Leap called godsend for nonreaders

Contra Costa Times

Rebecca Rosen Lum
TIMES STAFF WRITER


RICHMOND -- John Tate's cell phone rings with a Bach fugue. A slim, well-spoken man with wire-framed glasses and a neatly clipped goatee, Tate could easily pass for a writer.

But Tate, 54, never learned to read. Born in New Orleans, he grew up picking cotton, then migrated to Richmond in 1983 to work construction. He had "mother wit," black Southern parlance for the moral sensibility learned from one's mother, but no education.

That's a gift Richmond's Literacy for Every Adult Program, or LEAP, gave him.

"All my life I've been pretending I could read," Tate said. "LEAP is like a family for people like me who come in scared to let the public know I can't."

After an on-the-job injury ended his work life, he sat down with a tutor and learned to sound out long vowels and short vowels. How to break down words. How to sound out the letters of the alphabet. How to form sentences.

"Oh, lord!" he said. "I'm 54. It's hard to absorb all the fundamentals at my age."

LEAP program staff have patiently prodded, inspired and cajoled hundreds of people like Tate to learn to read long after most others have given up or mistakenly assumed they could read.

But those days could end soon. The program is slated to shrink drastically in January.

Although LEAP pays its own way by landing state and private grants, another city department has tapped those funds, leaving little to run a program that serves more than 100 clients a year.

"If they close this program, they close down hope," Tate said. "Of all the things in the world. Man! Something so small, yet something so large."

According to a national survey, nearly one in four Richmond residents struggles with literacy.

Literacy specialist Mark Trotter said program clients create ways to navigate a literate society. "It's, 'I lost my glasses,' or 'I have arthritis in my hands, could you write this for me?'" Trotter said.

"I'd always watch people reading the newspaper," said Fred White, 43. "Now, I can do that. It felt so good to read a newspaper in front of other people. When I came in here three years ago, I couldn't read a children's book."

Education has been a disappointment for many adult literacy students, said Trotter, 30, now in his sixth year at LEAP and his fourth as a staff member. "In order not to dash their hopes, you've got to have a lot of patience. A lot of it is frightening. (But) one's life can change, even though it might seem like it's unchangeable."

A smile playing over his face, he added, "Since I've been working with Fred, he's penned two plays."

Clients include an executive chef at a four-star hotel whose wife read menus aloud to him so he could memorize them.

One woman successfully kept her functional illiteracy a secret from her husband.

"Some, at one point, could read to some degree when they were younger, but over time their skills diminished," Trotter said. "For some, where they lived, education wasn't valued. A woman from Fiji told me in her culture, women really weren't expected to learn to read. They were just expected to cook, clean, care for the children. It didn't matter if they didn't learn."

It mattered in Tunami Eaton's family; many had attended college, and she hoped to follow.

But Eaton, 26, and the mother of four young children, had reading disabilities. Like other adult learners, she bluffed well.

When her 9-year-old daughter showed signs of reading problems, she got help.

"She would say, 'My stomach hurts,' or 'I'm tired,'" Eaton said. "Then at a certain point, she didn't want to go to school anymore. I realized I was no help to her unless I could assess my own disabilities."

At LEAP, "The hardest thing was letting my guard down," she said. "I was in a private room so I didn't have other eyes looking at me or judging me. It made it easier for me to say, 'I can't read.' This was the only place I could go to find some assistance.

"It really opened my eyes that I didn't have to stop with a GED; I could go to college and reach my dreams."

Layoffs resulted from plunder of literacy program

December 16, 2003 Rebecca Rosen Lum TIMES STAFF WRITER RICHMOND -- The city's Employment and Training Department managers drained $221,447 in restricted cash from the city literacy program to pay their own salaries, then laid off nearly all the literacy teachers for lack of money. Department records obtained by the Contra Costa Times show that city literacy funding, plus state and private matching grants, were tapped to help pay 11 employees with salaries up to $133,285 a year who do not work in the Literacy for Every Adult, or LEAP, program.

An incoming grant of $98,922 could delay pink slips sent to seven of nine literacy staffers, although there is no immediate plan to do so. Irregularities do not end there. Records show that at least one LEAP worker was directed by a supervisor to falsify a timecard. The wife of the department's deputy director makes $80,000 yearly as a top-level information technology specialist assigned to the department. SEIU Local 790, which represent LEAP employees, says that flouts the city anti-nepotism policy, which is in its contract with the union. City officials recently decided to lay off more than 100 city workers to close a yawning budget gap. The literacy misappropriations could spell big trouble for Richmond. The state library, which issues the grants, has tight rules for spending and overseeing the money. "At the very least, I know the state would pull its funding if they knew about this," SEIU Local 790 shop steward Linda McPhee said. "Literacy programs all over the state compete for these grants, partly dependent on their history. This does not look good for Richmond." Cities may eye literacy programs during hard times "because they are a magnet for funding," said California State Library consultant Valerie Stadelbacher Reinke. "But there are certain minimum standards for using these grants, and if they are not following those standards, we would hold Richmond responsible." One is that the program must be run by the city library. Here, it is not. "That alone is equal to fraud," McPhee wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to assistant city manager Leveron Bryant. Not true, said Employment and Training assistant director Sal Vaca. "This is a total misunderstanding," he said Monday. "LEAP is paying its fair share of the Employment and Training Department overhead. It's a cost allocation plan, and it has been negotiated with and approved by the finance department." Studies show that in Richmond and across the state, one in four residents can barely read, as dismal a showing as three of the lowest-ranking states: Alabama, Florida and South Carolina. Only Louisiana, with 28 percent adult illiteracy, and Mississippi, with 30 percent, are worse. More than one-fifth of Richmond's population has reading problems, according to a recent survey by the National Center for Education Statistics. After Upesi Mtambuzi, the Employment and Training Department director, issued the pink slips, closed satellite offices and bumped the main office from its longtime home, she left for a monthlong trip. "The level of their conduct is surreal," teacher Mark Trotter said. "Funds were taken unconscionably. Two staffers isn't hardly enough to give this city literacy." Tonight, the City Council expects an explanation of the concerns raised by LEAP staff members earlier this month. None of the Employment and Training workers whose salaries were subsidized with LEAP funds take home less than $65,000 a year. The list includes office helpers, bookkeeping assistants and secretaries. Mtambuzi earns more than $133,000 year; $25,725 of that i LEAP money. According to the city's agreement with SEIU Local 790, employees can only be laid off for lack of work or lack of money. Demand for literacy help continues to soar, and minus the misappropriations, there would have been plenty of money, McPhee said. Of LEAP's $845,000 budget, the city contributes $385,000 from its general fund. The state library fund and other private sources ante up matching funds. After long meetings with City Manager Isiah Turner, Vaca proposed changes to Mtambuzi's plan, with only one tutor-coordinator losing his job. "Upesi (Mtambuzi) tried to fulfill (both departments') objectives and also reduce dollars, but her restructuring has disproportionately affected the LEAP staff," Turner said. "The city doesn't have much experience laying off people," Vaca said. "It's awkward and uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it needs to be done to preserve the financial health of the city." SEIU members slated for layoffs have muddied the waters: "If they go down, they want to drag everyone down with them," he said. Meanwhile, many LEAP clients will watch the outcome of today's council meeting to see what will come of the proposed cuts. "I could see if it was a place where no one succeeds, but everyone comes out of here benefiting," said Kareem, 19, an aspiring electrician who came to LEAP to improve his math skills. "There are jobs where you can get out there and work your body to death, but I want to use my mind. It's already a struggle to get hired. It's crucial to get the skills." Reach Rebecca Rosen Lum 510-262-2713 or rrosenlum@cctimes.com.

Atheist groups 'springing up all over'

Oakland Tribune

Sept. 29, 2006

by Rebecca Rosen Lum
Staff writer

When Richard Golden put the word out that he was starting a group for atheists in Walnut Creek, about a dozen people showed up.

Two years later, 80 are dues-paying members and several more drop in on twice-monthly meetings to chew on everything from particle physics to court cases.

Horrified by escalating religious violence and alarmed by the Bush administrations faith-based initiatives, which make government money available to religious organizations, atheists are coming out of the closet -- and organizing.

Local groups "are springing up all over the place," said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists. Active groups have grown by about 90 percent over the past six years, she said.

In the past few years, groups affiliated with American Atheists have taken root in Walnut Creek, Berkeley, San Francisco, Davis, and Silicon Valley. East Bay Atheists has grown to more than 300 members.

California membership in the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group of atheists and agnostics that monitors the separation of church and state, increased from 900 to 1,200 in one year. Nationally, it grew from 5,000 in 2004 to 6,400 members by the beginning of 2006, said co-founder Annie Laurie Gaylor.

Meetings and rallies, once the province of older folk, now include younger people with tattoos and dreadlocks. The Internet, radio spots during Al Franken's Air America radio show and campus groups are responsible, Johnson said.

"They don't have the baggage that someone my age does," Johnson said. "Atheism was such a dirty word -- associated with communism. Plus, this is a very scientific era. They are not afraid to say what they think."

But atheism appears to be gaining ground as a belief, not just a wave of political activism by those who fear the wall between church and state is being disassembled."The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins appeared at No. 5 and No. 23 on the Amazon.com bestseller list Sept. 20.

"Our primary conviction is that there is only one world -- there is no supernatural world -- the world that is the subject of scientific investigation," he said. "We are focused, as the humanists are, on having our human potential increased in this world, rather than working everything out in the world to come."

Two UC Berkeley sociology professors found that the proportion of Americans with no religion doubled from 1990 to 1998, but has leveled out at 14 percent.

"We argue that . . . reflects a growing backlash against the role of organized religion," said Claude S. Fischer, one of the authors. "People on the political left have reacted against the organization of churches on the right. Their statement is a reaction: If that is what religion means, than I am not religious."

Studies suggest the surge in interest is more a wavelet than a tsunami. The Baylor University Institute Religion Survey, released Sept. 11, showed 10.8 percent of the nations population, or some 10 million Americans, do not adhere to some faith. The majority of the 1,721 respondents who were unaffiliated with a religion said they believe in some higher power.

On Oct. 6, many atheists will head to the Freedom From Religion Foundations convention in San Francisco to hear author Sam Harris ("The End of Faith") speak and to watch comic Julia Sweeney perform her solo opus "Letting Go of God."

The Foundation has brought 30 First Amendment lawsuits since 1977 and has more percolating through the courts. Among its victories: winning the first federal lawsuit challenging direct government funding of a faith-based agency.

Sept. 11, 2001 hammered home the dangers of religious fundamentalism for Larry Hicok of Berkeley, who describes the terror attack as an ultimate faith-based initiative.

Now he chairs East Bay Atheists, whose membership has been growing over the past five years.

One of the most recent developments to galvanize activists is the Public Expression of Religion Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind.

The bill would deny attorneys fees and damages to those who successfully argue against violations of the church-state separation. The House Judiciary Committee passed on a party-line vote, Republicans for, Democrats opposed.

"There is no other time in American history where the wall between church and state was in such danger," Gaylor said. "We could be taking a faith-based case every day if we had the resources. This is the time to come out swinging."

DEBATING VALUE OF RELIGIOUS FAITH GROWS CONTENTIOUS

Contra Costa Times

May 26, 2007

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Times staff writer

The tipoff came before the debate between authors Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges started: The emcee asked the Berkeley audience to restrain from heckling.

She forgot to address that comment to Hitchens, who ran away with the evening and bolted off the stage before the event officially ended.

Invited to square off over the value of religious faith, there was plenty that separated the men, even though both are best-selling authors of books about the damaging influences of organized religion.

Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America rank among a phalanx of books with sights trained on institutionalized faith.

A longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Hedges, 50, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for team coverage of global terrorism. He also won the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He holds a master's degree in divinity from Harvard University.

The iconoclastic Hitchens, 58, has written for Vanity Fair, Slate and Free Inquiry. He abandoned his post at the Nation after a falling-out with other editors over his support for the war in Iraq. Oxford-educated, Hitchens has authored several books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger and Why Orwell Matters.

Dressed in leather jacket and jeans, Hedges somehow appeared pressed and mannerly before a packed audience at King Middle School in Berkeley. Hitchens managed to look rumpled even in his boxy leisure suit.

After tearing off a 15-minute rant that trashed Islam, Christianity, and Judaism -- with asides to the "mush-headed" spirituality that blooms in Berkeley -- Hitchens offered his audience a challenge. He asked if anyone could name a moral stand taken by a religious person that couldn't be equaled by a person who does not believe in the existence of God.

"The whole extraordinary galaxy was created with us in mind?" he told a laughing, clapping audience. Ah yes: "The 'me' galaxy."

Religion comes "from the stupid infancy of our species," before people knew the world was round, he said.

He detailed a history of carnage, cruelty, and callousness leading to the present day, in which the Pope declares condoms more dangerous than AIDS and where, in Iran, "parties of God are set on wreckage."

But by oversimplifying faith, Hitchens himself has become a sort of fundamentalist, Hedges said.

"He sees only the chauvinistic, the bigoted and intolerant brand," he said. "It's a cheap way to avoid exploring the wide range of religious belief."

In fact, monotheistic faith created the concept of the individual, Hedges argued. With it, people acquired the freedom to develop and act upon individual conscience, the ability "to resist the clamor of the tribe."

God is not a noun but a verb, a commitment to transcendence, he said.

"Faith is what we do," he said. "Faith is the sister of justice. The danger is not in Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, but the human heart -- the capacity we all have for evil."

Hedges said repeatedly that he shares Hitchens' disdain for fundamentalism.

But the polite and civil Hedges was no match for Hitchens, who bit off the ends of Hedges' sentences to register indignation ("It's not an interruption; it's a comment") and volleyed questions from the emcee by pontificating on other points.

The rowdy audience with an obvious appetite for an intellectual feast alternately roared, applauded, booed, and cheered each thrust and parry.

The room reached its boiling point when Hedges explained suicide bombers as people whose despair has driven them to desperate acts.

In the occupied territories in 1988, he found a "strangled" people, 1.1 million "living in what can only be described as a prison," he said, "living ten to a room, no possibility of work."

"You're rationalizing murder," Hitchens cried. "You're rationalizing murder. Shame on you."

Seeking to understand the motivations of suicide bombers represents "a new fashion among the half-baked," he said.

By the time the emcee took questions from the audience, one man accepted Hitchens' challenge. He mentioned a spiritual leader who "ministered" to the Ku Klux Klan out of love.

"It's a start," Hitchens said gallantly, before suddenly souring. Better than loving them, the religious leader should have sued them, and pushed them into economic ruin.

"Love your own enemies, don't love mine," he roared.

Hitchens drew brickbats from the crowd by defending the United States' incursion into Iraq as a mission to bring democracy to that devastated country.

"Though you sneer and jeer at them -- and you have to live with the shame of that -- these people are guarding you as you sleep," he said.

"I feel like I'm reading Rudyard Kipling's' 'The Burden of the White Man,'" Hedges quipped.

"You mean you wish you'd read it," Hitchens shot back.

The real danger, Hedges said, is the conviction of people who feel they have the "absolute truth."

"The search for the truth, the examined life, requires humility," he said.

Hitchens unleashed a final firebomb, and Hedges quietly passed on closing remarks. By then, Hitchens had darted off the stage, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

--Rebecca Rosen Lum covers religion. Reach her at 925-977-8506 or rrosenlum@cctimes.com.

Parkinson's effects eased by classes

Oakland Tribune

Dec. 28, 2007

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Staff writer

IN A SUNLIT dance studio, a pianist plays a flurry of arpeggios. Men and women sitting on metal folding chairs slowly bend and stretch.

One man's hands tremble; a woman's legs remain rigidly bent. As one woman moves her hands, her feet involuntarily go along. These dance students have Parkinson's disease.

By the end of this class, they will have waltzed, stretched and marched, relaxed deeply and laughed loudly.

"It is more damn fun," said Joan Hodgkin, 75, a tall champagne blonde who drove herself to this class at Oakland's Danspace -- something many with Parkinson's patients cannot do. The class was a gift from the Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, while it was in the East Bay to dance "The Hard Nut."

In New York, class meets weekly. It had its genesis with Olie Westheimer, who founded and directs the Brooklyn Parkinson Group. A former dancer, Westheimer approached Morris about a therapeutic dance program. It seemed a natural for Morris. The edgy choreographer engages public school students in a dance and poetry project and conducts an after-school program. He agreed immediately.

A central nervous system disorder, Parkinson's often impairs the sufferer's motor skills and speech. The therapy cannot reverse the course of the illness, but it can help ease its effects, said teacher and Morris company dancer David Leventhal.

"Parkinson's is such an individual disease," Hodgkin mused. "What is hard for one isn't hard for the other. It is nerve wracking because you never know how it will affect you."

But one thing tends to hold true for many people afflicted with the degenerative disease: Movement to music helps them fare better, an observation of celebrated neurologist Oliver Sacks among others. Sacks talks about the power of music in his new "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" (Knopf, 2007). Music therapy for people with Parkinson's triggered his interest in the subject, he said in a recent AARP interview.

Parkinson's sufferers struggle to coordinate speech and movement, but music, while it lasts, "gives them precisely what they lack, which is tempo and rhythm and organized time."

Sacks "talks about becoming 'unmusicked,'" Leventhal said. "Parkinson's disease is the premier example of that. (Music) is a neurological glue that holds us together."

On a recent day in Oakland, Leventhal teamed up with company dancer John Heginbotham who sported outsized pink nails (He was Mrs. Stahlbaum in that evening's performance). The men led the students through stretches and progressive relaxation exercises. One by one, the students called out their names accompanied by a signature personal gesture.

Carol Brian, a tiny, silver-haired woman with purple bangs, opened her arms wide. Lee Shapiro, a slim man in wire glasses, jeans and gray fleece jacket leapt up and lifted a knee in the air. The group duplicated each move, laughing heartily. Fun matters here.

Leventhal said fun spurs production of dopamine, a chemical messenger between nerve cells that enables smooth, coordinated movement. People with Parkinson's have abnormally low dopamine levels. A videotaped dance class won rave reviews at the International Congress on Parkinson's Disease in Berlin in 2005.

"People are having fun and chemically that is very important," one participant commented.

In Oakland, a photographer asked the group's permission to shoot from inside their circle.

"Sure, as long as you wear this nose," said a man brandishing a bright red rubber clown's nose. The group howled as he tucked it back into his pocket.

While seated, the students rolled up onto the balls of their feet. They kicked, pointed and flexed.

"This wakes up those nerves and can help you balance," Leventhal said.

Toward the end of the class, the students stood. A man who had sat squarely now listed to one side. Another bent forward. Some struggled for balance as they took a step. They bent deeply and swung from side to side as pianist Lucy Hudson played "The Waltz of the Flowers."

"You really want to be down low, like speed skating," Higenbotham told them. "Make little fists that are like pendulums."

They joined hands for a circle dance as Hudson played "Never On Sunday." At the end, they sent a pulse around the circle with a squeeze of hands.

Student Martin Baron describes himself as "one of the stiffest people in the world." The class makes him feel "more musical, more loose," he said.

"I love it," said Brian, 60, a jeweler who has had Parkinson's for 10 years, the past eight months of which have brought exhaustion, stiffness and memory problems.

"I get really teary and emotional. It's so upbeat ... the music and the people. Everyone knows what everyone has."

A debilitating illness, Parkinson's can restrict a person's human contacts to doctors and therapists.

"This counteracts that isolation," Leventhal said. "It builds community."

Like the company's dancers, the students seek to move with focus, intention and commitment, Leventhal said.

"They want structure," he said. "They want form. That's the only way they can initiate movement."

Legendary dancer doesn't rest on her laurels

Contra Costa Times
Nov. 13, 2003

By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Times staff writer

HER DANCING was sublime, her celebrated autobiography a spellbinding glimpse into the creative process.

Tall, angelically beautiful and sumptuous, Balanchine ballerina and muse Suzanne Farrell danced with an almost palpable intelligence, setting a deliciously high standard at New York City Ballet.

Now, as artistic director of her own company, George Balanchine's muse and interpreter says she wants to take her own dancers to "a another level."

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet Company performs at Zellerbach Hall Friday and Saturday. The program promises much: "Divertimento No. 15," "Serenade," "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux," and "Tempo di Valse" from "The Nutcracker."

"I want to take all the ballets we do and my dancers to another level," Farrell says, in the same light, tawny voice viewers will remember from the 1997 documentary, "Elusive Muse." She spoke on the phone in between rehearsals in East Lansing, Mich., where her company was performing.

An awestruck Maria Tallchief, who preceded her in the company and in Balanchine's affections, compared Farrell to "quicksilver" in a role Balanchine created for her: that of Dulcinea.

Farrell danced her last at age 44 in 1989, showered with roses by a loving New York audience.
Since then, she has been staging ballets and teaching. She launched the Farrell Ballet first as a touring company based at Lincoln Center in the nation's capital, now newly rooted there as a permanent company.

Even her critics say there was likely no one closer to Balanchine -- he once told her, "You are the other half of my apple" -- and he created more than 20 ballets for her, beginning with "Meditations," a passionate duet that spelled out his intense feelings for her, when she was 18

The Farrell national tour heralds a year of international festivals, new ballets and special programs celebrating the 100th anniversary of Balanchine's birth (the legendary choreographer died in 1983 at age 79).

"Nobody worked with Mr. Balanchine longer than I did," she says. "It doesn't make me better, it just puts me in a position to have that information, information to draw on."

That information includes Balanchine's own insistence on keeping his dances fresh, recreating and reinventing.

"I don't want to keep his ballets just alive in the sense of memory, I want them to be memorable," she says. "His dances, even if they were old, they had an immediacy, an urgency -- a life in the present.

"Even 'Apollo,' which he did in 1928, he kept revisiting. He said it was the ballet in which he learned to eliminate. When you're young and you cook, you want to put everything in that cooking pot. You don't have to put everything you know about ballet into one ballet."

She declines to critique other companies' interpretations of Balanchine ballets. However, she does say generally there are "misinterpretations, oversimplifications." She was abruptly fired from the New York City Ballet in the early 1990s by artistic director Peter Martins, her longtime partner, after openly lamenting that she was given too little to do, despite her wealth of "information.

"The steps are only one aspect of (Balanchine's) dances," she says. "If you teach the steps without the musicality, it's not Mr. Balanchine. If you have the musicality without the philosophy, it's not Mr. Balanchine. It has life, breath, a circulatory system."

Farrell sees very little dance, but enjoys theater and always takes note of how other kinds of performers claim stage space.

No mirrors
Born Roberta Sue Flicker in Cincinnati, she went to Manhattan with her mother and sister to train with the New York City Ballet, and at 16 joined the company. Her big break came when another dancer got pregnant before the premiere of Balanchine's "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" and Farrell was chosen to replace her. She was an instant hit.

While she was still technically on staff at the ballet in the early 1990s, James Wolfensohn -- a die-hard fan since his days as an investment banker in New York, when Farrell would frequently dance more than one role a night -- offered her support to launch a program at the Kennedy Center. She began teaching a three-week summer program called "Exploring Ballet with Suzanne Farrell." Since then, she has also joined the faculty of Florida State University and teaches there for part of each year.

"I'm always telling my students, 'Don't look in the mirror! Don't look in the mirror!' You can't be an honest performer and a spectator at the same time," she says. "Also, what's in the mirror isn't the true reflection of who you are. I take my students to the National Gallery, and we see Monet's paintings of Notre Dame. You see the real thing, then you see the reflection of Notre Dame in the Seine. It's different, there are those wavy lines from the water."

Farrell commands the kind of fearless risk-taking from her dancers she used to embrace on stage. But as ABT great Cynthia Gregory commented in her talk at Herbst Theatre last year, the extreme-sports trend that has taken hold in many companies sometimes stops short of artistry.

"We have excellent dancers nowadays, but they are not necessarily more interesting because of it," Farrell says. "A dancer needs a mind, a vulnerable intellect, the ability to tap into her musicality. Where you are in time, where you want to be in time -- all those things play into your performance."

Because she looked so seldom in the mirror herself, staging ballets after her retirement brought some surprises. She had been dancing the role of Terpsichore from the age of 17, accompanied by two female dancers and one male.

"Suddenly, there was this extra girl in the way," she says, laughing. Although Farrell never performed a role the same way twice -- in his own autobiography, Martins spoke of it as her "genius" -- her own dancers bring their own surprises to roles she has danced, which she says will happen with care and nurturing.

Your life, in dance
In a generous gesture characteristic of Farrell's complete devotion to the works, she cast ABT alumna Christina Fagundes in "Meditations," in which Balanchine "had choreographed our lives."
"Fagundes . . . was down to earth -- a mezzo type -- and she did 'Meditation' in her own way," New Yorker writer Joan Acocella wrote. "When Farrell danced it, the ballet was something that happened to the man; when Fagundes danced it, it was something that happened to her."
Farrell loves this.

When she watches her dancers, "I often think, 'Gee, why didn't I think of that?' " she says, laughing. "I want their contributions."

Inevitably, just as often, a young dancer will not, cannot, bring more to a role. Farrell says she doesn't expect them to bring 20 years of experience to a part -- and inevitably, more life means more life to bring to the dance.

Yet, "as you perfect your craft, you lose that vulnerability."

"You need that innocence and freshness," she says. "I tell my dancers, every time you come (to perform), think of it as the first time you came."

Expert helps fundamentalists overcome guilt, grief

Oakland Tribune

May 19, 2007

by Rebecca Rosen Lum

The graphic imagery from an end-times movie forms one of Michelle Lyerly's most vivid, and most horrifying, memories.

The hellfire-and-brimstone Christian high school she attended in North Carolina screened "A Thief in the Night," in which the forces of the Anti-christ push a college student from a bridge to her death because she failed to convert in time for the Rapture.

"You can imagine a bunch of 12-year-olds," Lyerly said. "This could happen tonight. This was ingrained in us."

Lyerly and former fundamentalists from five states flew into Oakland earlier this month for a workshop, "Release and Reclaim."

They're losing their religion.

The three-day event offered role-playing, sharing of personal histories and guided imagery -- tools to develop a sense of self and bonds of support.

Their God was a capricious, vindictive, punishing figure. Now they need help learning to trust themselves, said workshop lead-

er and Berkeley psychologist Marlene Winell.

Fundamentalism encompasses evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic faiths. They share a belief in original sin, a final judgment day and reliance on the Bible as the literal word of God.

The percentage of people who believe the Bible is the actual word of God has shrunk from 34 percent in 2004 to 28 percent in 2006, according to a Gallup poll.

But more than 60 percent of born-again Christians in this country believe they will suffer if they disobey their religion, according to a 2003 survey by the University of Rochester and Zogby International.

That's a damaging belief, Winell said.

Those who leave punitive faiths struggle with confusion, grief, anxiety and anger, she writes in "Leaving the Fold," an autobiography and guidebook on letting go.

Winell knows this world from the inside out. As a high school senior, she chose the University of California, Irvine, over Oral Roberts University, knowing the public school promised more souls in need of saving.

Today, Winell performs a different kind of rescue.

Helping children learn to articulate their ideas and feelings is "the psychological food parents are supposed to give their children," she said.

But in the fundamentalist world, "before they have the cognitive ability to process it, they are given these images of a bloody Christ on the cross and told they are responsible."

She spurns the combat metaphor fundamentalist leaders employ in place of a loving God. She calls on the helping professions to study and treat the recovering adherents as they do for other traumas and addictions.

At one time or another during the workshop, each participant broke down in tears. All spoke about guilt, shame and fear.

Common touchstones, like witnessing, salvation, speaking in tongues and "Christian counselor" resonated -- and spurred laughter.

"If you have doubts about the faith, going to a Christian counselor wouldn't help at all," Winell said. "Doubting is defined as sin."

In one exercise, they paired up and related bits of wisdom they had developed. Winell calls that "remedial nourishment."

They took turns sporting a headband with a mischievous pair of red sparkly devil's horns.

"There ain't no atheist like a former fundamentalist," participant Geraldine D'Arc said.

Today, Valerie Tarico is the author of "The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth."

But as a fundamentalist, she struggled with suicidal feelings -- the result, she said, of evangelical beliefs.

She suffered from an eating disorder and "according to my spiritual guides I should have been able to get rid of those horrible, sneaky, deceitful, humiliating behaviors through prayer -- if only I had faith the size of a mustard seed."

It didn't work.

"The last straw for me was working at Children's Hospital in Seattle and listening to all of the self-serving rationalizations used by believers to justify the suffering of innocents," she said.

It took several years for Deborah Thornley to make a break. Thornley embraced fundamentalism at age 18. "I had my fill of 'us' and 'them.' I walked out of Sunday school one day and I never went back. I went cold turkey."

Over the years, Lyerly's spiritual leaders trained her to not trust her own instincts. There were no mistakes, no errors in judgment, no missteps -- only sin.

Lyerly later earned two master's degrees, and celebrated Episcopal Bishop John Spong praised her book, "From Rapture to Revelation."

Still, she struggles, but "I'm not as alone as I thought," she said.

Winell, who will hold another workshop in September, asked her charges to write a note to someone who is taking baby steps away from an authoritarian faith.

"Just get yourself to this retreat," wrote one.