Skid Row Dreams

She can still hear the music from long ago, drifting out of a quiet place in her memory. It’s a piano concerto by Mozart, played unevenly by someone not familiar with the classics.

She stops what she’s doing to remember.

The year was 1977. Sherry Jason was a new public defender on a tour of Juvenile Hall. The music originated down a corridor. It was an odd place for Mozart, and its draw was compelling.

Jason broke away from the tour group and followed the melody. She opened the door to a storeroom. There at a piano, a teacher nearby, sat a young man, playing with the kind of emotion that lights fires.

“It’s his first lesson,” the teacher whispered, wonder in her voice.

Jason stood there for a very long time, transfixed by this much quality from a Juvenile Hall inmate. It was a performance made powerful by the very nature of its staging.

Only when the tour group was departing did she leave. And only then did she learn the young man at the piano was being held by the California Youth Authority for murder.

“I remember thinking,” Jason says today, “if only he’d met a piano before he met a gun.”

She left Juvenile Hall and the young inmate vanished from her life. But never from her memory.

In a way, City Hearts, a performing arts center for kids on the edge of Skid Row, is a tribute to genius discovered and lost in a gray environment.

The image of that kid at the piano and the music pouring from his soul haunted Jason for years. As a public defender in the juvenile division, she began realizing with every passing day that something more was needed here.

So many of the kids were coming from the downtown areas, from crowded apartments, from Skid Row hotels, from parents whose lives were blurred by drugs and alcohol, and from a lifetime of failure so pervasive it had damaged their dreams in infancy.

There wasn’t a lot she could do about that. But she could offer them an interlude of music that might, just might, make a difference down the road.

Almost magically, a fellow public defender was buying an old Challenge Creamery Building on the edge of Skid Row. He needed investors.

Jason looked at the building one day and fell in love with it. By borrowing and mortgaging, she and her husband, Bob, also a public defender, came up with $75,000 to remodel a section of the building into a studio.

Bob took a $35,000 retirement payment in a lump sum, committing his future to his wife’s dream, and to kids he had never met.

Offering dance lessons first was a natural extension of Jason’s own interest. Born in L.A., she had been in love with ballet from childhood and still teaches it at her home studio in Topanga.

She hired two more teachers with her own money and began looking for students. Downtown people scoffed. Skid Row kids don’t give a damn about dancing. Cops warned her that the inner city was a dangerous place to be.

But this isn’t a woman who gives up easily.

Jason knocked on enough doors to rally an army. Finally, the principal of nearby 9th Street School not only endorsed her idea, but arranged transportation to send students to her studio.

In 1985, City Hearts gave its first public performance with 45 kids dancing to a segment from the ballet “Swan Lake.”

Today, it offers free lessons in music, dance and drama to 1,000 young people a week from throughout the downtown area, and sends teachers to schools and homeless shelters when the kids can’t make it downtown.

Jason has to fight for the $100,000 a year it takes to run the studio, but never seems to tire of going after grants and donations to share what she loves with anyone willing to participate.

How effective her studio has become is reflected in the fact that beginning next month, Juvenile Court will begin sentencing some of its wards to lessons at City Hearts as a condition of probation.

Jason realizes that teaching young people music or drama isn’t the answer to the spiraling statistics of juvenile crime.

“But maybe,” she says, “we can give them a feeling for the arts they might not otherwise have. I want them to be able to dream. I want to hear them say, ‘I want to be something when I grow up ... ‘ “

In that first “Swan Lake” performance, she remembers a young inner city boy being handed a bouquet during his bows. He held it for a moment and then, with a gesture of gratitude beyond words, tossed it gently to Sherry Jason.

She cried, and couldn’t help thinking about a young man, a piano and the music of Mozart in a juvenile jail a long time ago . . .