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ST. THERESA POINT — A little whistle means Kevin Taylor has managed to hoist himself over the slop pail by himself and doesn’t need his mother’s help.

Taylor, a shy 30-year-old who has cerebral palsy and can’t walk on his own, has a few bathroom options in his St. Theresa Point home, and they’re all a humiliating hassle.

He can use his crutches to get from his perch on the living room sofa to the small room that serves as the bathroom. That’s where the new slop pail is parked under the chair-like commode, near the plastic basin that serves as a makeshift sink. if Taylor’s in a hurry, though, he usually drags his body down the hall in a scooching motion he’s perfected and heaves himself up onto the commode.

"if he goes in a hurry, he crawls there. He doesn’t have time to grab his crutches because his crutches slow him down," his mother Alice said. "I say ‘Kevin are you OK?’ and he will whistle away. that means he’s OK."

If it’s summer, Taylor can make a tortuous trip out to the biffy. Positioning his crutches carefully on the sinking wooden palettes that make a path, Taylor inches past the home’s garbage pile, where the family dumps their slop pail.

The Taylors are among 300 families in St. Theresa Point without any running water — no sewer lines or water pipes, no cistern, no toilet, no bath, no kitchen sink.

That doesn’t take into account the reserve’s dramatic housing shortage that jams a dozen or more people into small two- or three-bedroom bungalows, forcing people to sleep on old couches or mattresses strewn on the floor. the band estimates it needs another 900 homes to give residents the kind of space most Winnipeggers enjoy.

Chief David McDougall doesn’t believe, at the rate things are going, that he’ll see his community fully serviced by water and sewers in his lifetime.

"I don’t think so, the way things are happening," he said from the band office. "the population rate is exploding now… it would be very ambitious to say we can do it in 20 or 25 years."

Despite Taylor’s disability and his parents’ rapidly advancing age, the family is not on the band’s priority list for running water, which highlights just how long that list is. This summer, the band had enough funding to build 18 new homes and retrofit 11, giving them running water, proper toilets and kitchen sinks. the Taylors didn’t get a nibble, even though all their neighbours have piped water so the main line must run right past their living room.

The truth is, compared to many families who live on reserve, this family gets on pretty well despite Taylor’s challenges. Taylor rarely gets sick with the kind of skin or stomach ailments that often plague people without proper sanitation. the home is rundown, the walls are a little dirty and the linoleum flooring is peeling. But it’s tidy and uncluttered, with a laminated Ten Commandments posted on the wall and a shrine to St. Theresa on a corner shelf.

And Alice Taylor has chosen to focus her considerable energy on getting help for her son, not necessarily demanding running water, though a sink and a toilet would be a godsend. video player to use on WFP

The Taylors have filed a federal human rights complaint about the almost total lack of programs for disabled people on reserve. There is no physio or speech therapy, no work- or life-skills programs and no respite for the family. Taylor spends most of his day watching television and doing word-search puzzles when Alice knows he is capable of much more.

"I’m fighting for him to stay on the reserve instead of going out to some institution," Alice said. "I’d like the services to come to him, because I know there are services that are available, so he can stay with his siblings and local people that he knows, so he doesn’t have to go to some other place, like in the city."

Ironically, the family’s lack of basic sanitation is also Taylor’s social salvation. Once a week, he’s picked up by home-care workers and taken to the bright new nursing station for a bath. It’s one of his few outings, except an occasional trip to church.

All week he counts the sleeps until his Monday bath. Once, Alice told him it was two more sleeps, and Taylor took two naps that day, hoping those counted.

On reserves where mud roads and soggy yards are the norm, it’s difficult to stay clean. the interior of every truck is caked with grit and gravel. Before entering any office or home, everyone removes their shoes, leaving a pile of mud-clotted sneakers or Crocs on soggy pieces of cardboard at the door. Even so, the floors in many homes are smeared with dirt, the walls scuffed or scribbled upon.

Kids who play outside get dirty almost immediately, and they often stay that way since most homes don’t have showers or washing machines.

It’s a particular challenge for Kevin Taylor, whose shoes wear out quickly because of the way he drags his feet, and whose track pants often get pretty grubby when he’s scooching across the floor.

Kevin washes his face in a plastic basin just like everyone else in the house, and Alice gives him frequent sponge baths. But it’s getting harder for her and her husband to cope as they get older.

"I know I can’t handle him anymore," she says. "we try to keep him clean. I do his laundry. I use rainwater in summer as much as we can. if we have a vehicle running, we can get water from the pumps."

In winter, the family melts snow for washing. Getting clean drinking water means a drive to the communal pumps, which often freeze in the winter.

Over the summer, the federal government spent $1 million in Island Lake on new, 170-litre water barrels that can be filled up by water trucks.

Ottawa also sent 1,000 new slop pails for use as indoor toilets, complete with toilet seats for added comfort. Those were distributed among the four Island Lake bands, and many saw them as an insult. instead of dealing with the larger demand of new water pipes and real indoor toilets, Ottawa perpetuated Third World conditions. it was a solution one chief called "archaic and degrading" and it fell well short of the $8 million in emergency funding the Island Lake chiefs requested. they hoped to build central shower and laundry facilities and buy two dozen more water and sewage trucks able to deliver water and haul away human waste.

But Alice Taylor got both a new slop pail and a big water tank, and said they actually improved her situation, especially the water tank, which the family put under the eaves to catch rainwater.

"if we had running water, it would be so helpful," Alice said. "He could bathe himself, and we wouldn’t have to limit our water for washing and drinking."

History

Updated on Saturday, October 22, 2011 at 9:51 AM CDT: adds video

Writing from Abu Dhabi, Hani Mustafa delights in stories of the displaced Click to view caption

The fifth round of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival started this week; each year new leaps are evident, testifying to the dedication of the executive director Peter Scarlet, who chooses a fair number of important films produced within the previous year. Most will have been premiered in the top pick of festivals prior to their arrival in Abu Dhabi

It's been five days since Melissa McCarthy won her first Emmy on Sept. 18, and she is still visibly overwhelmed by emotion when she arrives at a photo shoot for The Hollywood Reporter at a Los Angeles studio.

Variations on "I can't believe all of this is happening to me" are uttered often by the Mike & Molly star, who greets a photographer, hairstylist and reporter without makeup or Hollywood pretense. if her career-making character in this past spring's surprise box-office smash Bridesmaids was forceful, masculine and raunchy (propositioning an air marshal midflight), then McCarthy, 41, in person is precisely the opposite: gentle, feminine and exceedingly polite.

Mention the statuette she has housed between family pictures on the mantel in her L.a. house, and you can see tears form. Push McCarthy on its significance, and you get the feeling she's doing all she can to keep them from streaming down her face.

VIDEO: behind the Scenes of THR's Melissa McCarthy Cover Shoot

Still, she's more than willing to share details of her win — by all accounts an upset of The Big C's Laura Linney, Nurse Jackie's Edie Falco and Parks and Recreation's Amy Poehler, all considered stronger favorites — but confesses her memory is spotty from shock and genuine disbelief.

"I remember my knees went first, and I thought, 'oh God, please don't fall down,' " she says of her thought process in that moment. "just keep it upright. You're in a dress. your mom and dad are watching."

She was standing beside fellow nominees Tina Fey, Martha Plimpton, Linney, Falco and Poehler, having rushed the stage when their names were announced, part of an unrehearsed comedy routine conceived days earlier by Poehler. By the time presenters Rob Lowe and Sofia Vergara began placing a tiara on McCarthy's head and a bouquet of roses and Emmy in her arms, McCarthy recalls registering a second thought: "Is this still the bit? oh, this is going to be so awkward if this is part of the bit."

PHOTOS: The Hollywood Reporter's Cover Story Gallery

But bear hugs followed from the women, and McCarthy was pushed toward the microphone. She let out a "Holy smokes," the broadcast-appropriate version of another phrase she'd mouthed seconds earlier. then she apologized to a U.S. TV audience of 12.5 million for being a crier, with tears in her eyes as she uttered such lines as, "I'm from Plainfield, Ill., and I'm standing here, and it's kind of amazing."

For McCarthy, the leapfrog over better-known nominees marked the official Hollywood coronation of an actress so outside the realm of convention that it gave the broadcast one of its few genuine surprises. indeed, it would seem McCarthy has plenty working against her, a plus-size fortysomething in an industry that traditionally favors sample-size females two decades younger. But what she lacks in dewy ingenue sex appeal, she makes up for with depth, comedic timing and sheer likability.

In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a working actress more successful than — or certainly as busy as — McCarthy right now. Not only does she have a starring role on CBS' hit sitcom Mike & Molly — the second season bowed Sept. 26 to a series-high 4.8 rating in the adults 18-to-49 demographic and 13.9 million viewers — and an Oct. 1 gig as Saturday Night Live host, but also she recently sold a road-trip comedy pitch to Paramount (with Bridesmaids writer Annie Mumolo) and a TV comedy project to CBS (with her actor-producer husband, Ben Falcone). All of it comes on the heels of McCarthy's scene-stealing turn as Megan, the unfiltered, unconventional and undeniable standout of the may release Bridesmaids, a role so well-received it has Universal positioning her as awards-season bait on the film side.

"It's truly her moment," says CBS Entertainment chief Nina Tassler. Adds Peter Roth, president of Mike & Molly studio Warner Bros. TV, "this is the year of the McCarthy." It's a label he claims is richly deserved, adding: "everything about her is relatable. You root for her; you want her to win."

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So what's it like to be at the white-hot center of Hollywood's attention, after nearly two decades working on the fringes? Overwhelming, exhilarating and utterly surreal are among the descriptors McCarthy uses. Earlier this summer, she was out rug shopping with Mumolo — the longtime friends shop often for their homes, with Mumolo insisting McCarthy could be an interior designer if she weren't an actress — when McCarthy's "team" called to see if she was up to do episode two of SNL's 37th season.

"I went into such an embarrassing, weird, inappropriately loud cry," says McCarthy of her response, laughing about a story she shares often. "Annie was running in circles. She thinks something horrible is happening because I'm bent over, literally, in the rug section of Living Spaces wailing." Mumolo cracks up at the story's retelling, adding, "I thought someone had died."

If you believe the actress, the crying stopped only recently. On this day, McCarthy — set to leave for SNL rehearsals in two days — is focused on preparing for the gig and calming her nerves for the show she calls the Holy Grail of comedy. She claims she'll fly to Manhattan with a trunk filled with sketches and characters from her decade-plus tenure with L.a. improv group the Groundlings. Among them: Marbles, a cross-eyed, eccentric genius she'd love to work into a skit on SNL. "if I get Marbles on SNL, you can hit me with a bus right after that and I'll be OK," jokes McCarthy.

It was this Groundlings character that won over Mike & Molly creator Mark Roberts during the series' casting process in early 2010. "When I saw Marbles [on McCarthy's reel], all I could think was this woman was an absolute genius," he says. "There's an off-handedness and unpredictability to her comedy that just makes it engaging." (It's worth noting that Marbles is also among the characters that won over Falcone, a fellow Groundlings alum. "She'll do anything for a laugh," he says, recalling his wife falling into splits onstage without stretching.)

To hear McCarthy tell it, Marbles is precisely the type of character she's drawn to: those who are notably different but still confident and comfortable in their skin. Bridesmaids' Megan, in particular, fits into that category, though only after McCarthy got to put her stamp on the hard-to-cast character. what was initially conceived as a nervous oddball McCarthy reimagined as an uber-confident misfit.

McCarthy went into her audition for Bridesmaids with Dockers, no makeup and a force-of-nature attitude. In her mind, she was channeling past Groundlings characters with the physical appearance of the Food Network's Guy Fieri, from one of her favorite shows Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (other favorites include top Chef and Chopped). She remembers leaving the audition horrified by her performance: "The whole ride home, I was like, 'God, you get one shot, and you go in and you act weird,' " she says. "I was like, 'You idiot, you idiot.' "

Fortunately, producer Judd Apatow and director Paul Feig, along with writers and former Groundlings members Kristen Wiig and Mumolo, appreciated her take on weird. "My jaw hit the ground," recalls Feig of McCarthy's audition. "I remember watching the first time, and we almost couldn't laugh because we were like: 'oh my God. what is she doing? this is amazing.' "

That her improv skills were similarly top-notch — Feig is fond of telling the story of a scene that didn't make the cut where McCarthy's Megan starts ad-libbing about a squirrel infestation in her house, revealing there's "a squirrel burrowing its way into her vagina and living inside her" — made her casting a no-brainer.

For Mumolo and Wiig, who had recommended her for the role, Bridesmaids was an opportunity to share the side of McCarthy that fans of her TV work did not know. "She'd just get on the stage [at Groundlings] and grab the crowd by the balls," says Mumolo, who acknowledges she was initially thrown when McCarthy was cast as the "nice little chef" on Gilmore Girls. Her husband, who played Air Marshal Jon in Bridesmaids, agrees, arguing, "Bridesmaids was really the first chance for Melissa to show what exactly she can do."

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So where does McCarthy's gut-busting humor come from? as noted in her Emmy speech, she was raised in Plainfield, some 45 minutes southwest of Chicago, on a working corn and soybean farm. (Her parents remain there, though they've since moved off the farm.) without neighborhood kids to play with, she and her older sister spent much of their childhood creating characters and an imaginary world — a skill that would clearly serve her well later in life.

At that time, McCarthy had her heart set on a career in fashion. She and close friend and fellow goth Brian Atwood, now a well-known women's shoe designer, would tear out pages of Vogue and fantasize about their own lines. Her parents beat down the idea of her attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in new York, so she settled on Southern Illinois University, where she briefly studied clothing and textiles before dropping out.

With boredom having seeped in again, McCarthy decided to follow her sister Margie to Boulder, Colo., where she found a gig making costumes for a dance company. But a visit from Atwood, who had already moved to new York, convinced a then 20-year-old McCarthy to pack her bags and join him in Manhattan. Once there, it was he who suggested she try her hand at stand-up, a genre with which she'd had no previous experience.

"It was terrible," she says, describing the wig and gold leather jacket Atwood squeezed her into for her first open-mic night at Stand up new York. She hadn't realized most comics come with material and that the light that blinks after an allotted period is a signal to wrap it up. "I just told these long, bizarre stories," she chuckles. "I had no idea what the light meant, so I was winking and nodding at it like: 'Thanks, guys. I appreciate the help.' I kept going and going." Perhaps surprisingly, she was invited back.

At first, a young McCarthy loved it. "this idea of really being able to pace an audience and make strangers laugh, I just thought it was the greatest thing," she says. But she grew tired of the hecklers fairly quickly and turned her attention to theater, studying and performing in off-off-Broadway productions for several years.

The inability to make a living finally caught up to her, and she packed her bags again and moved to Los Angeles, where she moved into a friend's kitchen to save money. Her sister had sent her a newspaper clip about The Groundlings, so she boarded a city bus, auditioned and got in. "It changed my life," she insists. "It taught me to write and how to do a character rather than just play crazy." (McCarthy is set to return to the Groundlings with a special performance in October.)

After a string of lower-level production gigs (the first on her cousin Jenny McCarthy's eponymous MTV sketch-comedy show) and small roles in film (Go, Charlie's Angels), she landed a supporting role on Gilmore Girls, a coming-of-age drama on the now-defunct WB (and later on spinoff the CW). The series, starring Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel as mother and daughter, ran from 2000 to 2007. Within months of wrapping, McCarthy was hitched to another friend role in ABC's short-lived Christina Applegate vehicle Samantha who?

Then came Mike & Molly, in which executive producer Chuck Lorre decided the longtime supporting actress "was more than ready to step into the lead role." The first time McCarthy read with co-star Billy Gardell, says Lorre, "was one of those moments you dream about. they were perfect together. I like to imagine that Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows were smiling down on us." (She was eight months pregnant with her second child at the time.)

When Mike & Molly premiered in fall 2010, critics were struck by its premise. rather than feature impossibly thin characters living upper-class existences, as many primetime offerings do, the CBS series centered on a blue-collar cop and schoolteacher couple who meet at Overeaters Anonymous. The plotline stirred early controversy when a Marie Claire writer claimed on the magazine's website that she would be "grossed out if [she] had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kiss each other."

But Roberts believes the realness of the series' characters — and their waistlines — has helped make Mike & Molly a success, regularly garnering 10 million viewers during its first season. "I had gotten very tired of watching people on television that were just sort of improbable," says Roberts of his thought process while penning the pilot. "they were too perfect, they made too much money, and their apartments were way outside of their economic abilities."

For Gardell, a long-time stand-up comic, that authenticity was part of the characters' appeal. "We're not the norm on TV, and I think we take great pride in representing down-to-earth people who are just trying to get better," says McCarthy's co-star. "I think you have to have a deep soul to do that, and Melissa definitely has one."

McCarthy agrees, claiming she was drawn to the idea that the show features real people with real jobs. "I don't know any neighborhoods where everyone's walking around in seven-inch heels and perfect makeup," she says, arguing she has been less bothered by criticism of her physical appearance since becoming a mother to daughters Vivian, 4 — who has been parading around for days with her mother's Emmy tiara — and Georgette, 1 ½.

"The stupid stuff like what I wear or how I look I can't control, so I just try not to give too much energy to it," she continues, noting later that after having her second child, her body is a work in progress. "At 20, I would have been like: 'Don't they like me? Was it my hair?' At 41, I think the things that define me, I hope, are a lot more than those kinds of petty things."

With her raised profile, McCarthy is getting ready to launch a retail line for other plus-size women. "trying to find stuff that's still fashion-forward in my size is damn near impossible. It's either for like a 98-year-old woman or a 14-year-old hooker, and there is nothing in the middle," she laughs, recalling her recent struggles to find a dress for the Emmys. after combing through "9 million dresses with taffeta or shiny bows," she opted to channel that teenage passion and design her own (with couture dressmaker Daniella Pearl).

She could need more of her own creations as the awards circuit heats up. McCarthy is likely to garner attention for her role in Bridesmaids, a rare female-lead comedy hit with both critics and viewers. The movie earned nearly $170 million at the domestic box office, making it the no. 2-grossing comedy of the year behind The Hangover part II. (By comparison, Apatow's earlier hits The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked up and Superbad banked $109 million, $149 million and $121 million, respectively.)

What's more, it solidified something so rare it's almost unheard of in Hollywood circles: a posse of female comedians, including Groundlings alumna McCarthy, Wiig, Mumolo, Maya Rudolph and Wendi McLendon-Covey. for the genre's males, there has been the Adam Sandler crew, the will Ferrell clan and even the Jason Segel-Seth Rogen gang. But outside of Fey and Poehler's East Coast tribe, there has never been a network of female comedians as powerful as this one. "we all keep texting and calling each other, going: 'Are you freaking out right now? I don't know what's happening,' " says Mumolo of the troupe. "I think we're all still spinning from the summer. and Melissa, Melissa is in outer space."

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Now, McCarthy and Falcone, currently in Atlanta filming what to Expect When You're Expecting, are busy prepping a production company. The pair is leaning toward naming it On the Day, a phrase McCarthy utters often. "Whenever someone wants to really rehearse a part, I always say, 'oh, on the day, on the day it will be fine," she says, referencing her distaste for over-rehearsing.

It's a fitting next step given how many projects McCarthy has in the works, a byproduct of her recent success. "to have the opportunity to start developing and being on the creating side of stuff, for me, is one of the most amazing and exciting things that's happened," she says, back in gush mode. "I've been writing for 15 years, and now, suddenly, people are like, 'oh, what's in that drawer?' It's like, 'well, I'll show what's in the drawer.' "

In addition to being in negotiations to star opposite Jason Bateman in Identity Thief, McCarthy and Mumolo are co-writing another McCarthy star vehicle. The project, set up at Paramount, will feature McCarthy as the mastermind of a plan to hijack the Stanley Cup in order to cheer up her sick husband.

Then there's the multicamera comedy concept about a woman having a midlife crisis that was recently sold to CBS, which she and Falcone will co-write and co-executive produce. "When you hear a pitch and the writer knows every aspect of that character's life, you feel the reality," says CBS' Tassler of McCarthy's animated sell. "There was crying in the pitch, and then there was laughter and outrage. She painted the full picture."

McCarthy's drawer also houses a dark comedy feature script that's about halfway complete from McCarthy and The help writer-director Tate Taylor, another fellow Groundlings alum. But it's a project titled Tammy that McCarthy claims has her heart.

"It's so funny, and it also kind of breaks my heart," she says of a film script of hers centering on a woman who is leading an exceptionally unfulfilled life. The character wakes up one morning as things are crumbling around her and decides she has to get out of town — and the only way to do so is in her grandmother's car. When her heavy-drinking grandmother insists on going along, they end up on a wild road trip to Mount Rushmore. "It's these two women who are not where they thought they'd be, and they kind of band together," she says, her excitement on display.

The Bridesmaids team is not through with her, either. Apatow already has locked her into his still-untitled Knocked up spinoff, and Feig says his Dumb Jock project at Universal has been set up for her to star in. "She's really one of my new heroes," says Feig of McCarthy. "I'll do anything to keep working with her. When you find someone like her, you don't let them go."