Dispatches: 2/25/09 - New Haven Advocate

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Personal finance, Gay Rites and the Recovery Act

_{Lost and found: Debra Marcella. (Melinda Tuhus Photo)}

Youth & Personal Finances
Banking on it: Youth @ Work puts money in the bank

NEW HAVEN — When 15-year-old Diana DeMettio began her internship making Elm City resident cards at New Haven City Hall last summer, she had $20 in her savings account. But now she’s socked away more than $400 in savings from her $6.25 an hour job. “I’ve started saving a lot more,” she says demurely about her newfound financial savvy.

She’s not alone. DeMettio is one of 1,000 interns at City Hall’s Youth @ Work program who took a new course in financial literacy last summer designed to encourage young New Haveners from low-income backgrounds to save more. “We’ve seen a lot more saving among our youth since the program began,” says Youth @ Work director Tomi Veale. “I think the program was very helpful.”

The course, which was run by Financial Empowerment for Women, an independent organization that offers education and consulting on financial literacy, offered interns tips on how to save small amounts of money out of each paycheck for future plans.

“They said that if you start saving now, later you can buy a car, go to school, or get a house,” DeMettio says. Worksheets and presentations explained how small sums of money — $50 and $100 per month — can accumulate into large sums over time, allowing prudent savers to start businesses or buy houses years down the road. “These small sums will make a big difference later,” Veale says.

Youth @ Work is a state and federally financed internship program run by New Haven, which finds paid internships for young residents who live at or below the federal poverty line. The program has existed for years, run first by the Board of Education and, since 2003, by the city’s Community Service Administration.

But the savings component is new, introduced last year by Veale and Youth Services director Che Dawson. “We didn’t want our interns to misuse their funds,” explains Veale, who says she was tired of seeing young people spend their money on frivolous purchases or incur hefty fees from check cashing businesses. “The money they protect is the money the will carry on for later.”

Veale hopes to expand the program this coming summer, bringing representatives from banks like Wachovia and Bank of America to the session to help interns set up savings accounts the same day.

But for DeMettio and others, Youth @ Work’s economics lesson has already made a difference. “I used to spend a lot of money on random stuff, like junk food,” DeMettio says, “but now that money is in the bank.” —Nicholas Handler

Literary Scene
Cheap Haven: A home for “homeless” writers

NEW HAVEN — New York and Boston have more to offer writers than New Haven does, but those same writers may have to work more — and perhaps write less.

That’s according to Alexis Zanghi. She’s a co-founder of a local online literary magazine called The Dirty Pond (thedirtypond.com). It’s bi-monthly (every other month) and showcases writers (and other kinds of artists) who live and work in Connecticut.

Zanghi has lived in major metropolitan cities before, but she keeps coming back to the Elm City, a place she enthusiastically calls “a rich mine of creative output.” Her reasons? Utterly practical — it’s cheap to live here.

“In New York, I had to work twice as much just to live,” she says. “New Haven gives you more room and more time to make art. The city is influenced by Yale, but that’s not the only thing. There are so many people doing good work who have nothing to do with Yale.”

Matthew Salyer is one of those people. He’s a student at the University of Connecticut. Zanghi calls his serialized story, “Oh, Pioneers,” “beautiful” in various ways at least three times: “It’s a really beautiful and beautifully written story that’s evocative of the immigrant experience in Connecticut,” she says. “It’s just a beautiful piece of writing.”

The latest issue, launched two Mondays ago, also features music by Kryssi Battalene (who performed at Artspace last weekend); poetry translation by Christina O’Connor (she lives in New Haven); art by Jacob Pongratz (soon to show in Westville) and Josh Jayne (a student at the Paier College of Art in Hamden); Steve Listro (a “bourbon affectionato” in New Haven); and Shangzi herself.

Shangzi says her piece, “Lil’ Creamer,” has a “early-20s, post-college feel.” The statement is drained of pride, but the story is emblematic of the literary publication as a whole — quick and dirty, impulsive and reckless, not too concerned about decorum, not too obsessed with excellence. We can talk about making this happen, it seems to suggest, or we can stop talking and make it happen.

Sorta like the town it celebrates.

New Haven is high-brow enough to be cosmopolitan and low-brow enough to be grounded. It has lofty aspirations without a lofty cost of living. It’s that pond, as it were, between the distant shores of New York and Boston — a little bit filthy, a little bit fabulous.

“We aspire to provide a home for local writers,” she says. “Not that we are on the look-out for misfits. But we look for weird stuff that can’t find a home elsewhere. We want to especially encourage writers moving across genres.”

True to form, The Dirty Pond’s offices are at the Anchor Bar on College Street. “The water cooler is well-stocked,” Shangzi says. —John Stoehr

Anniversaries
Survival Act: The Recovery Act was misnamed

NEW HAVEN — Last week saw the anniversary of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It was passed on the brink of what was feared to be a very deep economic depression.

Though the Great Recession has been painful — and hurting since December 2007 and since before the current Administration — the right-wing echo chamber has won the battle of the message.

Many believe the stimulus bill failed, a big cash give-away to all the wrong people. In retort, all the White House and left-wing supporters can do is say: Look, it could have been worse. But hypotheticals are no grounds for a defense. It’s just guessing. Opponents can merely point to reality — more than 8 millions jobs lost, many of which are never to return.

I thought I’d take a look at how the stimulus bill has affected Connecticut, with special focus on the three largest counties. The long and short of it is this: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was misnamed. It wasn’t about stimulus. It wasn’t about recovery. It was about survival.

When you go to propublica.org, you find a long list of public agencies that provide much-needed services. The economy was tanking so badly so quickly that most of the money went to unemployment insurance, health services (especially for children), schools, transportation, public housing and food stamps. If the government had run out of cash, our infrastructure might have collapsed.

What you also find is that Connecticut has received 28 percent of what it’s been allotted. So when someone says the stimulus went to the public sector and therefore doesn’t count as a stimulus, you can say, “You’re right. There’s more to come.”

The problem, given our 9 percent jobless rate, is this: It might not be soon enough. —John Stoehr

Gay Rites
A gay old time: Pride Center to give out Dorothy Awards

NEW HAVEN — Black tie is optional at the 7th Annual Dorothy Awards this Saturday. But, come on, there are a lot of good reasons to dress up.

First, the all-volunteer New Haven Pride Center (www.newhavenpridecenter.org) is about to celebrate its 15th year as a voice for the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community. Tom Donato, co-president, said recently the group will hold a gala this spring to mark the date.

Most remarkably, there is the anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Connecticut. Since then, things have been looking up. The Pride Center isn’t a political organization, so the news didn’t specifically change its agenda. Still, Donato says, simply, “We’re, of course, thrilled.”

The Dorothy Awards — a night that includes dinner and dancing at Fantasia in North Haven — will be the perfect venue to fit the upbeat mood, and tickets are still available.

Dena Castricone, founder of CABO, the state’s first and only GLBT chamber of commerce is one of this year’s honorees. “Oh, I was really honored,” she says. “The folks at the New Haven Pride Center do such great work.”

The vibes are beyond good. But nobody’s sitting around taking it easy. There is work to be done. The NHPC, guests and honorees — which also include Leif Mitchell, co-chair of GLSEN Connecticut; Michael Morand, associate VP of Yale University for New Haven and State Affairs; and the Imperial Sovereign Court of All Connecticut — strive to do the very best for a community that needs strong representation, even in a state that’s more tolerant than most.

Castricone said her primary concern at this point is making people more aware of CABO’s existence, a goal that will inevitably be helped by her Dorothy Award. “What does the community want?” is a primary question, Donato says, as the group reaches out to other LGBT leaders in the state, revamps their Web site in a major way and talks to people in New Haven who want to know what the Center is all about.

“We have been busy and tired, it’s a lot of work,” he said. “But when we step back sometimes and think of what we’ve done—the whole life of the Center—it’s amazing what an all-volunteer organization can do.” —Cara McDonough

The Theater
Sound Enough: “Fuck the witches!” in so many words

NEW HAVEN — At the Iseman Theater, with viewers on three of the space’s four sides, The Yale School of Drama’s production of Macbeth had a Shakespeare in a fishbowl feel, and certain theatrical effects of the play — that ghostly dagger, the “blood-boltered” Banquo appearing and disappearing at the table — had to be relinquished.

Which was more or less fine with me, since the greatness of Macbeth is in the language. On that score, the cast did fine, meaning we got to hear Shakespeare and not that overwrought “out-Heroding of Herod” that Hamlet cautioned against, and which Shakespeare often inspires in actors.

As Macbeth, Ben Horner had the bluster and the bod, but never sounded the poetic depths of the character. Macbeth is a finely wrought warrior, full of too many misgivings and too much verbalizing to be an effective assassin. Horner gave us a hero none too bright, doomed by a certain literalism of mind. Not a bad reading, but one-dimensional. His best scenes were the physical ones early on with Lady Macbeth (the very capable Christina Maria Acosta): stripping off while his wife arouses him by speaking sweet-nothings (her plans for regicide) was electrifying. Director Devin Brain cut loose most with Macbeth’s posse of bare-chested he-men with tattoos who might’ve stepped out of Braveheart. When thanes fist-pump to this extent, rugby must be on the way.

The more interesting touch was having the Wyrd Sister (Emily Trask) on stage throughout. Clad in an encrusted bodysuit and mask, crossing stage in slow-mo limp like the girl on the video in The Ring, she enacted a chorus, overseeing the bad end to which most of the cast comes. Trask’s delivery of the witch’s speeches were “full of sound and fury.”

A complaint about the staging of Macbeth’s final speech: Macbeth speaks like a man with the rug pulled out from under him, saying, in effect, “fuck the witches!” Macbeth sounded like a guy blubbering while being beaten, just not crying uncle. —Donald Brown

The Great Recession
Broken Family: How to find your missing father

NEW HAVEN — We know how the Great Recession is affecting us. We read about it everyday.

Nine percent unemployment in Connecticut, more than 8 million jobs lost nationwide, $787 billion in federal money just to stay afloat, a state budget sunk in more than $500 million of red ink. We see the human toll, too. In fact, we see the human toll of the recession so often — homelessness, foreclosures, food stamps, unemployment insurance — that one can develop something like “recession fatigue.”

Until you encounter someone like Nikita Gagain.

She’s a student at the University of Maine, a double major in political science and women’s studies. She lives with her mother in Lincoln, just north of Bangor. She plans to graduate in the spring. Yet amid the planning for the future is a deep sense of fear and loss.

Since graduating from high school, Gagain hasn’t seen much of her father, Mike Gagain. Once a year for as little as an hour, she says. That’s not too unexpected. When Mike Gagain divorced Nikita’s mother, he moved back to New Haven and remarried. But since the middle of 2008, Mike Gagain has been missing. No word. Just gone. The last time Nikita knew, he and his new wife were being kicked out of Nikita’s grandmother’s house for their drug addiction.

This is the part of the story where some might think: Well, there you go. Drugs. It’s their fault. Why feel sympathy?

If that were it, you might be right. But dig deeper and you discover Mike and his wife, Debra Marcella, used to be employed as itinerant carpenters until one of their clients ripped them off. The drugs were prescribed for a job-related injury. Eventually, they were both hooked and it got so bad they were kicked out of his mother’s home. Now they live in a dilapidated old house on Shelton Street that’s owned by an acquaintance. In exchange for board, they are using their carpentry skills to fix up the house.

We know this, because the Advocate met Marcella one day at the St. Thomas More Church on Park Street. It’s a soup kitchen that serves lunch every Wednesday. Marcella told the Advocate that she hadn’t eaten that well for the prior two weeks. She also told us that she planned to bring food to her husband, whom she did not name. He was too ashamed, she said, of being needy to show up. “The situation is making him depressed and desperate,” she told Melinda Tuhus for a Jan. 21 story titled “Worse Than You Think.”