Class Acts: Students Hone Their Talents

Class is in session. Frolicking about are a girl in a red yarn wig and shoes that look like giant strawberries, a barelegged boy in white lab coat and pith helmet, an Elvis impersonator in a leopard skin.

We’re at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where instructor Stefan Haves is putting students through a warm-up for a production of “Cirque de Spectacle.”

It’s one stop on a tour for prospective students and their parents, some of whom must decide whether to sign up for July 10 auditions, the last for fall applicants.

Our guide, docent Deanne Levitt, mother of theater arts student Valerie, acknowledges that Arts High takes a little getting used to. Where’s the football field? The cheerleaders?

Leading the way around this small slice of Cal State L.A.’s campus east of Downtown, she tells of one parent who left a tour midway, announcing huffily that she’d “seen quite enough.”

At first, “The purple hair and nose rings really turned me off,” Levitt admits. She was dead set against Valerie transferring from tony Marlborough School for girls. Now, she’s a major fan.

Free expression is coveted here, and a furor erupted recently when dance department chairman Don Bondi, a founding faculty member, was removed and assigned to a desk job at another school.

His offense: Booing a student Mexican-heritage production in which Gov. Pete Wilson was portrayed as a Mexican-baiting bigot. The incident ignited angry debate over where artistic freedom ends and racism begins and whether political correctness conflicts with the idea of art as a unifying force.

Late last week, following a high-profile protest in Bondi’s behalf by a multiracial, multiethnic group of students--and a threatened ACLU lawsuit alleging that his First Amendment rights had been violated--he was reinstated.

Arts High is not the kind of place where one would expect students to cave in meekly. Principal Bo Vitolo describes her students as “alive, energetic, outspoken, mature.”

Our tour begins in Jerry Freedman’s 11th-grade history class. “You’re artists,” he’s telling students. “Did you know that artists were part of the Cold War?” A lively discussion of artistic propaganda--from murals to “Rambo”--ensues.

Later, in student leadership class, parents hear what the kids really think about their school. They say they like the big doses of responsibility--and how “everyone speaks their mind.”

But, says senior class secretary Erin Shelton, 18, she misses “the whole spirit behind football games and dances.”

In a mirrored hall, dancer-choreographer Rudy Perez is scrutinizing lifts and dips. No, no, he says: “I want to see something I haven’t seen before, and I’ve been around a long time. . . . It’s not 1950.”

Former Fifth Dimension singer Patricia Bass Blodgett’s gospel class is seeing a video of its recent concert. The concert was so stirring that one student, leaping to her feet, broke another’s toe.

But, then, enthusiasm appears to be contagious in this eclectic student body of 485. The school is tuition-free, admission highly competitive.

At the July auditions, hopefuls will show their stuff--playing a solo, maybe, or presenting an art portfolio or a pair of monologues. (Rules specify “No Shakespeare.”)

One in four will get in. Girls now outnumber boys, two to one, and hearts leap when a male appears--but, Vitolo says, standards are not bent.

Interest in the school, now 9 years old and California’s first public high school for the arts, reflects both outreach to the inner city and cutbacks in arts at public schools.

It tends to attract those who march to different drummers. And, says Vitolo, a former professional dancer, “Sometimes the talent just blows me away.”

Academics fill the mornings; arts classes, taught by pros, the afternoons. Nights or weekends, one might catch rehearsals of Gilbert and Sullivan or Andrew Lloyd Webber, Chekhov or Oscar Wilde.

One alum dances with the Alvin Ailey Co. Another understudied the lead in “Phantom of the Opera” in San Francisco. But, Vitolo knows, not all who graduate will “pursue their dreams.” The reality is that talent abounds; support for the arts does not.

At the end of a tough day--and lately she’s had a few--she may ask herself: “What would my soul like today?” Then she’ll take in a concert, ballet or recital. Without leaving campus.

A Legacy of Compassion

As a student at Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake), Justin Rascoff was among its biggest boosters. “He just loved that place,” his father recalls. “He immersed himself and absorbed everything the school had to offer.”

On June 4, 1991--three days before he was to graduate--Justin, 18, died in a fiery explosion after losing control of his Toyota convertible on the 134 freeway and plunging down an embankment.

He was on his way home to Beverly Hills from Glendale, where he’d been helping put out a spoof of the school newspaper.

His parents, Joseph and Jane, sued Toyota, alleging design flaws caused the 1991 Celica to oversteer and its gas tank to rupture when the car smashed sideways into a tree.

Toyota, admitting no fault, recently settled out of court for $500,000. Attorney Craig Winterman says his client settled to avoid the expense of a trial and after considering the jury sympathy factor in these cases.

The Rascoffs have given the money to Harvard-Westlake for the David Justin Rascoff Memorial Fund for Faculty Sabbaticals.

It is “exactly what Justin would have wished,” says Rascoff, an entertainment business manager whose company, RZO, has among its clients the Rolling Stones and the Elvis Presley estate.

Frequently, Rascoff says, his son said it was too bad his teachers had to take summer jobs to make ends meet, rather than pursuing some special dream.

The fund, established by the family at the time of Justin’s death, had reached $127,000 through contributions big and small. The $500,000 ensures that in perpetuity at least one faculty member each year will be able to spend a summer “as Justin would have wished,” headmaster Thomas Hudnut says.

Three sabbaticals have already been granted. English teacher Philip Holmes went to Greece, history department chairman David Waterhouse visited baseball fields and Civil War battlefields, and this year history teacher John Corsello will go to Italy.

Justin’s family also planted a daisy garden on campus. Inscribed on a plaque there are words from an editorial Justin wrote, asking that everyone take time to smell the daisies.

Justin, who had been accepted at Princeton University, is remembered by Hudnut as “smart and tireless. He made things happen. He threw off sparks. He was a great kid.”

Battling through their grief, Rascoff says, he and his wife “decided to start our lives again.” Their son Spencer graduated from Harvard-Westlake last year and is at Harvard University. Sixteen months ago, the Rascoffs, then both 48, became parents of twins--a girl and a boy.