Getting Into the Swing for Children’s Center Benefit

More than 120 guests paid $75 each to attend a Dixieland jazz concert on Saturday at the Design Center South in Laguna Niguel, raising an estimated $15,000 in ticket charges and donations for the Blind Children’s Learning Center.

The center, in Santa Ana, offers programs to help visually impaired infants and toddlers develop play skills, sensory abilities and communication. It is also an accredited preschool where youngsters can learn and play with other blind and sighted children. Executive director Ronnie Passolt said party proceeds would help underwrite tuition for the center’s 40 students.

“Parents pay on a sliding scale that doesn’t anywhere near touch the cost” of running an 11-month program for infants through preschoolers, said Passolt. She estimated tuition at about $13,000 per year per child, adding that the school underwrites 70 to 100% of each child’s fees. With party proceeds, Passolt said, she hoped to underwrite two students.

The benefit was a family affair for chairwoman Kim Cirillo, whose mother, father, sister and brother all pitched in.

“My sister and dad built the (stage) set. My brother is working the lights and sound. And my mom did a lot to help us all,” said Cirillo, a board member with two children enrolled at the center. “This is their party as much as mine.”

The fund-raiser got rolling at 7 p.m. in a tented courtyard, where guests--escorted from the parking lot by El Toro-stationed Marines--bought drinks and sat at white-clothed tables facing the stage. Pictured on the hand-painted, homemade set was a narrow street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, birthplace of Dixieland jazz.

When most of the tables were full, the concert and musicology lesson began, compliments of the 20th Century Jazz Band, which is headed by clarinet and saxophone player Art Cutcliff--Kim Cirillo’s dad.

Cutcliff and his five band members worked their way through tunes that illumined the birth and development of jazz as announcer Bob Chase read scripted tidbits about plantation songs and turpentine camps and cigar-box guitars and “blue notes.” It didn’t take long for the well-heeled crowd to kick in with rowdy applause and even a few hoots and hollers.

After an hour, the musicians broke for a 45-minute intermission, and guests dined on buffet sandwiches, fruit, vegetables and desserts. The second half of the program included performances by the vocal group the Close Encounter and another set by the 20th Century Jazz Band.

Helping Cirillo (and her family) were committee members Bryn De Beikes, Cindy Bright, Laurie Frei and Linn Morgan.

Among guests were Doy and Dee Henley, Sam and Francesca Rehnborg, Mike and Kathi McLean, Mary Jo and David Lang, John and Nancy Hall and Dick and Anita Timboe.