Stevie doesn’t really look like Stevie anymore since Craig Lamar Traylor has grown up over the years and changed his appearance a bit as he’s now sporting several tattoos and has gauges in his ears that a person might be able to shoot a Nerf dart through. He sounds happy though, which is the most important thing, and he might even be making a return to acting as he has a part in a movie that will be headed for release this coming June. The title of the movie is Forgiven This Gun4Hire and it apparently offers a different look at Butch Cassady and Calamity Jane, but it’s uncertain just how big Craig’s part in it will be. He did try his hand at acting after the show Malcolm in the Middle ended in 2006, but nothing really stuck and eventually he did step away from show business to take on his own personal passion, wire wrapping. This is an ancient method of making jewelry that Craig stepped into for a couple of reasons, one being the love of it and the other being that he stated not a lot of people that look like him get into it. While that’s kind of an odd statement it’s also likely that not a lot of people get into it simply because it’s an old and antiquated way of doing things, which might not allow for a lot of time to produce a mass quantity of product to sell people. It’s easy to state that quality takes time, but when dealing with techniques that date back a thousand years or more, it’s usually found that productivity requires more than one person to be in on the act to get anything out.
His role as Stevie Kenarbin was great since Craig played it off so well. He was bound to a wheelchair, was missing a lung, had asthma, a father who was an emotional weakling, and a mother that, once freed of her inhibitions, was kind of out of control in a lot of ways. So really, it should have been easy to feel entirely sorry for Stevie, but it was almost impossible since despite his infirmities he was still an extremely bright kid, a genius like his buddy Malcolm, and he knew how to think his way around various issues, such as in one episode when Stevie’s family met Malcolm’s for the first time, the boys were sat at the same table and were playing the circle game. His huge disadvantage was that he talked slow and moved slow, and as a result it was easy for Reese to tee up on him constantly, punching Stevie hard enough to get his wheelchair rolling away. Try as he might, Stevie couldn’t make the game work for him, at least not until he rolled away supposedly crying because he’d had enough. The trick of course was that he’d pulled a fast one on Reese with fake tears and managed to get Reese back when he caught the elder brother slipping enough to make him look at the circle made by Stevie’s fingers, which was the point.
One might have thought that Stevie was bound to punch like a powder puff, but when he revved his wheels up he gained enough momentum to launch Reese into another table, after which he teed up on Reese again until his mother pulled him off. There were times when it was very easy to feel a bit sorry for Stevie, but there were plenty of other times when he used that pity to his advantage and therefore made it simple to feel little more than mild irritation with him since he used his issues to seek pity or to some other advantage. But there are plenty of kudos to be given to Craig for nailing the role so well since during the course of the show he was entirely professional and managed to pull off the act in such a way that some people might have actually thought that Stevie was more than just a character. People might have become offended at this today since playing the part of a handicapped individual would be seen as so utterly wrong that the show might have been canceled or at least harangued until the producers decided it was in their best interest to get rid of Stevie or discontinue the show. This is one reason why things were a little better over a decade ago, since people weren’t really bothered by this type of act. And if they were, they changed the channel and didn’t watch, which is just as easy.
But whether Craig comes back to acting or not it’s fun to remember his contributions and to think that if he does come back it’s not going to be quite the same.
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