Bad Girls
Doing time at the Rhode Island Training School is punishment for young women who break the law. What's surprising is how many would rather be in the big house than out.
Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008
While she’s here, Diamond Jordan-Brown looks perpetually as if she just rolled out of bed: blue sweats, hair standing up in all directions. At eight this morning, she actually has just rolled out of bed. Diamond is sixteen and has the spunk and wit of a teenager but the poise and smarts of someone much older. Even now, as she shuffles across the white, linoleum-tiled hall into the day room and plops down on a vinyl-upholstered chair to wait for breakfast, it’s with the weary resignation of someone who’s seen it all.
If she were awaiting sentencing, or if the judge had sent her here for a few days to try to scare some sense into her—as he has before—she’d be wearing orange, walking around like a human traffic cone. But since she’s been sentenced—she’s more than halfway through a six-month “bid,” as the girls call it—she’s wearing “state blues”: state-issued blue sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, white sneakers.
On any given day, the Rhode Island Training School houses some 200 children. Administered by the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), yet populated by those remanded here by the criminal justice system, the Training School exists at a crossroads between prison and foster care. It’s a juvenile correctional facility, make no mistake about it—double fences topped with razor wire surround the complex, and residents leave locked buildings only with handcuffs on—but it’s also a public high school and a place where children receive counseling and guidance. DCYF refers to it euphemistically as “a highly structured, secure residential facility,” and the children are called “residents” rather than inmates. The boys are divided into seven different residential “cottages” based on age, offense, treatment needs and behavior, but the girls (in 2006, 16 percent of the total population) are all housed here, in the Mathias building, a facility that feels more like a tidy, bright hospital wing than a prison. The unit consists entirely of one hallway, off of which are classrooms on one end and bedrooms on the other, and a dayroom, where the girls spend their downtime and eat their meals.
Diamond’s friend Jessica* is on kitchen duty this morning. While the rest of the girls filter in, she unwraps several loaves of white bread and pops slices into the industrial-grade toaster, six at a time; she tosses mini cartons of milk out of a crate and into the refrigerator, mixes bright green “juice” from syrup in a jug and distributes piles of paper napkins onto each table. A trolley has already arrived from the central kitchen with a giant steel tray of aluminum-foil-covered scrambled eggs, and she puts this tray out alongside mini plastic tubs of cereal and a bowl of fruit.
The count today is thirteen. At breakfast, the blues sit together at two tables, and the oranges sit together at a third.
Beyond this obvious self-segregation is a more subtle grouping organized roughly according to the Training School’s level system. There are four levels, each with a corresponding set of privileges (number of visits, visitors and phone calls allowed, bedtime). Training School residents enter at Level 2 and work their way up (or down) the levels by earning (or losing) points for things like working hard in school, attending groups and meetings, keeping their room clean, following instructions and volunteering to help out around the unit.
Because it takes up to six weeks to gain a level, girls at Level 3 or 4 have usually been here for longer than girls at Level 1 or 2; what’s more, only girls with good behavior and a positive attitude tend to earn enough points to move up. All of which contributes to the fact that girls in the various levels tend to stick together. “Our clique is basically Level 3s,” says Jessica. “When you’re down there, at Level 2, Level 1, you have nothing better to do [than pick fights]. Elbowing in the hallway, pushing in the bathroom, swearing across the tables. We have to just ignore them. It’s kinda like we just brush them off our shoulder.”
One of the girls in her clique is Diamond, who is serving a six-month sentence for assault, intimidating a witness and disorderly conduct—all charges related to a fight with another girl that got out of hand. Later, I visit Diamond at home after her release (she ended up serving four months), and she couldn’t look more different than she did when we first met: She cuts a dashing figure with long, braided extensions in her hair, tight jeans, knee-high zip-up boots.
Diamond and her mother, Auretha, are very close. In the months leading up to Diamond’s incarceration, Auretha tells me she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Diamond loved to party and stay out late. She’d be home only for as long as it took to dump off her bag after school and leave again. What’s more, she’d get into so many fights that eventually girls started arriving at their family’s house and telling Auretha to get Diamond so they could fight her.
“I wasn’t the type of person, before I went in there, to just let little petty stuff go,” recalls Diamond. “You could roll your eyes and I was on you. Anything could trigger me. You could walk by me and almost brush my shoulder. You was going down.” She laughs when she says it, but she has an iron will; she must have been scary. The judge sent her to the Training School for a night two years ago after a fight, but it didn’t stick. Diamond had seven cousins there at the time, so it seemed like a sort of rite of passage. Sure enough, a few months later, she was back, this time for real.
The first few months of her sentence were marked by her typical behavior. On her very first day, she shoved a staff member who was bothering her. “It took her two to three months to realize what was really happening,” says Auretha. “Before, she was really angry when I’d go visit her. She didn’t like this staff, she didn’t like that staff. Then she just did a three-sixty. She knew, what I’m doing right now is not going to get me out of here.”
After breakfast, the girls spend a quiet half-hour in the dayroom, watching television, chatting or flipping through magazines before heading off to class. The boys’ school, because it has so many more students, operates much the same way as other Rhode Island public schools. The girls’ school, on the other hand, has only two classrooms, one for special education students and one for everyone else, where the girls, with wildly varying grade levels and skills, work more or less independent of each other, with guidance from a teacher.
During class, minor tiffs erupt about who’s sitting in whose chair, and who graffitied on the chalkboard.
“Stories on the outside are you’re going to get beat up [in here],” says Jessica. But this is no vigilante jailhouse. Physical fights like those that Diamond used to get into are rare here, Jessica says. The Training School “doesn’t test you like that,” she says. “It doesn’t test your strength. It tests you emotionally. It tests you mentally. The stress of when you have court. The stress of having to sit in a holding cell all day, just to know you’re coming back here. The stress of knowing that your visit may not come this weekend. The staff might not let you make a phone call. You might not be able to talk to your parents all week. You might not get your deodorant, and you might have to smell. Go a week without getting letters and see how it feels. If you don’t get your mind right, if you don’t have that emotional breakdown here, you’re going to come back. If people walk out and say, ‘My time was easy,’ they’re going to come back. If I’m like, ‘My time was hard, I almost went crazy in there, I was sick in there, it killed me emotionally, I’m so happy to be out now,’ I’m less likely to come back.”
Emotions run high. Social worker Sirinath Seneth is the female unit manager; before this summer, when she began the top job here, she was a clinical social worker in two of the boys’ units: the maximum security facility (known as the Youth Correctional Center) and the substance abuse unit. More often the victims of trauma and abuse, she says, “the girls are more needy. With the boys, forty or fifty kids? I can cover it. Here, with only ten or fifteen girls, it’s difficult. They get nervous, they get anxious about what it’s going to be like when they get home. They get jealous, they get mad, they talk about each other.” With the boys, Seneth said, she had to ask them to come see her. “Don’t you have issues at all?” she would joke. Whereas, with the girls, “if you don’t see them for one day, two days, they want to know why they haven’t seen you.” Juvenile Program Worker Dawn Nunez agrees. “The girls are too needy,” she says. “They’re much more emotional” than the boys.
Mandated both to enforce the rules and to provide emotional support and encouragement, Juvenile Program Workers, or JPWs, are something of a cross between correctional officers and Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentors. Residents call them by their first name, with an honorific tacked on: Miss Jackie, Miss Michelle. To be hired, they must have a minimum of an associate’s degree and some work experience with adolescents; many have worked previously in group homes or residential programs. Before being hired, JPWs attend a six-week academy where they learn everything from fire safety to restraint techniques. One of the key things taught at the academy is the virtue of a “redirect.”
If a child talks back or disobeys an order, explains Joe Cardin, deputy superintendent of programs at the Training School, “you don’t make a big investment in it. And you certainly don’t go back to that schoolyard thing: escalation. The next thing you know you want to kill each other,” he says. This is, philosophically speaking, a huge departure from the classic correctional model, where if an inmate challenges the staff’s authority, the staff must reassert who’s in charge at all costs. Cardin recalls a recent incident where a pregnant resident refused to go to her room when instructed. The wrong response, according to Cardin, would have been, “‘Well, you’d better go to your room.’ [Because] then you get, ‘Well, put me in my room.’ Then you’re at a point as a staff member where you’ve just been called out. So what do you do? Do you people really want to drag a nine-month-pregnant female to her room? Does that make a lot of sense to you? Just walk out of that. There’s no direct threat to anyone. Except your ego.” Instead, staff members told the resident, “Fine, sit there if you want. We’ll come back in ten minutes.” She did, and they did, and then
she went to her room.
Very few girls are sent to the Training School for violent felonies. Training School data, which reflect the residents in custody on a single day in 2007, indicates that only two girls out of sixteen, or 12.5 percent, were serving time for felony assault. The largest proportion, almost 40 percent, was there for simple assault, a misdemeanor. The remainder were incarcerated for crimes against property, illegal-substance-related crime, and obstruction: resisting arrest or escape. Boys were more likely than girls to be serving time for violent felonies—almost 20 percent were there for felony assault or first- or second-degree sex crimes—but the majority of boys, too, were there for nonviolent crimes, about 40 percent of which were crimes against property.
Like many of its residents, Jessica is no stranger to the Training School. (According to an analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count, 25 percent of youth at the Training School in 2006 had been incarcerated previously.) This marks her fifth time here, though her previous visits were for a night or two, a week at most.
At sixteen, her skin is lightly smattered with acne, and her soft face still lacks the sharp angles of adulthood. Her boyfriend’s name is inked in dark-lettered script on her shoulder.
“They’d always say, do this program, let us see that you’re doing good at home, and you can go home for good,” she recalls. “I never got to that point [of changing her ways]. Reality didn’t hit.” Now that reality has hit, Jessica has the kind of perspective on her life and her behavior that she’d lacked.
Her mother was only fourteen when Jessica was born. Their closeness in age meant that it wasn’t always clear who was in charge—at least not to Jessica. “I wanted to be the mom,” she says. Shortly after Jessica was born, her father was sentenced to forty years in the ACI for second-degree murder. Her mother met her current husband while he was in the ACI serving time for breaking and entering; they got married while he was still locked up. “Me and my sister felt like she was picking him over us,” Jessica recalls. “She would always be at his visits, every other day, put money in his account when she couldn’t even buy us something. It was real hectic.”
Her stepfather was released about a year ago, and her young-est sister was born shortly after that.
Still, things didn’t start to get really out of control until about three years ago, when her father’s parole date began to approach. “When it started getting close to him going up for parole, I started acting up to my mom, yelling at my mom, disrespecting my mom,” she recalls. “Kinda like, ‘I don’t need you, I’m going to have dad.’” It only got worse when he was released, though, and all of the promises he’d made to her over the years—trips to the zoo and to the mall, quality time together—were broken one by one. “He was doing his own thing; he didn’t want to deal with nobody,” she says.
Jessica’s fights with her mother escalated to the point that in 2004 her mom filed a Wayward/Disobedient Petition with the local police department, essentially a parent’s way of asking law enforcement for help controlling her child. The petition brought Jessica into the orbit of the Family Court, which handles all juvenile justice cases. From there, the judge placed her in one group home after another, and in the group homes, she’d get into fights, she’d skip school, she’d run away.
In fact, that word “run” echoes through the girls’ unit at the Training School. The girls in orange, the girls in blue, from one DCYF placement to the next: run, run run. “This stuff shouldn’t be bringing kids into core corrections,” says Joe Cardin. “But they only come here because the courts tried alternatives, like probation, and the kids run. They always run.” Violation of probation, truancy, disorderly conduct, violation of probation, vagrant and disorderly conduct, reads one girl’s charge sheet, a litany of misdemeanors. Another sheet includes fully nine counts of violation of probation, or VOP, which means, usually, she ran. Wayward/disobedient, violation of probation, escape, simple assault, truancy. “It’s kind of like a broken record,” says Cardin.
As the chief judge of the Rhode Island Family Court, Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah sees a lot of these children in front of his bench. A man of imposing girth who’s known to many of the kids in the system as a sympathetic listener—“He feels people,” says Diamond—he says he hates to send kids to the Training School, but often he has no choice: “What do you do when you say to a child, ‘Here’s the deal: I want you to go to school regularly. I want you to respect your teachers. I want you home at eight every night. And if [you meet] those conditions, then I’m going to suspend your sentence.’ What do you do when they don’t follow those conditions? I don’t think you have any choice but to send them. Because otherwise they’d laugh at you.”
In fact, for some girls, visits to the Training School become as much, or even more, a part of the fabric of life as school and family. I visited the Training School twice over a one-month period, and on my second visit, one girl I’ll call Ramirez reminded me that I’d met her a month ago. “I was in orange then. I’m in blue now,” she says. “I got sentenced.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell her.
“That’s okay,” she says. “I won’t be here long.” We are eating a lunch of soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup with plastic spoons out of Styrofoam bowls and canned pineapple rings. Most of the girls are complaining about the food, a common refrain in the dayroom, and discussing what their first meal “on the out” would be: Chinese food, homemade lasagna. From there it’s a quick jump to how uncomfortable the beds are. Ramirez pipes up to say she doesn’t mind the food. Or the beds, for that matter. “I actually kind of like it here,” she says. I ask why. “I feel more...” she pauses to find the right word. “Stable. When I’m not here, I’m running.”
Data provided by the Training School indicates that Ramirez’s experience is not unusual. Of the sixteen girls incarcerated on a single day last spring, only four had been living with a parent or family member immediately prior to incarceration; nine had been living in a group home, residential facility or shelter. Three had been AWOL, which is to say, running. (This data stands in stark contrast to the boys, almost 50 percent of whom had been living with one or both parents prior to incarceration.)
Once they are in the system, many girls rack up enough misdemeanors and violations of parole that it is only a matter of time before they get caught up in something more serious. For Jessica, that something turned out to be possession and delivery of marijuana. Jessica doesn’t even do drugs, she says. Her grandmother died of complications from drug addiction, and her father gets abusive when he’s drinking, which, these days, is often. “It’s in the family, and I don’t want that to happen to me,” she says. But still, her boyfriend had been shipped to his native Dominican Republic to clean up his act (like Jessica, he entered the system at fifteen or sixteen and had been in and out of group homes and the Training School ever since), and she was trying to make some quick money to bring him back. There was already a warrant out for her because she was on the run from a program, and when the cops found her, they also found the drugs. If she hadn’t had the drugs on her, she says, “I would’ve just had a violation of probation, probably go to another group home. But in a way, I think it was God that did that. If I didn’t have the drugs, and I got sentenced to another group home, I would’ve ran. I would have a warrant out for my arrest right now. On the street, having to watch my back all the time.”
It’s decidedly unnerving to hear one girl after another say that, ultimately, she’s glad she was incarcerated. Diamond feels the same way. Now that she’s home, she says, “There’s no fun in what I used to do.
Before, my mentality was just like party, party, party hard. Now, I kind of get a head-ache around loud music.” Two months before her release, Diamond’s social worker held her prerelease meeting at the Training School. In addition to Diamond and the social worker, also present were Seneth (the unit manager), Auretha and outreach workers from two different programs in the community. Together they crafted her release plan: Meet each of the outreach workers plus her parole officer once per week. Other girls’ plans are more elaborate, including visits with psychiatrists or social workers, curfews, attendance at school and other such restrictions, but, according to Auretha, the team decided these weren’t necessary for Diamond. She’d always done well in school, and her adviser—she goes to the Met School, which stresses individual attention —had been visiting her weekly while she was incarcerated so she would be able to dive right back in when she got out. And so she has, becoming a tour guide for visitors and prospective students at her school and teaming up with some fellow students to plan a volunteer trip to Africa for three weeks this spring.
Being away from her family, says Diamond, helped her learn not to take them for granted. By the end of her sentence she was entitled to two visits per week, and if her mother wasn’t there every Sunday and every Wednesday, Diamond was heartbroken. (“This girl is spoiled,” her mom says.)
“I’m glad I went,” Diamond says of her time at the Training School. “I’m not glad I was there for that long. It didn’t take me that long to get the picture. But if I didn’t [go], I’d probably be in a worse predicament than I was in.”
I ask Diamond and her mother if there is an alternative to the Training School that would have had the same effect. They’re sitting beside each other on the couch in their tidy Pawtucket living room, and images on the muted television dance silently in the background. Neither of them can think of anything. “She needed that long bid,” says Auretha.
Judge Jeremiah suggests that an effective foster care environment, like a group home but less institutional, a place where guardians can provide the guidance and support and structure that the kids so badly need, would be a better place to send kids like Jessica and Diamond. “Nobody cares about kids,” he says. “They don’t vote. So they’re hurting.” The foster care system and alternatives to the Training School are not allocated the resources they need. “It’s about money,” Jeremiah says.
Parenting classes and additional resources for families would also help. Many of these kids’ parents never learned how to parent because they grew up in similar environments to the ones they’re providing for their kids. “Sometimes they don’t know how to nurture their babies, even to hug them,” Siri Seneth says of the girls’ parents. “Because they never got that from their parents.”
Jeremiah agrees. “It’s a breakdown of the family unit,” he says. “I think that’s what lands them [at the Training School]. How often does somebody say to a child, ‘I love you’? How often do they say to their child when they come home from school —say they had a 70 average, now they have a 78 average—‘Gee, congratulations, you’re doing better.’”
However, indifferent or ineffectual parents are better than the alternative. Many of the residents were victims of abuse, whether at their family’s home, at a group home, or while on the run. An analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count found that on a given day 48 percent of adjudicated youth at the Training School were victims of documented abuse or neglect. All of this can lead to some serious emotional struggles and mental illness. “For females in particular, comorbidity [having more than one psychiatric diagnosis] is the norm rather than the exception,” says Dr. Joseph V. Penn, director of psychiatric services at the Training School. “With all of the physical trauma and abuse, this may be the first place they feel safe. They’re like pinballs all over the system. They get here, and they’re locked down; they finally realize they’re not going anywhere, and they start to make real therapeutic progress.”
Since she’s been at the Training School, Jessica has been involved with programs about anger management, personal responsibility, safe sex, and loss and grief. She attends the speech and debate classes taught each week by Brown University students. She’s involved in Project Peer, a program where residents at Levels 3 or 4 can apply to be a motivational speaker for kids who have gotten into trouble; the judge sends them by the vanload to the Training School for an afternoon to see what’s in store for them if they keep it up. She’s also earning her GED. “My thing was I could always start something, but I could never finish it,” she says. “Now I’m actually getting certificates. I’m actually going up in levels. I chose to finish those groups.
I don’t have to. I chose to work up the level system. I’m choosing to use my time wisely here.”
When Jessica is released, she plans to enroll in Community College of Rhode Island and take classes towards becoming a dental hygienist. She’ll move back in with her mother, but since her boyfriend is back in Providence with his own apartment, Jessica knows she has a pressure valve, someplace she can go to get away from it all rather than fight with her mom. “I’m doing it for my sisters,” she says. “Because my sister is going down the same exact path that I did—acting up, talking back to my mom, everything. It’s all coming out. I got a feeling that she might come here,” and she wants her sister to see that there’s another way.
Classes end for the day at 2:30 p.m., and the girls spend an hour and a half in their rooms, doing homework, napping, writing letters. At 4, pairs of girls are handcuffed to one another and loaded into a big silver van in which they’re driven to the gym for a surprisingly spirited game of indoor soccer. At 5:30, while everyone else is showering, Jessica starts setting up for tonight’s dinner and wonders aloud about what her next job is going to be when kitchen duty ends tonight (“All I can say is it’d better not be bathroom.”) At 6, Miss Michelle shouts, “Ladies! To your doors with everything you need for the day- room!” At 6:30, a JPW named Tay is dishing out dinner, and by 7, Jessica and one of her fellow residents are clearing tables, wiping them down, folding them and wheeling them into the corner. They clean out the fridge while two other girls sweep. And then everyone settles down to play cards until bedtime. These girls, along with the JPWs, are singularly focused, fierce competitors at spades. The bedtime for Level 3s like Jessica and Diamond is 10:30, but Tay lets them and their friend, Julie, who’s still at Level 2, stay up until 11, because their game is so heated. The television mounted on the wall plays a baseball game nobody’s watching.
Although her time here has been marked by slow emotional progress, Jessica knew coming in that this time would be different. “I knew I had to change,” she says. “It’s the end of the road. I’ll have another year until I’m eighteen. This is the end of my childhood. I don’t want to waste it in another group home. I try to tell girls who run, you cannot run forever.”
*Jessica's name and identifying details have been changed per her mother's request.
I am an award-winning freelance journalist based in Brooklyn (formerly based in Providence, R.I.) and and an MFA student in creative nonfiction at the New School. This is not a blog, but rather a collection of some of my work. ~ My favorite stories are about people: people who do unlikely or awe-inspiring things, people with dreams and visions and singular voices, people and communities whose voices are marginalized or forgotten by the popular press. I have a special interest in the criminal justice system and health care for the underserved and disenfranchised, particularly HIV/AIDS. I also write news and book reviews, and have been known to write enthusiastically about books, beer, old houses, music, and politics. ~ Thanks for stopping by to take a look at my clips.
Rhode Island Monthly>Bad Girls
Rhode Island Monthly>Faces of War
With a mom or dad deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, sons and daughters step up to fill their boots on the ground.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
Rhode Island Monthly>Reel Stars
Reel Stars
By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 2007
OUTSIDE NEWPORT'S JANE PICKENS THEATER, a line is forming. It stretches down Touro Street, past a bed and breakfast and a tilting 1801 green clapboard house, to the corner. Inside, the theater is like something from another time. A soaring archway with elaborately decorated molding frames the stage, which is fronted by a pipe organ. But when the lights go down, and that unmistakable clack-clack-clack of a film reel starts up, you know exactly where you are. You’re at the movies.
This warm June evening in 2006 is the opening night of the ninth annual Newport International Film Festival. The house is sold out, and the audience is chattering with excitement. The opening night film, Quinceañera, won both the audience award and the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and tonight’s showing is the New England premiere. The directors are here, as is one of the actors. Later, they will answer audience members’ questions about the making of the movie. But right now they’re hunkered down in their green-upholstered chairs like everyone else, waiting for the curtain to rise.
The first reason that most festival attendees are here is for films like this: films by independent filmmakers, films too quirky or off-beat for widespread distribution, films you can’t see anywhere else. The second reason is far more basic. The people here just love movies. “I’ve been going since I was eight years old,” says Jane Dyer, a compact silver-haired woman with bright eyes and rimless glasses who is in the audience with her daughter and a small army of friends. “I saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when it first came out in 1937.” Dyer says that during the festival she sometimes closes her downtown Newport shop, Cadeaux du Monde, earlier than planned in order to attend up to three films a day. “Then I can’t take it anymore,” she adds with a laugh.
Film festivals serve many purposes. For independent movie-makers, they are important opportunities to make connections, share their work and gain name recognition. For those in the industry, they are a chance to cherry-pick the hottest new movies to distribute and the brightest new talent to finance.
The big name venues, known as market festivals, are primarily a way for filmmakers and distributors to connect. What gets lost in their mad rush of hobnobbing and cocktail schmoozing is the everyday audience member, the film-lover who drops everything to take in that foreign flick or those series of animated shorts.
At Newport, it’s different. “I think the essence of this festival is bringing the people of Newport together with the film community,” says Ryan Harrington, who runs A&E IndieFilms and is a juror at the 2006 festival. Laurie Kirby, the festival’s executive director, agrees: “Our mission is not to be a market festival. Our mission is to be an audience-based festival.”
Quinceañera turns out to be a lovely film. Following the life of a fourteen-year-old girl from L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood through the travails preceding the coming-of-age ceremony that will mark her fifteenth birthday, it’s also about the impact of gentrification on working-class communities, acceptance, forgiveness and family. And though Sony Pictures Classics will distribute the film to art-house theaters later in the season, those in the audience tonight will have seen it here first. Plus those in the audience will have heard the filmmakers’ stories about how the movie was shot (in their houses and those of their neighbors), cast (their cleaning lady and her family are all featured in the film; filmmaker Richard Glatzer says of Emily Rios, who plays the lead, “the top of her resume was that she had played Cleopatra in her school play”), and vaulted to success (filmmaker Wash Westmoreland says, “We never imagined we’d win both the audience award and the grand jury prize. It was better than sex, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”)
“The audience felt like a warm embrace,” Glatzer says later, at the opening night party at the Newport Colony House. “You really do make your film to be seen. It’s nice to see it with a different audience that isn’t L.A. It’s really a nice festival.”
Geographically speaking, the Newport International Film Festival is largely based in Newport’s Washington Square. The event’s two main venues, the Jane Pickens and the Opera House theaters, are both on Touro Street. The panels, parties and events, held at places like the Newport Art Museum and the Newport Blues Café, are all a short walk away.
The 2006 festival features ninety-six films that fall into one of three categories: narrative features, documentaries and short films (shorts, which run anywhere from three to twenty-eight minutes, are shown either in clusters at a single screening, or individually, preceding a full-length film). The selections cover a wide range of genres, from comedy to drama to anime to mockumentary, from films about family to films about love, about small towns, the environment, immigration.
Some two dozen films play each day at different venues. Tickets for most screenings and events cost $10 (festival passes range from $50 for five screenings to $300 for twenty, plus three event vouchers and various goodies). Most films run on two separate occasions, and executive director Laurie Kirby estimates about 75 percent of them are followed by a question and answer session with the filmmaker, a cast member or director. “That makes it so much more of a rewarding and interactive experience,” she says. “It’s the icing on the cake, to see an incredible movie and then get to ask the director about it. It’s such a treat.”
Each day there are also panels and events. For filmmakers, there are how-tos, like “Get it Made the Legal Way,” and “The Distribution Game”; for audience members, there are events like “Live Comedy Improv,” featuring cast members from “Saturday Night Live.”
Most of the feature-length movies are culled from other festivals. Programming director David Nugent attends upwards of a dozen each year, picking out the ones he likes best and lobbying the filmmakers and production companies to bring them to Newport. Many of the name-brand, glitterati festivals, such as Sundance and Cannes, require what is known in the industry as premiere status. They only show a film if it’s the world premiere or the national premiere. This helps to create buzz, but it’s less important here in Newport.
“It’s a local community audience,” says Nugent. “They don’t care if they’re seeing the premiere of the film; they just want a good film… . So what I’ve done for this festival is, in addition to getting some premieres, I’ve found what I think are the best films that have been playing at these festivals, and I’ve brought them here.”
About 10 percent of the feature-length films shown, as well as almost all of the shorts, were submitted directly to the festival by independent filmmakers. In 2006, that totaled more than 700 films. In the months before the festival, Nugent assembled a screening committee of about a dozen people in the industry. Committee members watch ten to twelve films each week, enter their reviews into a database and meet once a week to discuss what they saw. Then they whittle down the pool to about 150 finalists. Nugent watches every one of these, and then makes the final decisions. There were a few films that didn’t make the cut, which Nugent says he agonized over, including one called Colma: The Musical, an Asian-American teen musical romantic comedy.
Given its, um, underwhelming premise, he expected to be disappointed. Instead he grew quite attached to it. “There are a lot of factors that go into [the decision-making process],” he says. “It’s not just going to be all of my favorite films. There’s a lot of things I’m trying to serve –– different audiences, different ages.”
THE IDEA FOR THE NEWPORT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL was born in 1997, when two friends, Nancy Donahoes and Christine Schomer, were meeting in New York for weekly lunch dates. Donahoes was working in theater at the time, and Schomer, a Barrington native, was working on the David Letterman show. The two were kicking around the idea of making a movie together when Schomer came home for a visit with her parents. Director and Pawtucket native Michael Corrente was in town filming, and the movie Meet Joe Black was being shot in Warwick. Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, which was made largely in Newport, had just wrapped, and people were still talking about it. At their next lunch date, “Christine said, ‘You know, there’s a lot of film going on in Rhode Island,’ ” says Donahoes. “ ‘Don’t you think Newport is a great spot for a film festival?’”
And so it was. The two spent that first year visiting as many festivals as they could. At the Sundance Film Festival, which is held in Utah in January, they distributed handmade flyers with lush pictures of Newport. “Frost bitten?” read the flyers. “See you in Newport!” The idea was to get a sense of how it feels to be a regular audience member at the big-name events.
As it turns out, “we found some of them quite impenetrable,” says Donahoes. “We never felt comfortable. You really did need to know how to work the system in order to get tickets to things.”
Even industry insiders sometimes find these festivals to be less than user-friendly. Kirby says, “What the filmmakers tell me is that Newport’s a very intimate, accessible festival. Many of them say they’ve been able to watch films here that they wanted to see at other festivals but couldn’t get into.” David Nugent adds, “At Sundance, you spend half your time just trudging through snow, or on shuttle buses to get different places. The parties and the screenings are very hard to get into. And it’s just sort of tougher to get to meet people.”
Newport’s small scale means that meeting people here is easy. A short conversation in Washington Square Park with Nugent can be punctuated by filmmaker sightings and chats with other audience members. “There goes a member of the jury,” he says, pointing, and later, “there’s the star of The Last Romantic walking across the street. Did you see that film?”
Because of the city’s appeal as a tourist destination, many people make a vacation out of a visit to Newport during the week of the festival. Casey and Linda Roe, for example, were waiting in line to see the documentary 51 Birch Street. They had traveled from their home in Philadelphia for what they describe as a “springtime weekend getaway.” The walkable distances between venues make the festival feel low-threshold and easy-access.
In all, it’s a welcoming place for audience members. Nancy Donahoes should know. She passed the torch to executive director Kirby some years ago, so now she comes just for fun. “This year, I had a great time just watching movies,” she says.
The major market festivals on the circuit are Sundance, Cannes, the Berlin International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and, to a lesser extent, New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. For filmmakers seeking distribution, these are what New York-based independent filmmaker Alex Karpovsky calls the crown jewel festivals. “The best thing to do, if you can do it, is to try to get your film into one of the top three or four festivals,” he says. “When I say top, I don’t mean necessarily in terms of the content of the films, but in terms of industry and media presence.”
The fact that many of the films at Newport have played at other festivals first does a lot to eliminate backroom-negotiating here. However, the Newport International Film Festival’s identity as primarily an audience-centered event does not prevent contacts from being established or deals from being made. Though Karpovsky’s quirky comedy, The Hole Story, did not get into any of the big market festivals, he was pleased to be included in the lineup at Newport. “It’s certainly one of the best regional festivals in the country,” he says, “probably in the top ten or fifteen national festivals.”
The handful of feature-length films which, like Karpovsky’s, made it to Newport not via other festivals but rather by submission, can offer distributors some pleasant surprises. In 2000, for example, a film called George Washington came through submission from an unknown filmmaker named David Gordon Green. One member of the jury was so blown away that he encouraged the programmer at the New York Film Festival to show it; it went on from there to distribution. The Boys of Baraka, a submission in 2005, also went on to distribution. “That’s one of the delights for critics, to find those rare gems here,” says Kirby. “We have a good track record for uncovering them,” adds Streich.
However, in the independent film world, success stories like Quinceañera’s, and, to a lesser extent, like Karpovsky’s, are relatively rare. “Ninety percent of the films we see at these film festivals will never get distribution,” says A&E IndieFilms’s Ryan Harrington. For the makers of these films especially, festivals like Newport are critical. “No one wants to make a film and have it sit in their closet and not get seen,” says Nugent. “So for them, it’s a chance to get in front of an audience.”
Just as the festival organizers do their best to make the audience feel welcome, so too do they welcome independent filmmakers with open arms. When Kirby or Nugent commits to screening a film, that means the festival is also committing to transporting the filmmaker to and from Newport, housing him, entertaining him and feeding him for the duration of the event. There are parties every night where food and drink flow freely. “Generally our goal is to bring the filmmaker here, house them and stuff them with food and liquor,” says Kirby with a laugh. Festival manager Nina Streich agrees, “Good parties. Good camaraderie. Lots of filmmakers to hang out with.”
At the sweeping stone entrance to the opening night party, for instance, is a statue of a minuteman –– no, wait, a man, painted all in brown, like a statue –– who turns slowly to ring a bell in greeting each time a guest arrived. A band performs Ella Fitzgerald and Harry Connick Jr., and wait staff make the rounds with trays of appetizers of ahi tuna with wasabi on sesame rounds. There are five different kinds of tequila, beer, margaritas and other mixed drinks, free shot glasses and a sculpture of a film projector carved from ice. Glatzer and Westmoreland, the makers of Quinceañera, are there with actor Jesse Garcia, as are many of the festival’s other filmmakers, jurors, and industry guests. Glatzer chats with his old friend, Kelly Reichardt, whose film, Old Joy, is on the schedule for later in the week.
Whereas other venues will only cover expenses for feature-length filmmakers, Newport pays for the ones who make shorts, too. “It’s a very non-hierarchical festival,” says Streich, who herself is a filmmaker, “so everybody interacts on the same basis. It’s a very peer-to-peer film festival, and people really react to that.”
These expenses can add up quite quickly, and as the only full-time, year-round staff member, Kirby spends a large portion of her time fundraising. In-kind donations almost double the festival’s small $500,000 budget. Amtrak and Delta have provided free travel vouchers to bring the filmmakers here. The Newport Harbor Hotel and the Chanler, as well as many other local hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, have donated free rooms for housing and venues for panels and events.
Filmmaker Alex Karpovsky ultimately found some success here. “In fact, of all the festivals that I’ve been to, the most success that I’ve had from distributors has been at Newport,” he says. “It’s really exciting.” He met a distributor who agreed to distribute The Hole Story on DVD. Short of theatrical distribution, says Karpovsky, the DVD-rental website Netflix is “the most accessible way to get a movie into the world,” and the deal he signed with a woman he met here will get The Hole Story onto Netflix and into film lovers’ homes.
Including Laurie Kirby, the festival employs about thirty people, from a part-time development director and a part-time director of operations, to people like Nina Streich and David Nugent, who work full-time for a few months out of the year. There is also a crew of what Kirby calls itinerant festival workers, projectionists and others who travel from festival to festival and make sure all the crucial cogs in the wheel run smoothly. “Each year we become more, for lack of a better word, institutionalized,” says Kirby. “We really have systems down.”
However, no matter how many systems are in place, there is always the element of surprise. “I used to say, because my background is in theater, that it was really like putting on a performance or a show,” says founder Nancy Donahoes. “You could have the infrastructure going on, but the flavor of it wouldn’t happen until all the people arrived. Which is what makes a film festival more unique than just going to the multiplex and going to a movie.”
Casey and Linda Roe, the visitors from Philadelphia, wrinkle their noses at such a thought. “If it’s so popular that it’s playing at a multiplex,” says Casey, “we probably wouldn’t like it.” “We like the vibe of a film festival,” agrees Linda. “We’ll never go to a multiplex.”
Rhode Island Monthly>A Dollar and a Dream
A Dollar and a Dream
By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 2006
Bruno Barata is pacing. A chubby but compact boy, Barata can’t seem to stand still. “If you get nervous,” says theater instructor Karen Carpenter, “just take a minute and reconnect with Willie.”
Barata, thirteen, is auditioning to be part of the incoming fall 2006 freshman class at Pawtucket’s Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For his audition, he has chosen to perform one of Willie Loman’s monologues from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “A pretty mature choice for an eighth grader,” says Carpenter.
When he’s done, Carpenter hands him a packet of paper. It’s a monologue from Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door. Barata is supposed to do a cold reading of a monologue by Jack Palmer, the caretaker at a home for developmentally disabled men. “This is what we call direct address, so talk directly to the audience and just enjoy it,” says Carpenter.
He tries to enjoy it. He really does. But he’s just so nervous. So the lines come out sounding not like Jack Palmer, but like a nervous teenager reading them off the page. Carpenter takes a different tack. “Let me ask you a question,” she says. And she makes Barata hunt through the monologue for some details, to help him get to know Jack Palmer.
“How long has he been working there?” (Eight months.)
“How many men live there?” (Seventeen.)
“How old are they?” (Adults.)
“When he says ‘escapades,’ what does he mean?” Barata looks through the script and starts to describe some of the antics of the house’s residents. The meaning of the words suddenly sinks in. He giggles. “Yes!” exclaims Carpenter. “Those are the escapades! Enjoy them!”
Aside from playing improvisation games with his cousins, watching the ABC comedy-improvisation show “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” and generally making people laugh, Barata has had no training that would bring him closer to his goal of being an actor and comedian. But, he says, “I get a feeling when I do it. It just feels right.” He has been meticulous about preparing his audition, calling the school several times to confirm the date and time and to field help in choosing his monologue. That enthusiasm, says Carpenter, “that’s the biggest thing.”
Equal parts Fame! and Lean on Me, the Pawtucket public school opened last fall with aspirations to be a competitive conservatory-style school that feeds into such prestigious institutions as Berklee and Julliard. Admission is by audition only, and, in addition to their academic classes, students are subject to a rigorous curriculum in their chosen artistic specialty. At the same time, the school is part of an inner-city school system whose two other high schools — Tolman and Shea — face corrective action, with consistently low test scores and dropout rates above 30 percent. The result of these competing atmospheres is that the school is very much like its students: it has talent and commitment, ambition and drive, but few material resources and little formal training.
The Walsh School was the brainchild of Pawtucket Public Schools superintendent Hans Dellith. The year was 2000. Members of the Gamm Theatre company, having outgrown their quarters in Providence, hatched the idea of turning the empty Pawtucket Armory into a center for the arts, with themselves as lead tenants. Seth Handy, then the president of the Gamm’s board, approached Dellith about collaborations between the potential new arts center and the Pawtucket School Department: perhaps the Gamm could stage plays in the schools, or the kids could come over to the Armory to work with the artists? Dellith took it up a notch. Perhaps Pawtucket needed an arts high school. “I’d go to school productions, and I’d see a tremendous amount of talent with the students,” says Dellith, who has headed the school department for nine years.” I came up with the idea that maybe what we should do is broaden our horizons and start thinking about what we could do for students in terms of training them.”
The newly established Pawtucket Armory Association negotiated with the city to buy the hulking castle on Exchange Street for $1 and a promise to perform extensive renovations and reinvent the building as the Arts Exchange. A school for the performing and visual arts was to be one of the building’s first tenants.
If Dellith conceived the Walsh School, then its midwife was an affable and energetic Pawtucket native named Donna Jeffrey. Jeffrey, fifty-five, is a classical guitarist and renaissance lute player who began teaching music in the Pawtucket public schools thirty-two years ago. Jeffrey talks about the arts like a physician talks about medicine. When asked why the arts are important, she replies with another question: “Why is breathing important?” Over the years, she followed whatever career path afforded her as much time as possible with students. Early on in her career, for instance, when the budget for her elementary music education program was slashed, “I went from seeing kids twice, three times a week to seeing them every other week,” she says. “And what teacher can teach anything once every other week?” She responded by creating after-school musical productions that kids could participate in, singing, dancing and acting in Disney stories and other favorites like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That way, she says, she could “see them not only in music class but also get them after school.” When a high school job became available, the lure of daily music classes was too strong to pass up. “Imagine what I could do if I saw them every day!” she recalls thinking. And so she left for Shea High School, where she taught for eleven years, during which time she created a steel drum ensemble and taught guitar and chorus classes.
Hans Dellith knew a dedicated arts educator when he saw one, so he tapped into Jeffrey’s enthusiasm and experience when the arts high school was in its early stages. She started attending meetings. Then, when a real school began to take shape, she cut her schedule at Shea back to half-time in order to coordinate the nuts and bolts of bringing it into the world: writing curricula, drafting budgets, creating guidelines for hiring, auditions and admissions, and working with architects and construction teams to turn the second and third floors of the armory into classrooms and studios. All along, however, she planned to usher the school into existence and then return to her steel drums. To head the new school, she says, “I wanted a person who was a principal, who had a degree in fine arts, who had experience as an administrator and in the arts. I didn’t want the job.”
But then came June 2005. The Pawtucket city council had been level-funding the school department for more than a decade, so the city had long relied on the state’s yearly increases in contributions. In an economy where costs are always increasing, level-funding is the practical equivalent of slashing funds. When the state announced that it too was level-funding the Pawtucket schools, suddenly the school committee faced $8 million in deficits. The arts school — along with any other expenditure deemed not absolutely necessary — was on the chopping block. In the end, the school eked into existence when Jeffrey, Dellith and others slashed its budget from $1.5 million to $559,000. One of the cuts was the principal’s job, to be replaced by a lower-paid school coordinator. Jeffrey recalls thinking to herself, “If they’re not going to get someone in here who has more experience and knowledge of this than me, then I will go for the job.”
The former deputy superintendent of schools, a much-beloved woman named Jackie Walsh, had died of cancer the previous fall. She had always been an advocate for the arts. Dellith and Jeffrey agreed that naming a new school after her would be a fitting tribute. And so the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts opened its doors on August 31, 2005, with Donna Jeffrey at its helm. It had admitted its first freshmen class the previous spring, and the plan was to add a class each year so that the school would have four classes by 2009.
Looking back, it seems to have been the obvious next step for Jeffrey. From every other week, to after school, to every day, she has finally settled in a school where more than three hours a day are dedicated to the arts. “Even in schools that have wonderful music and art programs, kids usually only have one — maybe if they’re lucky, two — classes a day in the arts,” she says. “These kids are living and breathing it all day long.”
And even if they don’t ultimately pursue a degree at a conservatory or a career in the arts, Jeffrey is sure that the school’s curriculum provides a solid enough foundation for students to follow their hearts, wherever they lead.
“I want to be a dancer,” says fifteen-year-old Walsh student Iesha Bemway. She pauses to consider her options. “Or singer. Or actor.”
“Yeah,” chimes in Keisha Fordham, fourteen, also a student. “Cause you always have to have a backup plan, in case things don’t work out.”
Tall, slim and muscular, Bemway has an angular jaw and a big, toothy smile. She and her friends are finishing their lunch in a noisy tall-ceilinged makeshift lunchroom before heading back to class. Zuleika Castro is a dance major at Walsh like Bemway, but she has other career plans. “I want to go to business school,” she says, noting that what she has learned at the Walsh School will help her when she gets there. “In dance, you got to follow all the rules, and trust me, there’s a lot of rules. And you got to take this stuff serious. And if I can take dance serious, I can take that into the business world.”
The Walsh School’s thirty-one students — nine boys and twenty-two girls — start up the armory’s big stone steps around 7:45 a.m., trudging sneakers and boots over the giant anchor mosaic at the top of the landing. Five are music majors, four study theater, ten dance, and twelve focus on visual art. About half receive free or reduced lunch. Those who live outside Pawtucket must pay $15,000 per year tuition; there are only two students who do so, one from Burrillville and one from Central Falls. The school occupies the second and third floors of the armory, and the renovations have lent the space the feeling of both a school and a place with history. The walls are painted in bright yellows and whites. The little bank of lockers is blue. Most classrooms have high ceilings, at least one wall of exposed brick and tall windows.
The students gather in the room on the second floor that serves as classroom, studio and cafeteria for breakfast and the pledge of allegiance. From 8:30 a.m. until 1:45 p.m., they take the usual range of academic subjects. At 2:00 p.m., while giant yellow buses begin pulling up to the curb next door at Tolman High School to take the students home for the day, work at the Walsh School is just beginning. First the students take a crossover class; a music student, for instance, can take a visual art class, or a dancer can take theater. Then they have three hours of class in their chosen major. The three hours are broken up into blocks, which might include theory, exercises and practice.
Nancy Rosenberg, a working composer with the demeanor of a hip mom, is equally comfortable discussing the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly as the hip-hop duo Outkast. Pairing students with working artists was one of the goals of the school, and this is reflected in the teaching staff. Karen Carpenter, the theater teacher, is in the company at the Gamm. Tovah Bodner, the dance teacher, directs her own dance company called the Robin’s Egg. And Chris Kane, the visual art teacher, is a sculptor who runs the metals foundry at the Steelyard, an industrial art center in Providence.
When auditions for the school were first planned, sight-reading — performing a piece of music by looking at it, without preparation — was to be one of the requirements for the music majors. But in order to sight-read, students have to know how to read music. Many of the auditioning students sang in their church choirs or with their friends, but few had had formal training. The audition criteria were quickly adapted.
“I don’t care if they sight-read,” says music teacher Nancy Rosenberg. “I’ll teach them to sight-read. I am less interested in what training they’ve received before they arrive than in raw talent and commitment.”
It’s a good thing that the students, for the most part, are starting from scratch. It’s a good thing, too, that they have the dedication required to stick it out despite tough circumstances. Because a student who is already a musical impresario might find the resources at the Walsh School to be somewhat lacking. For instance, when the class studies music theory, Rosenberg pulls out a giant cardboard keyboard, with Velcro dots marking the notes they’re discussing. It’s a far cry from the school where she previously taught, the Boston Arts Academy, a public school much like what the Walsh School aspires to be. It has a full recording studio, every imaginable musical instrument and five music faculty. Comparing the two schools is like “apples and oranges,” says Rosenberg. The Walsh School, on the other hand, has five synthesizers, a battered upright piano and a lengthy wish list:
Drum set with cymbals: $2,000.
Grand piano for performances: $9,000.
Two baby grand pianos: $7,000 each.
Electric guitar, amplifier and case: $800.
That’s only part of the wish list, and that’s only for music. Under “general equipment,” the list even includes twenty cases of Xerox paper and twenty bottles of Wite-Out. “We’ve been living on next to nothing,” says Jeffrey. Aside from the teachers’ salaries and the lease, which the school department pays, “everything has been donated or bought by me,” she says. However, “it’s more important that we’re open than that we have everything we need.”
While Bruno Barata is downstairs pacing during his audition, a handful of other eighth graders wait upstairs for their turn. Marc Tiberius has been acting in after-school programs at Slater Middle School. He had planned to go to Shea High School, until he heard about this school. “I was really excited to find out there was a school for acting,” he says. His dad is excited, too. “I would have killed to have a school like this,” he says.
Jeffrey and Dellith had hoped that each of the admitted classes would have one hundred students, with the number of students topping out at 400 in 2009. However, the numbers have been disappointing so far. Last year, sixty-five auditioned, forty-five were accepted, and thirty-three came (two have since left). This year’s auditions have yielded roughly the same results. They blame the low numbers on the fact that the school’s fate has been so uncertain. In August of last year, just weeks before the school was scheduled to open, Jeffrey was forced to send a letter to the families of newly admitted students warning that the school might not open after all. And though it did finally happen, the construction wasn’t finished in the Armory yet, so the students had to spend the first few weeks in the old Registry Building. Dellith still can’t promise that the school will survive past its infancy, though he says he will continue to fight to keep it open. “These parents are the pioneers,” acknowledges Jeffrey. “There are a lot of families that would have liked to send their kids here, but they were afraid to take the chance. And I feel sad for them.”
The school’s small size, however, has had a positive consequence: family atmosphere. “We see this small group of students every day,” says biology teacher Julia Goulet. “We get a better idea of what their day is going like, and what might be going on in their lives that might be interfering with their schoolwork. It’s a luxury to have the classes be small and manageable.”
What’s more, that the students are committed to their art contributes to a unique atmosphere. “In many other schools,” says Spanish teacher Kayla Campbell, “kids have no interest in school at all. These kids have an interest in being here.” Goulet, who taught at Tolman High School for thirty-five years, says the biggest difference she sees is in attendance. Walsh boasts an attendance rate of 96 percent, at least 10 percent higher than attendance at other Pawtucket public schools. “They want to be here,” she says. “They are here every day.”
Hans Dellith can’t dance.
He says that he has not two, but three left feet. But he knows the power of dancing. “What distinguishes us from the animal world are things like art, philosophy, music, dance, theater,” he says. “All the things that really make us human, these things are very important.” He recalls a day that he visited Tovah Bodner’s class; his dedication to art education was redoubled by what he saw there. “I’m watching this student do a dance routine, and I’m watching the intensity of her performance,” he says. “I’ve never seen that type of intensity in a math class, in an English class, in a phys-ed class, or anywhere else.”
At a time when budgets are being slashed at public schools around the country, the arts are usually the first to go. Nancy Rosenberg herself used to teach music at Feinstein High School in Providence, until her position was cut. “I became a professional musician studying music in the public schools,” she says. “That’s almost impossible right now.” She likens teaching art in a public school to the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, wherein a besieged Jim Carrey must chase after his memories as they are being eliminated. “I feel like I’m running around as the music programs are disappearing underneath me,” says Rosenberg. “People don’t understand what is at stake when you do that.”
Unfortunately, Rosenberg was more correct than she could have known in February. Over the summer, she was laid off from the Walsh School due to cutbacks in the city’s school department, and replaced by a music teacher with seniority in the Pawtucket public schools, as per union policy.
Every student, whether or not he possesses natural artistic talent, deserves a chance to study art, “the opportunity to be exposed to a musical way of thinking,” in Rosenberg’s words. And while the Walsh School offers art education only to those students who are talented and dedicated enough to audition, be accepted and work hard, it marks a resounding commitment to the arts by a beleaguered public school system that could have said “not now.”
It’s been worth every minute, says Donna Jeffrey, to help the students work toward their goals. “I want them to choose the field they’re happy in,” she says. “I want them to go off and light the world on fire in whatever area is their love.”
Rhode Island Monthly>God is in the Details
God Is In the Details
Woonsocket’s own Sistine Chapel ducked the wrecking ball six years ago. Its second resurrection requires $3.5 million. Can it survive without divine intervention?
By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 2006
Photographs reproduced here courtesy of Nat Rea.
This piece was awarded 1st place in the in the religion category in the Rhode Island Press Association's 2006 Editorial Awards.
The red and white house on the corner of Robinson Street and Progresso Avenue in
Woonsocket has always been a busy but orderly place. The Doiron family has five kids, with eleven years separating the youngest from the oldest. But Yvette Doiron, the matriarch, “ran a pretty tight household,” recalls Dominique, twenty-seven, the youngest. And, like most of the other families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were a working-class, French-Canadian family. The parents of both Yvette and her husband, Ray, moved to Rhode Island from Quebec as teenagers to work in the mills, and Yvette and Ray spoke French as their first language. And, like most families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were also very involved in their Catholic church. They went to mass every weekend, Yvette was the leader of the parish’s Girl Scout troop and a Eucharistic minister, the boys were altar servers, the girls taught Catechism class, Ray was the parish sextant and sang in the choir. St. Ann’s Church on Cumberland Street was less than ten blocks from the Doiron household, and those blocks were heavily trodden by the fourteen feet that resided in the red and white house.
So it was only natural, when the Diocese of Providence announced in 2000 that it was closing St. Ann due to dwindling parishioners and rising building maintenance costs, that the Doirons would get involved. “They didn’t close this church without a fight, let me tell you,” says Sue, the second-oldest Doiron sibling, thirty-seven. “Though we didn’t get as far as chaining ourselves to the church.” What the family and a handful of other former parishioners have done, however, will probably have a much more lasting impact on the fate of St. Ann’s than any short-lived stunt might have had.
One way or another, St. Ann’s was going to be torn down. Either the Diocese would have dismantled it and sold the pieces – “they could have made a lot of money selling the marble,” says Sue –or they would have sold the whole parcel to developers, who likely would wrecked the church to build condominiums or a shopping plaza. A scrappy group of former parishioners hatched the idea of “a major center, a tourist attraction, a place of opportunity for local artists,” says Dominique. In 2001, the non-profit, non-sectarian St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center was born with the Doiron family at the helm. In 2002, the Diocese agreed to lease the building to the group at $1 per year for ninety-nine years. Ninety-nine years is a long time; the group is hoping they’ll last through this winter.
The stretch of Cumberland Street surrounding St. Ann is nondescript, a run-down thoroughfare with a Dunkin’ Donuts, dry cleaners, service station and funeral home, all fronted by big empty parking lots. From the outside, St. Ann’s Church also looks much like any old-fashioned cathedral on any run-down main street in any aging former mill town. Behind the building’s giant wooden doors, however, is the church’s sanctuary, a room so magnificent that it literally takes your breath away.
Smothered in color and light, the sanctuary is ringed by forty-eight elaborate stained glass windows. Its sixty-five foot vaulted ceiling and half of its walls – 20,000 square feet in all – are covered in buon-style frescoes, paintings whose pigments are integrated into the plaster itself and whose angels, prophets, saints and devils throb with brilliant color. Standing underneath them, head tipped back, you almost want to take chunks of the delicious scenes in your mouth and suck on them like hard candy, or climb into them and lie in the grass and pick flowers. Each of the individual paintings is a masterpiece, but the effect of them together is literally stunning. It’s as if a whole world is in this one room. You could spend a lifetime and never see it all.
BOUNDED TO THE NORTH BY THE Massachusetts border and to the east and west by North Smithfield and Cumberland, Woonsocket has the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest per-capita household incomes in the state, trailing only Central Falls and pockets of Providence. “Woonsocket,” says Dominique with a laugh, “has come to be known as the armpit of the state.”
It wasn’t always this way. The late 1800s and early 1900s was a boom time for towns along the Blackstone River, the epicenter of America’s industrial heyday. Woonsocket grew up around Woonsocket Falls, whose thirty-foot drop generated power for the town’s forty or so textile mills. Meanwhile, farmers in the countryside of Quebec were finding it harder to eke a living out of the land, and word spread about the many jobs in New England’s textile mills. By the time Woonsocket was incorporated in 1888, more than 40 percent of the city’s population – some 8,500 people – was composed of French-Canadian mill workers and their families.
Woonsocket’s French-Canadians were deeply religious people and the Catholic Church was the heart of their community. In 1890, with the city’s only French parish, Precious Blood, bursting at the seams, church officials decided to create a new parish. Members of the new St. Ann’s parish envisioned a magnificent building and began knocking on doors and digging deeper into their pockets at Sunday mass to build it. “This was a parish of poor immigrants, of French-Canadian mill workers who were really devoted to their faith, and wanted to build a temple for themselves,” says Dominique. The nickels and dimes started adding up, and by 1917, the French Renaissance-style church on Cumberland Street was completed.
In 1920, looking towards the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the parish, congregants decided to replace the church’s enormous windows with stained glass. Once again, the parishioners dug into their pockets. Plays were staged as benefits. Some of the wealthier parishioners donated the cost of windows as memorials to family members. The windows, shipped from Chartres, France, were installed in 1925. The centerpieces are two windows on either side of the transept, which are so large that, were they laid end-to-end, their square footage would exceed that of the floor plan of an average ranch-style house. Portraying the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, what makes these windows exceptional is their multilayered artwork. In the foreground of “The Crucifixion,” for example, are kneeling worshippers and Roman soldiers on horseback. Jesus on the cross rises from their midst. In an ordinary stained-glass window, behind this scene might be decorative colored panels. In this one, the scene is backed by the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Behind the walls, the hills. And behind the hills, a frightfully churning purple sky. The windows face north and south such that “The Resurrection” is always the brightest window in the building.
Nineteen-forty marked the parish’s 50th anniversary, and St. Ann’s pastor decided that the church’s interior should be decorated in honor of the upcoming golden jubilee. Father Henry Morin had always admired the paintings at St. Matthew’s Church in Central Falls, and he invited the artist, Guido Nincheri, to visit St. Ann’s. Nincheri, who lived in Quebec, had been raised in Florence, Italy, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. He was best-known for his stained glass, but he was an accomplished artist in many media, including painting, mosaic, sculpture, and the Renaissance method of fresco painting known as buon fresco. Michelangelo used this method to paint the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. During Nincheri’s initial visit to St. Ann’s, he noticed that the walls and the ceiling were still unfinished, covered with cement stucco and not plaster. Father Morin was apologetic. Nincheri was delighted.
Instead of applying oil or tempera to pre-existing plaster, fresco pigments are applied to fresh, wet plaster. The chemical changes which occur mean that the painting is integrated into the wall itself. The moment the pigment touches the plaster, it is permanent. The artist cannot remove paint, or paint over anything he has already done. If he makes a mistake, the plaster must be cut away from the entire area and the process must begin again.
The result is that the paintings never fade. They never chip or peel. And the colors are so rich and bright, they look like they’re glowing. “If you come back 400 years from now,” says Dominique, “these colors will be as bright and vibrant as they are now.”
Over the course of eight years, from 1940 to 1948, Nincheri painstakingly covered the entire church with frescoes. He used the congregants as models for his work, integrating more than 400 individual faces into the paintings’ 175 scenes. One of the centerpieces, “The Last Judgment” depicts three devils being cast into hell, two of whom face us. When the time came to paint the devils’ faces, Nincheri went across the street to St. Ann’s school, and asked for the two naughtiest boys in the class. The nun who serenaded Nincheri while he worked is immortalized as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of Church Music, playing the organ over the choir loft.
Roger Nincheri, the artist’s grandson, is cataloguing his grandfather’s artwork, which can be found in 220 churches throughout North America. “I consider St Ann’s to be Guido’s Sistine Chapel, in terms of the size and complexity,” he says. Dominique agrees. “If you take [all of Michelangelo’s frescoes in] the Sistine Chapel as a single piece, this is bigger. By a lot. People spend thousands of dollars to go to Italy, but here it is, in this country, in Rhode Island, right in Woonsocket…It’s part of our heritage. Our ancestors came here and built it.”
IT’S WEDNESDAY, BINGO NIGHT at St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center, and though it’s only 4:40, the church basement is already half-full. The mostly elderly crowd is lining up their bingo daubers like many-colored soldiers on the tables, and hunkering down over baskets of French fries and games of cards.
Bingo is just one of the many offerings on the calendar. The building is open from 1 pm until 4 pm every Sunday afternoon for tours. The organization tries to offer at least one event each month. Some notable recent performers were Elisabeth von Trapp, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Community College of Rhode Island chorus and orchestra, and the Ocean State Summer Pops Orchestra. A production of Carousel is slated for May, and the Providence Singers are performing Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” in June. Ultimately, the organization hopes to use some of the un-frescoed part of the sanctuary as gallery space for local artists, and to host weekly events that serve as an anchor for the Center’s calendar, such as a Sunday afternoon piano recital series. When he’s really thinking big, Dominique envisions removing the pews so the sanctuary can be used for weddings, banquets and balls.
The word is not out yet, however, and Center events are not always well attended. When von Trapp performed, it drew 100 people; in a room that seats 1200, “it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” says Dominique. Even when the Vienna Boys’ Choir visited, he recalls, “there were only about five or six hundred people, which wasn’t enough to pay the bill of bringing them in.”
Part of the problem is the church’s location. The old joke about having to pack a bag to travel from Providence to Warwick has some truth to it; Rhode Islanders are notoriously reluctant to travel more than a stone’s throw from home. What’s more, says Dominique, “it’s hard to get people to Woonsocket because they still think of it as a burned out town with nothing to do.”
Ticket prices are very reasonable. Events are usually pay-what-you-can, and the most expensive to date were $10. Ironically, however, this may deter visitors accustomed to performances at Providence’s Veteran’s Memorial Auditoriu