up the other patients. He wasn't just the friendliest guy in school during good times.

Longley still looks on the bright side of that dark night. "I don't look at it that I had an accident for a reason. I look at it more that maybe I was kept alive for one."

His body broken, something else mended. John Longley, a food service executive, and his wife Betty had been separated for a year; on the night of the accident they began to reconcile. "His father and I saw things in each other, some vulnerabilities, that we hadn't really shared," says Betty. "Out of our commitment to Mitch our commitment to each other healed."

Using heavy leg braces and a walker, Longley was able to swing himself upright across the stage at his high school graduation. But instead of going right off to nearby Southern Connecticut State College to study theater as he had planned, he focused on his rehabilitation for the next year, regaining some movement in his hips and strengthening his upper body.

He then decided to go to Northeastern in 1984. He was drawn to Boston, where his parents had courted, and he also had acquired enough money for the school's tuition, as his hometown had raised $22,000 for him. The money also paid for a road-hogging, hand- controlled Buick Regal that he still drives.

At Northeastern he majored in speech and philosophy, and was actively involved in campus activities, including singing in a small choir. He started giving lectures on topics concerning disability, and began to rediscover that knack for acting that he'd put on hold, taking a few acting courses along the way.

Longley only spent a year living in housing for the handicapped, then moved into a regular apartment. He practiced his usual ingenuity in getting around campus - a particular challenge in snow - and did some agitating to improve accessibility. He also did five co-ops, including a senior year stint in San Francisco working with disabled kids at a recreation center.

Marlene Helt, coordinator of the N.U. Visitors Information Center, where Longley had another co-op, remembers a "sweetheart" whose biggest fault was that he talked too much. Also, Longley who has lectured about sexuality and the disabled, was unabashedly frank in his ordinary discourse. "He talks about everything, and I mean everything," said Helt with affectionate annoyance. "Sometimes I'd say, I don't want to hear it. Tell it to the Marines!'"

After graduating in 1989, Longley worked for Hachette Magazines in New York, where he'd done a six-month co-op during his third year. Then came Egypt, Bruce Weber, and Byron Pierce. Since Another World, he has been on a personal quest of sorts. After all, this is a young man whose life got serious before he had a chance to finish playing. "Part of me died when I had my accident," he says. "Part of me will forever be seventeen."

Two years ago, while giving a lecture at a Massachusetts high school, he met a senior student named Jon who reminded Longley of himself. Becoming friends, Longley even participated in Jon's graduation parties. "I was finishing a period of my life," says Longley.

"I was able to live that last quarter of high school with him and his friends. But then I started noticing that Jon was growing, and I was still there! I realized that I had to shed that skin. Now I need to step into reality, see myself as a professional, as a man. As the president of a nonprofit!"

He also realized that he couldn't keep running from commitments, like a seventeen-year-old would do. "The longest relationship I ever had with a girl was seven months," he says. "Anyone who wanted to put any restriction on me didn't last long. Now I feel I can commit. If I meet a woman I fall in love with, I'll commit like that."

This past summer he had a sort of last teenage fling - "like the six-months-after-high-school-trip-to-Europe" - camping under the stars in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. But he also spent time studying disabled services on the Navajo reservation, figuring out how SOWOHO's resources might be of use. Perhaps it will be funding for equipment, or for a traveling physical therapist, or even just some lectures. He won't promise anything to the Navajo, though, until he's carefully thought it out. "There's a lot of white people who have come into their lives and made promises and not kept to them." he says.

After his summer travels he moved out to Los Angeles, far from the safer haven of the East Coast, where he's been writing funding proposals for SOWOHO, pursuing acting jobs, and staying in shape at the gym. Longley has already participated in a few experimental rehab programs, where he's been hooked up to electrodes that allow him to peddle a bike - and even walk. He says he's been criticized by some with disabilities who think perhaps he's too vain about how his legs look, or is in denial about the permanence of his injury.

"My body feels best when I exercise," he insists. "Your legs can turn to skin and bones, and I don't want to be that way."

There haven't been any Schwab's-style discoveries yet. Indeed, on this day, when a panhandler asks for some coin, Longley smilingly tells him he's down to his last hundred bucks himself.

But Longley's doing what so many in L.A. do: He's writing a screenplay. That's not because of some pipe dream of Hollywood success. He just needs to invent a plum role for his own unique abilities, one that could perhaps accomplish for a disabled actor what Marlee Matlin has done as a deaf performer.

"A casting director told me that there aren't many roles to audition for," says Longley, "and that I have to create them. I'm not resentful of that; I want that to happen."

So he's working on a story about a paralyzed young man who wants to be able to impregnate his wife naturally and have children - but can't without some sort of medical assistance, because his ejaculatory system doesn't work.

"There's going to be a nude scene," says Longley, and pulls up his shorts leg to show off his slim, handsome thigh and hip. "What's the big deal about that?"

"It's not autobiographical, but it is," admits Longley of his script. "This character has the same body as me. Of course I want to have my own kids."

If there's any concern about Longley from friends and family, it's that he tries to do too much.

"He's got a lot of different goals, and he needs to narrow them to make them successful," says Sullivan, who serves as research director of SOWOHO. "He ought to be triplets to do what he wants to do in this life," says his mother.

When people's lives are so altered by injury, others often wonder if they've been transformed by the experience. Does the stingy one turn benevolent, the arrogant one modest? Asked if her son Mitch has turned out differently than she would have expected, Betty Longley pauses for a long moment.

"I think I would not have expected him to be so introspective and unselfish," she says. "I wouldn't have expected him to be someone who wanted to make dramatic changes in the world.

"He has handled it so well, and it's not phony," she continues. "He thinks he's a better person for it. I don't know if he is, but he thinks so."

"That's often the stereotype: that somebody has an accident who may have been cocky or conceited, and then they become grateful and godlike," says Mitch. "That wasn't the case at all with me. I was pretty much the same person that I am. I was always able to get back to the core personality - the friendliest kid in high school. If I was an asshole who got hurt and became a nice person, I would be going around the world telling people to be nice now, before a tragedy makes them a nice person."

"But I want the world to appreciate the things they have," he continues, "and to ultimately learn how to love themselves. Our generation is very turned off to that kind of talk about love, but it's the truth.

"You have to find a way to talk about it without filling people's ears with rhetoric," he concludes. "It's more like you have to act as an example."

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