"Deep inside I want to communicate," says Harding. Her hearing aids help her to know when someone is talking to her, but they don't help her understand the words. For that she lip-reads. "It's huge for me to communicate. I have to be tenacious. I have to tolerate hell."

No matter what degree of hearing loss a person suffers, communicating with friends and family can get tough. Both the people with the hearing loss and those trying to communicate with them experience the same frustration and anger. After awhile they sometimes completely give up.

Hearing loss isn't a problem of the few. Twenty-one million Americans have some degree of hearing loss. In fact, according to the organization Self Help for Hard of Hearing People (SHHH), hearing loss is the number one disability in the world. And it's growing worse. Every seven seconds a baby boomer turns 50. It's typically in their 50s when people begin to notice hearing loss. That's when communication problems can begin.

What's more alarming, the fastest-growing group suffering from noise-induced permanent hearing loss is teenagers because of loud music. Not surprising, then, is the fact that 60 percent of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are hearing impaired.

Other than learning sign language or having relatives and friends write down what they want to say, the only alternatives left for people with hearing loss are learning to read lips or withdrawing altogether, says Marcia Fariss, a semiretired audiologist who teaches lip reading through West Valley College.

Her classes are held at the Saratoga Senior Center and at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center of Silicon Valley in Los Gatos. Fariss' students range in age from their 50s to their 90s, and their hearing loss ranges from minimal to near-deafness.

Photograph by George Sakkestad Lip-reading student Marcia Harding says she has to be tenacious to understand communication effectively.

Saratogan Elaine Hocker—who has hearing loss as well as macular degeneration—is a political activist and wants to be able to hear political speeches.

Lip-reading can make a significant difference for those with hearing loss. Los Gatan Jan Owens-Martinez, 60, who woke up one morning to find she'd completely lost hearing in one ear, says she was in an auditorium recently listening to a speaker. There was so much ancillary noise with sounds reverberating off the walls that she couldn't hear a word. Suddenly she remembered she could lip-read. So she looked right at the speaker's mouth. "It was like they turned up the volume," she says. "I could hear everything."

"No one can lip-read 100 percent," Fariss says. "But they can get up to 90 percent."

Fariss says audiologists prefer the term "speech-reading" because the skill involves watching the whole face and body for clues, not just the lips. It's teachable, she says, and if a person is motivated, they are halfway there. But it takes tremendous concentration.

She says this art/science is taught phonetically. "Forget how the word is spelled," Fariss tells her students. "Go by how it looks."

Some sounds are easy to see. F, for example, is easy because the top teeth rest on the bottom lip. "You can always tell the F words," student Bob Thomas says with a laugh.

But then there are homophenous words that need to be understood in context. These are words that look alike when we say them—rabbit, rabid, rapid. Some homophenes look different written but the same when spoken—women and ribbon.

Without exaggerating her enunciation, Fariss silently mouths homophenous words to her class—math, bath, path. She faces each direction so the students can see her mouth. Her students tell her what the word is. Some get it right. Some don't.

She mouths sentences. Wickham says, "I get the first part of the sentence figured out, but then I start concentrating on the second part and I forget the first part." Others nod their heads. One woman thought "forgot" was "for God."

Long vowels like eee or ooo are easy to see. But short vowels like "uh" or "eh" form in the back of the throat, so speech-readers can't see them.

Fariss encourages her students who get only a few words. "OK, you've got the gist of the sentence. That's good enough," she says. "You don't need to know every word to understand what the person is saying." She reminds her students to watch for context and patterns. "The brain wants to make sense of things," Fariss says.

"But," she adds, "if you don't know what the subject is, then ask." She encourages the students to tell whoever they are talking with to let them know when the subject changes.

By the time people come to Fariss to evaluate their hearing, she says, they've lost a good chunk of their high-frequency sounds. "Most people don't notice the loss until it affects the speech sounds," she says.

Saratogan Neil Keever, 64, says his hearing loss falls mainly in the range of speech sounds. He actually hears higher-pitched sounds, which is unusual because those are usually the first to go. Keever thinks his hearing loss may come from his time in the military, when he was exposed to the sound of missiles taking off.

Fariss' classroom is an optimum place for speech-reading. Out in the real world it becomes far more difficult. Fariss encourages her students to make changes in their environment so they can hear better, such as by turning down background noise, like the television or radio; telling others of the need to see their faces when they talk; asking others to remove cigarettes and keep their hands away from their mouths; and, in restaurants, finding a quiet place to sit away from the front door or the bussing cart, going early or late, and sitting directly across from people the student will be speech-reading.

These suggestions help considerably, but the difficulty in restaurants and at parties is background noise.

"Hearing loss completely changes your social life," Keever says. "It's tempting to withdraw from social events altogether," he says. "You have to push not to."

Family get-togethers are a challenge, too. Lynne Kinsey, 53, from San Jose says she gets to the table first so she can pick out her seat. She likes to sit in the middle so she can connect with more people. "I can't hear at the end of the table," Kinsey says.

"Long tables are not good places for the hard of hearing," Fariss says.

Even sitting in the middle, Kinsey says, she misses a lot. When she found out her bachelor brother had a girlfriend for the first time, she realized everyone in the family knew about it but her. She admonished her brother. He told her he'd told everyone at a family dinner when Kinsey was there.

Some places are especially difficult to negotiate communication. Take the checkout line in a store, for instance. Margery Darling, who was born with hearing loss and learned to lip-read on her own when she was 4, recalls when cash registers didn't have numbers. "I'd say, 'Excuse me,' to the clerk, 'I'm hard of hearing.' " The checker would still talk too fast but get louder and louder. "The biggest help," Darling says, "is to smile. It loosens them up."

Edna McCready, 62, has her own cash register ploy. "I say, 'I'm deaf. Please write down the total for me.' " She says the problem comes when someone wants to help. "They don't give me a chance to say it," McCready says. "They tell the cashier I'm hard of hearing. Then the clerk keeps repeating herself, and it's harder and harder to understand."

Fariss adds that this kind of help can be humiliating. "Everyone likes to be independent," Fariss says.

Even at home, communication is a challenge. "Tell people how they can help you," Fariss says to her class.

Kinsey asks people to slow down a little. She says it's like trying to understand a foreign language—if they slow down, she catches more of the words.

"But," says Owen-Martinez, "if they slow down too much or over-enunciate, it's even harder to understand."

"Some people are hard to lip-read," says Saratogan Bob Thomas, "like Tom Brokaw."

Thomas says he gets frustrated when friends or family members forget he needs to see their face. "They turn around and walk away while they are still talking or they talk to me from another room." Like many in the classes, Thomas can hear when someone is talking to him, but he can't make out the words unless he can see their face.

Jo Anne Hersch, whose hearing is not impaired, says it's just as hard for her as it is for her hard-of-hearing friend, Marcia Harding. "You have to learn a whole new way of being," Hersch says. She says it was tiring at first to always have to look at Marcia when they were talking. Even if Hersch is actually talking to someone else in the group, she has to face Marcia so she can see what's being said. "This is hard," Hersch says. "You have to care."

Owens-Martinez says her husband gets frustrated because he keeps repeating himself to her, and she tells him it isn't helping. "Sometimes it's best when the speaker rephrases the idea," Owen-Martinez says. Sometimes she will say the words she understands and ask for more information. Then the speaker will either correct me or continue on," she says.

One class member says that what really gets to her is when she asks someone what they are saying, and they say, "Oh, it doesn't matter."

Then, of course, there's the stigma. Some people have a hard time wearing a hearing aid because they think it makes them look old or impaired. "Some people think hard-of-hearing people are not bright," says one of Fariss' students. "That's changing now because of all the baby boomers reaching hearing-loss age," the student says.

Photograph by George Sakkestad Margery Darling learned to lip-read at age 4 and has joined a class to refresh her lip-reading skills.

Fariss says lip-reading classes are growing in the Bay Area. Foothill College, West Valley College, Willows Senior Center and De Anza College are among the places offering classes. And on another note, some high schools are offering students foreign language credit for sign language classes.

Maybe this proliferation of help for the hard of hearing is because hearing loss is on the rise. From 1971 to 1991 the rate of hearing loss in the U.S. rose by 14 percent (that's after adjusting the data for population growth). What's troubling is, according to the magazine Hearing Review, more than one-third of all hearing loss is attributable to noise.

It seems that our hearing loss is a problem of prosperity. Our freeways, airports, jets, leaf blowers, loud restaurants and movie houses, our Jet Skis and snow skis and powerboats are hacking away at our hearing.

Fariss says that about 15 or 20 years ago, researchers found people in nonindustrialized countries continue into their 90s with good hearing.

Whatever the cause, the hard of hearing still have the problem of communicating and still have to be tenacious and force themselves to stay connected. And those who don't have a hearing impairment can help make that job a lot easier.

To sign up for lip-reading classes, call Marcia Fariss' voicemail at 408.741.2045, ext. 3655.