Songs from the 1980s have been having a moment largely thanks to the Netflix show “Stranger Things,” which recently made Kate Bush’s 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” go viral. As it turns out, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords is also a fan of the genre.
According to filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West, who recently released a new documentary “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” and came on The New Abnormal podcast to talk about it, shooting survivor Gabby Giffords used music, Cyndi Lauper’s specifically, to learn to speak again just weeks after she was shot in the head during a campaign rally outside Tucson, Arizona, in 2011.
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“The film shows this process and also how the heroic speech pathologist worked with Gabby to access words and used often music to do that,” Cohen told New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast on the show’s latest bonus episode. “There’s some pretty incredible footage from early on in Gabby’s rehabilitation where she’s with a nurse and a speech pathologist in these early days of really struggling to regain any language. And she’s just like belting out, ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun.’”
That’s who Gabby is, Cohen and West tell Molly. The two say the documentary kicked off with a Zoom call and they saw her personality come out then.
“Gabby’s opening gambit on Zoom was to like lift her foot, stick it right in the camera of the Zoom to show us that she was wearing RBG socks,” recounts Cohen.
She hasn’t stopped living her best life since.
“She has a very full life, very active. She’s really devoted to taking care of herself,” says West.
The filmmakers also fill Molly in on some of the things Gabby has taken up recently, like playing the French horn, as well as the adorable scenes in the documentary that show Gabby supporting her husband, Mark Kelly, and how she has worked to overcome her aphasia to give nearly flawless speeches.
“She has an incredible memory. So once she knows a speech, she can give a two-minute speech cold with no notes or no anything,” says Cohen.
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