A chance to dream
Felecia Gaston offers Marin City kids a taste of the arts and a way to perform.

BY JILL KRAMER

As Maurice Coleman crosses the parking lot of the Marin City public housing project he walks past clusters of older boys and men. They’re there every day, all day, and he pays no attention to them. He’s on his way to the Performing Stars of Marin office where he’s helping prepare for the next Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. Twelve years old, he’s already got his future mapped out and it doesn’t include hanging out with the parking lot crowd. He has his eyes on a bigger prize.

Maurice has been participating in Performing Stars programs ever since he was 4—doing gymnastics and drill team practice when he was little, football and basketball camps every summer and snowboarding trips to Bear Valley and Lake Tahoe each February. It’s all part of the Performing Stars grand plan to give the kids from Marin City a taste of the world outside.

“What we try to do is give kids some exposure to what else is out there, to see something besides just what they see in Marin City,” says Jesse Washington, who’s been volunteering with Performing Stars since retiring from the phone company three years ago. “When you grow up in a house where your father is a doctor or a lawyer, you have a path to follow. But here, what I see a lot of times is kids that don’t have any direction.” Washington says it’s important to show young people what their options are before it’s too late. “When a child believes the best he could do is sell dope down on the corner or be a pimp—when his images of what he can be in life are so limited—once a child has decided that’s where he’s going, it’s hard to bring him back. We’ve got a penitentiary full of young men like that, people that have lost their hopes and dreams.”

Felecia Gaston, the founder and executive director of Performing Stars, starts recruiting kids at age 3. “I look at what we do as a prevention program,” she says. “This program helps young people get out of Marin City.”

Marin City was built to house shipyard workers during World War II. When the jobs disappeared after the war, whites left and the remaining community was almost entirely black and unemployed. Today, it’s the site of the only public housing in predominantly white and affluent Marin County. In recent years there’s been some gentrification, as townhouses and single family homes have been built on the hillsides above the public housing. Still, most of the families on the flats are barely getting by and the community has an insular feel. The freeway separates Main City from the bay, where the white-sailed boats of the rich dot the sparkling blue water. A high, chain-link fence runs along the border to the underpass. When Marin City youths venture out in the evening to upscale Sausalito on the other side, they’re often stopped by police and questioned. In fact, many youngsters who grow up here never set foot outside the community until they go to high school. After a lifetime of absorbing the message that they don’t belong in the world beyond Marin City, it’s small wonder that many of them fail or drop out.

Gaston, the single mother of a 12-year-old boy, has made it her mission to counter that message. She takes groups of kids to San Francisco to see the Nutcracker ballet, to musicals like The Lion King. She enrolls them in dance classes and sailing programs. And when some classmate asks, “What did you do for Ski Week?” they can say, “I went snowboarding in Bear Valley.”

“There’s a big divide in Marin County,” says Gaston. “There are families who can afford the best of everything. But when our kids go to school, they can say, Yeah, I take ballet, too. I know how to sail a boat. I’ve been to the theater. Even though they have limited incomes, they get to have the same types of experience.”

GASTON IS A warm, earthy dynamo with a big smile. She launched Performing Stars 15 years ago with no money and no experience. The first grant she won, for $8,000, included no salary for her. She kept herself going with a part-time job for the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, doing parking enforcement at the Marin City flea market. Over the years, she’s honed her grant writing and fund-raising skills so that now her annual budget is about $250,000—a little more than half of which comes from the Marin Community Foundation. Her reach has broadened, too. While most of the children in the program—135 or so—are from Marin City, she now serves low-income kids from all over the county. Although she started out focusing on the arts, she now includes sports and recreation programs. She’s also working to make Marin City more visible to the rest of the county—by bringing a Marin City float to the Corte Madera/Larkspur Fourth of July parade and organizing special events for Labor Day and Black History Month.

Gaston’s office is abuzz these days with kids getting ready for this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. Under the direction of Marin Theatre Company, boys and girls are learning dramatic skits and South African dances. Maurice Coleman is one of 10 kids helping to build the stage sets.

Maurice keeps a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall of his bedroom. He bought it last year in Atlanta when he visited the King home. “I never thought I was going to be there,” he says. “Martin Luther King, to me, is a very wise man. I like what he did for our country and how he did it, marching for rights so that black and white can be together.” Maurice speaks softly, keeping his handsome face composed with a cool, macho stoicism. But he reveals his excitement as he rattles off the minutest details of the trip. It was the first time he’d been on a plane. “They had TVs on the plane and when you turned to a certain channel they would tell you how fast the plane was going and how high you were. And it was scary. The plane was going 546 miles per hour. It took us five hours and 30 minutes to get there.”

It was Gaston who organized that trip, although it wasn’t a project of Performing Stars and she provided no financing. Originally, she’d only planned on going back East with her son to visit family, but asked Maurice’s folks if he could join them to keep her son company. As it turned out, one of the men who volunteers with Performing Stars came along with his daughter and one of her friends, too. All six of them flew to New York and spent a week touring the eastern seaboard, stopping off to stay with Gaston’s relatives here and there, ending up in Atlanta.

Gaston grew up in Marietta, Georgia, in an extended family that spanned four generations. Her uncle was the only man in the household. The house was owned by her grandmother, a powerhouse of a woman known to the family as Big Mama. She worked as a seamstress, doing alterations for Sears, and started the first female gospel group in Marietta. She grew enough food to feed the family year-round, with vegetables in the backyard garden and pigs and chickens raised on a separate piece of land. Gaston’s mother worked nights at the post office. Co-workers often gave her free tickets to take her three little girls to local plays and musicals, and Gaston remembers seeing her first show at age 7. She wanted to be a dancer even before that.

She was born in 1955, 11 years before desegregation hit her school district. “I remember when I was 5 years old I saw all the little white girls going to ballet with their little leotards and their slippers and I can still remember what that felt like—how come I can’t go? But I didn’t even ask my mother because I knew it was not possible.” She also remembers the shock and isolation when, in sixth grade, she was bused to an all-white school. “Before that, I’d see white people at the store, but you didn’t mingle with them.” She had no friends at school until she was 15, when her mother remarried and moved the girls to Los Angeles. She came to San Francisco to study geography and cartography at SF State, with the intention of becoming a television weather forecaster. She wound up moving to Marin City for a job with the Community Development Corporation.

The place immediately felt like home to her—with its pluses and minuses. “Marin City reminds me of Marietta,” she says. “It’s comfortable and it’s safe. There’s six generations of families who came here to work during the shipyard days. And kids don’t get to mingle with white kids until they start going to high school.”

Recalling her own experience of being shut out of dance classes, she started Performing Stars of Marin as a link to existing scholarship programs at Marin Ballet and Marin Theatre Company. She identifies the children who are interested, helps parents fill out application forms and often provides transportation. “A child can receive a scholarship, but if they don’t have the needed support, they might not go,” she says. “We’re like stage parents—we help them take advantage of these opportunities.”

PERHAPS HER MOST stunning success story is that of John Lam, a boy she enrolled 15 years ago at Marin Ballet who now dances with the Boston Ballet Company. Lam grew up in the Canal area of San Rafael, the son of Vietnamese immigrants. The recipient of a string of scholarships that have taken him from Marin to the National Ballet of Canada school and then to Boston, he was recently honored with a dance fellowship from the Princess Grace Foundation.

Over the years, Gaston has placed a number of girls at Marin Ballet, but they usually drop out before they reach the advanced levels. Janelle Denson, 15, hopes to be the first African-American to graduate; Linda Steele, 14, vows to complete the program, too. “Once Janelle graduates, I’ll be right behind her,” says Linda. “Other African-Americans have dropped out because there’s not much diversity here. I was uncomfortable about it when I was little, but now it doesn’t matter. I just want to improve my technique so I can go off into the world and apply it.”

Marin Ballet teacher Laurie Klein sees a lot of turnover among the younger students, regardless of ethnicity. “It’s a very difficult art form,” she says. “It takes a great deal of effort and drive, as well as support from parents.” Cost, however, can certainly be a factor, even with a scholarship.
“Ballet stuff is really expensive,” says Janelle. “If I wanted to quit, it would be because of money issues. For every performance, we need tights and shoes. Most of the people here are wealthy and they don’t even have to think about that. But that’s when we need Performing Stars to help us.” Gaston has been kicking in some financial assistance, but she hasn’t yet found the funding to cover all the dancers’ expenses. Pointe shoes, for example, cost $50-$100 a pair; and when the girls are in rehearsals, they easily go through a pair every three weeks.

For any advanced ballet student, the schedule is grueling. Classes and rehearsals start as soon as the regular school day ends and take up most of the day on Saturdays. During the week, the kids don’t get home until 8pm. Most of their spare time is spent doing homework. To stick with ballet, they have to love it.

I watched on a recent Saturday as Janelle and Linda rehearsed, along with the rest of the corps de ballet, for the Nutcracker “Waltz of the Flowers.” The teacher, Cynthia Lucas—who’s also the school’s artistic director—spent more than an hour drilling the dancers on what will be five minutes on stage. She’d repeat one or two measures at a time, over and over again, until each member of the corps was perfectly placed in relation to the others, with just the right position of the body, angle of the arm, tilt of the head. The girls were drenched in perspiration.

Neither Janelle nor Linda is planning on a career with a professional ballet company—Janelle wants to do hip-hop, Linda is leaning toward modern—but the technical training of ballet is unbeatable for any style of dance. To their parents’ way of thinking, their ballet studies are bringing benefits already in terms of self-discipline. “She’s learning to finish what she starts,” says Nita Green of her daughter Janelle. “And she can apply that not only to dance but to other aspects of her life.”

Recent studies at UCLA and Stanford show that when children participate in the arts they improve their academic performance as well as increase their self-esteem. Victoria Earville, director of community outreach and education at Marin Theatre Company, says she’s seen the transformations in the Performing Stars kids who join MTC’s summer program. “I know it sounds hokey, but I really do believe that kids stand taller when they do performing arts. Their confidence level triples.”

Jesse Washington hopes to provide the kids with positive role models, too. “It’s more than just an arts or recreation program,” he says. “We try to teach them social skills, we talk about sex and personal things. We give them a place where they can talk about whatever they need to talk about. It’s about them being good citizens and good human beings.”

Maurice Coleman is already thinking about his future and what he has to do to attain his goals. He’s keeping his grades up in the hope that he wins a scholarship first to Marin Catholic High School, then to either UC Berkeley or UCLA. He wants to play professional sports someday—he hasn’t decided yet among football, basketball or baseball. “In my senior year in college I’ll pick one and start to work harder in that so I can get in the draft,” he says. “And if I do it, maybe my little brother will follow me and do all the things that I do.”

Meanwhile, he’s setting smaller goals for himself along the way. He achieved one of them on last winter’s Performing Stars snowboarding trip to Tahoe. “I went to the highest mountain and went all the way down,” he says. “I always wanted to be the only one to go to the highest mountain.”

The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration will be held the afternoon of Monday, January 16, at the Manzanita Recreation Center in Marin City. For more information, or to support Performing Stars of Marin, call 415/332-8316 or log on to www.performingstars.org.

PHOTO OF JANELLE DENSON AND STUDENTS BY MARTY SOHL

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