Doug has been insistent that the girl at either age should be seen using a blind cane and I've been resistant to it. Most of the scenes are in locations she knows well, so it doesn't make sense. It finally boiled down to her first scene as an adult on her first day of teaching school. But as I told him today, he has written the scene in such a way that if she walks in with a cane there's literally no scene to play. And I think he finally "got" it and saw I was right. He just wanted the audience to instantly know she's some kind of blind, but they do - you have to trust that the audience is not dumb, plus they'll certainly know it in the first thirty seconds because we find out for sure when a male teacher she goes to talk to discovers it.
And the one other scene is when she goes to visit her old man friend by walking to his house - that, at least made sense, but I tried it and it just doesn't look good. In fact, I'd say it harms what we're doing. He wrote a lovely play, a memory play, and so everything is filtered and diffused as she listens to cassettes of herself talking, an aural diary, and we see the scenes as she remembers them. And my point all along is that nothing should be "real" but "remembered". So, we have three realistic set pieces - a couch, a teacher's desk, and her bay window where she records. And I wanted those realistic because they are the touchstones of her life. Everything else comes out of darkness into the light, and everything is delineated by light. That's been my take on this from day one and it really works and he loves it. So, the cane is, thankfully, gone.