Arts Appreciation 101: Listen Up, Folks

You’re talking to the right person,” says Maribelle Koller at the Boys & Girls Club of Capistrano Valley. And for the next 30 minutes or so we lament and curse the fates and look for silver linings while talking about kids bucking the odds of making it in this life without strong parental help.

I’d had the subject on the brain since last week, when I came upon a 25-year-old man who lived near the new $200-million concert hall in Costa Mesa. Personable and well-spoken, he was frank about getting a late start in turning his life around: He’d left L.A. three years ago to come to Orange County and, even without a high school diploma or GED, was determined to make something of himself.

As a sidelight, he told me with wry certainty, he would never set foot in the arts center. For most of my time with him, he talked of growing up not seeing a father who was almost perpetually in jail and how his mother turned him and two siblings over to his grandfather for rearing. It was his grandfather, he said, who kept telling him not to wind up like his father.

If only, I thought. If only this guy had had more parental influence in his life. I thought it was amazing he had the gumption and the seeming good disposition to try to improve himself, but couldn’t help lamenting how much easier it might have been for him if someone had been there to insist, for example, that he go to school.

I figured people like Koller, who I count among society’s army of unknown heroes, knew the type all too well: kids with promise who find themselves behind the eight ball.

I ask if it drives her nuts. “It’s sad,” she says, choosing a different word. “Because there’s so much in here we offer, and kids don’t take advantage of it.” And why not? “I think it’s the lack of parenting,” she says, “because we have the programs, but we can’t force it on the kids.”

My image of Boys & Girls clubs is of kids shooting baskets after school. Not by a long shot. At the Capo Valley club, Koller mentioned a science department, a computer lab, sports and an oceanic program where kids can take field trips at sea.

And then there’s her particular passion: the arts. Koller has worked in both the public and private sectors and is the club’s fine-arts director.

In the quest last week that led me to the 25-year-old man, I hadn’t set out specifically to find someone who didn’t appreciate the arts, but it just so happened he made it clear he wouldn’t be caught dead in a symphony hall.

That makes Koller cringe. “Young people need the arts because the arts builds confidence in us,” she says. “There is no right and wrong in art. When children come from abusive or neglectful homes, their academics are going to be low. It’s going to be hard for them. When it comes to art, and I praise what they do, they start feeling good about themselves and they start doing better in other areas.”

As I wrote last week, it’s not necessary that everyone like the arts. But young people miss something if they never have exposure to them.

Still, that’s a separate issue from that of parents who don’t even fulfill the Parental 101 obligation to make sure their kids go to school.

To me, one of the great tragedies of our society is that so many of the “at risk” kids have innate talents and smarts. Koller sees them all the time. “They have dreams,” she says, “but they don’t have a road to meet those dreams.”

If there’s a recurring theme, Koller says, it’s the absence of a father. I realize that’s not exactly a scoop, but it’s a problem that never seems to go away.

Too often, Koller says, the mothers are working a couple jobs to pay the bills. When they aren’t working, their natural human tendency is to want some down time for themselves.

I keep telling Koller about the guy I met last week and how his determination to make something of himself got to me. I ask her again how she keeps from going nuts, given that she must see young people like him all the time.

“Not nuts,” she says again. “It just makes me sad. You see them with all that potential and not going anywhere. Young lives, young kids, they’re our future. What kind of future do they have without being taken care of, without being taught or directed now?”

The cliche is the saving grace: People like her try to make it work, one kid at a time, one day at a time.

And take solace in the payoff.

“I have just seen a lot of cases,” Koller says, “where kids have beat all the odds.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.