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Life & Times Transcript

06/02/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Some movies make prostitution look glamorous, but in real life, it's not that pretty.

Wendy Barnes>> You don't survive. You're so screwed up in the head afterwards. You can't live in regular society, so you go back there because you can disassociate. You know, you can just turn everything off and you don't have to deal with reality.

Val Zavala>> And then, she's under twenty and already has a national title under her coat. Meet America's top teen chef.

It's all coming up next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It's called the world's oldest profession, but it lures some very young women. In prostitution, the prime age is between fourteen and sixteen. But how do young women get involved in prostitution and, more importantly, how do they escape? Hena Cuevas has the story of one young woman who got involved when her boyfriend became her pimp.

Hena Cuevas>> Standing in the middle of her Orange County kitchen, thirty-seven year old Wendy Barnes is working to put her past behind her. You see, Wendy used to be a prostitute.

Wendy Barnes>> I'm putting one foot in front of the other, but I'm stumbling along and I'm trying my hardest not to trip over my own feet.

Hena Cuevas>> It started in Seattle when she was only fifteen. She ran away from home and moved in with her seventeen year old boyfriend, Greg.

Wendy Barnes>> It didn't start as this pimp-whore relationship. It very rarely does, I don't think, for anybody. I don't know a woman out there that ever entered a relationship going, "Oh, there's a pimp. Let me go be with him." (laughter)

Hena Cuevas>> At seventeen, she gave birth to their first child. Broke and with a baby, Greg told her they could make some easy cash if she went on a special date he'd arranged.

Wendy Barnes>> He said a Chinese man is going to stop and pick you up. He's going to offer you either twenty-five or thirty dollars to have sex with you. You'll have sex with him right there in the car and have him drop you off where I'll meet you.

Hena Cuevas>> And she did, getting paid twenty-five dollars to have sex in the bushes.

Wendy Barnes>> I knew at that point that I was worthless. I knew that, no matter how hard I ever tried, I wouldn't be human.

Hena Cuevas>> The money didn't last long and Wendy had to do it all over again.

Wendy Barnes>> So a week later, we're in the same situation. But at this point, it was easier for him to tell me this is what you need to do and, well, I need to do a couple more dates because, you know, he needs his car fixed and, well, if I love him, I would do this for him, and I did.

Hena Cuevas>> When did you realize that you were a prostitute?

Wendy Barnes>> I don't think I ever realized I was a prostitute as much as I realized I was worthless. I never thought of him as a pimp, you know. He's just doing this to get by. He's doing this so that we could have money, so that we can have a good life someday.

Hena Cuevas>> By then, drugs were in the picture and it wasn't just Wendy. She says that eventually they had eight to ten girls living with them, some as young as thirteen, all working as prostitutes. How much money do you think was coming in?

Wendy Barnes>> Different times, different amounts. We would go out and make as much as we could. The more we made, the more of a chance that Greg would treat us nicely.

Hena Cuevas>> It's a cycle that continued for fifteen years. But the business wasn't just limited to Seattle. According to Wendy, when things got slow, she and the girls would get into a car and drive to southern California to try and make some money. Once here, they would not only take to the streets to perform their tricks, but they would also work motels and even apartment complexes.

Wendy Barnes>> We would make runs down here to Orange County to Harbor Boulevard and stay for anywhere from three weeks to three months, work as much as we could, make as much money as we could and then go back up to Seattle.

Hena Cuevas>> Did you ever think about leaving?

Wendy Barnes>> Oh, yeah.

Hena Cuevas>> Once she actually did, moving into a domestic violence center, but with no skills and no emotional support, it only took six months before she went back to the only life she knew.

Wendy Barnes>> You don't survive. You're so screwed up in the head afterwards. You can't live in regular society, so you go back there because you can disassociate. You know, you can just turn everything off and you don't have to deal with reality.

Hena Cuevas>> Getting out of that life isn't easy, according to author Anne Bissell. A former prostitute herself, she's the author of the book, "Memoirs of a Sex Industry Survivor".

Anne Bissell>> It's a guilt, it's a shame, it's a feeling of being marked. You know, beyond all the glamour and the glitter, there's the reality of, you know, what you've done. Even if you were forced into it, there's often a lot of issues around it.

Hena Cuevas>> She says Hollywood has played a big role in glamorizing prostitution, especially in the movie "Pretty Woman" starring Julia Roberts.

[Film Clip]

Anne Bissell>> I saw "Pretty Woman" and that movie alone has caused us so much harm. That movie alone, I can't tell you how many people have probably been trafficked, have gotten into prostitution. Why did she do that movie?

Hena Cuevas>> Bissell has been out of prostitution since 1987. Ten years ago, she founded Sex Industry Survivors Anonymous, a twelve-step program to help other prostitutes like thirty year old Heather get out.

Anne Bissell>> They wanted to know how long you've been out of the lifestyle.

Heather>> Two years.

Anne Bissell>> Two years? Okay, good.

Heather>> Yeah.

Hena Cuevas>> Heather worked the streets of Hollywood for almost fifteen years.

Heather>> This guy said he needed to have sex and I was broke, so I said okay, I'll do it. So I ended up having sex with this guy for really less money, but I can't say the price. It's too embarrassing (laughter).

Hena Cuevas>> How much was it?

Heather>> Twenty dollars.

Hena Cuevas>> Is there ever the temptation or do you ever have thoughts about going back or are you afraid that you might slip and go back?

Heather>> Oh, yeah, every day. I mean, people still try to pick me up and I'm like, no, I don't do that. Even my old regulars are like, "Heather, come here." I'm like, "No, leave me alone. I don't do that bull*** anymore. I don't like it." If I do that, I'll end up going back to jail and I don't like jail.

Hena Cuevas>> According to Paula Petrotta, Director of the Commission for the Status of Women, between eight to nine thousand women are arrested every year in Los Angeles for prostitution.

Paula Petrotta>> The focus is generally on women and the acts that they commit and not necessarily looking for people who, in fact, pay for prostitutes and what their responsibility and what their role is in this crime.

Hena Cuevas>> In Wendy's case, going to jail is what finally brought an end to her lifestyle. She was charged with Compelling Prostitution, basically looking the other way while minors were being exploited.

Wendy Barnes>> The first couple of months, I was in a total daze. I couldn't even figure out what I did wrong. It's like, well, they'll realize the truth. They'll know that Greg's the one that's doing this and we just all followed his direction. But that doesn't matter, you know. I was twenty-nine years old. I was a grownup. I should have stood up for what was right and I didn't.

Hena Cuevas>> Once she got out of prison, Wendy found the self group online and began the slow road to recovery.

Wendy Barnes>> I hear so many times, "Wow, thank God you were there. There's nobody else out there doing this."

Hena Cuevas>> Wendy's pimp, Greg, gets out of prison next year.

Wendy Barnes>> I know that on August 5, 2007, I have to start running. I want to move to another country (laughter). I really do, but I don't have the finances for it (laughter). You know, I don't know what to expect from him.

Hena Cuevas>> For now, she's living with her mother and younger sister and, even though she's working two jobs, she knows just how fragile her life is right now.

Wendy Barnes>> I don't fit in to that life anymore, but yet I don't fit in to this life either and I don't know where I belong.

Hena Cuevas>> I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> The history of southern California can be told in one word: land. Well, make that two: homes. And for the hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the Los Angeles Times, it's taking a special look at, among other things, real estate.

Tom Curwen is an editor with the Los Angeles Times. He oversaw a special publication looking back at a century of real estate coverage, everything from land grabs to glass homes. I talked with Tom about our obsession with houses and land.

Tom Curwen>> We've always been obsessive about real estate. We've graded it, we've built on it, we've torn it down, we've rebuilt it and graded it again. In this particular story, we've identified about thirty or so various touchstones in southern California ranging from Howard Jarvis's home to the Cascades up in Sylmar to a peak in the San Bernardino Mountains where the grid of southern California was laid out in 1872. The touchstones are meant to help suggest that each of these places have a very current history as well as a very rich and evocative past.

Val Zavala>> What was it about Howard Jarvis's house that attracted your attention?

Tom Curwen>> Well, you can't think about property and home ownership in southern California without thinking about going back to 1978 and thinking about Howard Jarvis and the great Proposition 13 that totally transformed the landscape in southern California. We visited Howard Jarvis. Of course, he passed away in 1986, but his widow, Estelle Jarvis, is still there. We just had a chance to walk through and sort of see the back room where Jarvis had his fires burning and would have his cocktails and smoke his cigars and think about what was going to be such a landmark piece of an initiative passed in the state.

Val Zavala>> And it's impacting almost everything.

Tom Curwen>> Everything. It still is, absolutely.

Val Zavala>> But there is a certain kind of house that Los Angeles kind of made its own and it's glass houses. You focused on that, yes?

Tom Curwen>> That's right. What we found interesting is how the region sort of shaped architecture in one form or another. With that, we went to our architectural critic, Christopher Hawthorne, and we asked him to identify an element here of architecture that sort of is iconic for Los Angeles. He came back with the notion of glass houses and these walls of glass that you see in so many of the great modernist masterpieces of contemporary architecture, these enormous floor-to-ceiling panes of glass that, in so many ways, brought the inside outside and the outside inside.

Val Zavala>> Another thing we're famous for is not just building, but rebuilding in some of the most dangerous areas. You have a whole section called "states of denial".

Tom Curwen>> Absolutely. It's one of the great things about southern California. We love this place so much that we just can't get away from it. In this piece, we identified some places. Of course, Malibu with the fires, Bluebird Canyon down in Laguna for the mudslides and the hillsides that are slipping away. Also, we went to Wrightwood where we just found a couple that are basically living on top of a fault line, this great San Andreas fault out there. We love this place and we just can't get away from it. We will build and rebuild and continue to come back no matter what sort of peril these homes and this region puts us in.

Val Zavala>> You can't talk about real estate without talking about booms and busts, but mostly booms here in southern California.

Tom Curwen>> Booms have defined the region whether it's the current bubble we refer to it now as or whether it's --

Val Zavala>> -- we're a little more cautious now.

Tom Curwen>> Precisely, precisely. But back then in the 1880s, we had a real estate boom that would perhaps put the present one to shame. Fueled by the Southern Pacific railroads, it was bringing people out here by the thousands a day. Speculators just went nuts. At first, it was a fairly modest and, you know, temperate bit of development that was going on, but soon it took off like wildfire.

You had advertisements that showed paddle boats going up the San Gabriel River, talking about coming into this region and owning a piece of land in southern California. You could walk out on the street and you'd be hearing the sound of the saw, sounds of hammers. People were building and getting ready for this influx of new Angelenos running into the region.

Val Zavala>> But it was highly marketed.

Tom Curwen>> Highly marketed. The advertisements went around the country. Los Angeles was billed as being a great home for immigrants and, as we still find ourselves as being a great home for immigrants, we find that the history of this region says so much about who we are today.

Patt Morrison has written about Pickfair. Pickfair is the great house that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. built in the 1920s for themselves. It was a great house for Angelenos at the time to help identify and to think about what was possible in their own lives. Of course, they could never aspire to that sort of wealth and that sort of celebrity, but the great quality about Pickfair was that it was sort of a house for all the people in one manner or another, sort of the western White House in some odd way.

Patt follows the history of the house all the way up to its being sort of semi torn down when Pia Zadora and her husband moved in there in the late 1980s and rebuilt it in the 1990s. Patt talks to the present-day owner of the place as he's living in it with his family at this point.

Val Zavala>> And finally you take a look at the big sweep, the evolution of real estate, which was made easy in a way when you look back at your own archives, yes?

Tom Curwen>> Yeah, it's fascinating. We went into the archives of this paper and we were able to discover that our Sunday magazines have evolved over the decades and pretty much charts the development of southern California. The first issues that came out in the 1920s were devoted largely to farmers and the orchards. You slowly saw in the 1930s that that orchard became changed and it became suddenly gardens. Then finally in the 1940s or so, it simply became Home Magazine.

This was our way of going into the section and seeing how it paralleled the development of this city and its evolution from being sort of a rural and bucolic sort of place to now the great metropolis that it is.

Val Zavala>> Tom Curwen, editor-at-large with the Los Angeles Times, thank you so much for your work and your thoughts.

Tom Curwen>> My pleasure. Thank you.

Val Zavala>> The special anniversary edition about real estate comes out in this Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> How can an ambitious young person from a poor neighborhood escape poverty? Well, of course, there's always a college education if they can afford it and a record contract if they're so lucky. But some young people are discovering that a successful souffl� can be a ticket to success. Toni Guinyard met one very impressive young woman who's turned a talent in the kitchen into a scholarship at a culinary school.

Adreena Winnfield>> I started cooking when I was eleven and I've been doing it ever since then.

Toni Guinyard>> It doesn't take long to figure out that Adreena Winnfield's world is all about food.

Adreena Winnfield>> I would try to create stuff I've seen off the Food Network and it always didn't come so right and I would use my little sister as a tester. She would eat everything, but it all wasn't so good.

Toni Guinyard>> Adreena has come a long way since then. At seventeen years old, she entered the Art Institute's Best Teen Chef Competition of 2005.

Adreena Winnfield>> I filled out an entry form and I had to do an essay and set up a menu for the contest and that's how I got picked.

Paul Yarmoluk>> We look at their organizational skills and what they submit, their recipes, their pictures, the time they put into that simple little book that they gave us. You can see it. You can read and see the intensity that they may have in that book, so I look for that.

Anne Mack>> And they also have to do a two-course original menu. They don't actually have to cook it, but they have to present an original recipe.

Adreena Winnfield>> For the menu, I remember Cream of Mushroom Chicken with roasted potatoes and vegetables, with asparagus and a garlic and zucchini spread.

Toni Guinyard>> That recipe got her into the national cook-off where she dazzled the judges and beat out about three hundred other high school seniors. Her prize? A forty thousand dollar full scholarship to study culinary arts at the Art Institute California, Orange County.

Anne Mack>> It really signifies her talent and her promise as a future chef.

Adreena Winnfield>> I've always wanted to cook. I always said I was going to be a chef. But when I entered the competition, that's when I realized this is really what I want to do.

Anne Mack>> Every local winner we've ever had, every national winner we've ever had in this program, has said, "I never thought I would win."

Toni Guinyard>> But they are winning. Ryan Jackson and Anthony Ortega placed first and second in the 2006 regional competition. We caught up with them training for the national event, in some ways, following in Adreena's footsteps.

Adreena Winnfield>> Well, it's like a social gathering to talk over. It brings people together. You need it to survive on an everyday basis. There's someone that's always looking to try something new and that's what I want to offer. Something new, something interesting, something good, something that you'll remember.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> When we met Adreena, she was less than one year into the program and a world away from her past. This journey has taken her from her hometown of the Bayview Hunters Point community of San Francisco to the Art Institute in Santa Ana.

Adreena Winnfield>> I mean, it's like a different world. Well, where I live, you know, we have a lot of violence and there's just a lot going on. It is a kind of rough community, so it's got me out of that and it opened a lot of doors to succeed for me and it's just a blessing. It really is.

Paul Yarmoluk>> We see kids who come up from various socio-economic situations. We see that spark in their eyes. We capitalize on it.

Toni Guinyard>> Paul Yarmoluk is an industry veteran with forty years' experience. As academic director of the Art Institute, Santa Ana Campus, he's guided a lot of would-be chefs to appreciate the craft of what it is they dream of doing. As for Adreena --

Paul Yarmoluk>> She is respectable. She gives great respect to the faculty, to all the chefs.

[Film Clip]

Paul Yarmoluk>> She shows up happy. She has a great disposition which winds up being, oh, it just communicates to the chefs immediately. So when we find somebody happy, we like it even that much more. We don't look upon this as a kind of easy way out where you come and you book-learn. The first day you get here, you'll be mopping floors or picking up fifty gallon buckets of water ready to go to be boiled for stock. So immediately that glamour almost disappears.

[Film Clip]

Paul Yarmoluk>> It's a very tough job. It kind of likens itself to the Netherworld, somewhere between heaven and hell.

Toni Guinyard>> For Adreena, being in this culinary limbo puts her closer to what she wants to do for a living, but far away from the two people who inspire her most: her mother --

Adreena Winnfield>> One thing that she tells us is clean as you go. Always clean as you go. Be a clean cook. Wash my dishes. I make so many dishes and I don't like washing dishes.

Toni Guinyard>> A little messy in the kitchen, huh?

Adreena Winnfield>> Yes.

Toni Guinyard>> And what did grandma teach you?

Adreena Winnfield>> My grandma taught me, no matter what you do, it could be the worst job or the best job, always do your best.

Toni Guinyard>> This is all part of a brand new world for Adreena. She and many of the other participants in the Teen Chef Competition had never set foot in a professional skills kitchen before the cook-off and, once they got there, they realized there was a lot they didn't know.

Adreena Winnfield>> "I asked them what is a demi-glass. I don't know what that is. I went to find the sauce in the store, and you have to make it yourself (laughter)."

Toni Guinyard>> She can laugh now, but she wasn't laughing then. Before rushing off to class --

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Adreena had lunch at 50 Forks, a restaurant on the Art Institute's Santa Ana campus that is open to the public. The chefs in the kitchen and the wait staff out front are all culinary art students. This is one of the classes required before graduation, a class Adreena will eventually have to take.

Adreena Winnfield>> I want to cater to the stars.

Toni Guinyard>> To the stars?

Adreena Winnfield>> Yes.

Toni Guinyard>> Why the stars?

Adreena Winnfield>> That's where the big bucks are (laughter). My own catering business. Anything you want, we can do it. Starting price about four hundred thousand.

Toni Guinyard>> Four hundred thousand?

Adreena Winnfield>> Yep.

Toni Guinyard>> To cater what?

Adreena Winnfield>> Events, parties, weddings, birthdays, anything you want.

Paul Yarmoluk>> If she drives her business skills combined with a direction that she wants to go to, absolutely. She has that inner strength that we can see in her, so it's doable. I don't know about the four hundred grand (laughter). You know, that's all relative.

Anne Mack>> I can see her owning her own business and doing her own thing, if not a professional chef celebrity somehow, perhaps on a food show or a food channel, because she's got an amazing presence in front of the camera. I think what everyone would say about Adreena that sets her apart is that she has this natural talent that just was different.

Toni Guinyard>> So don't be surprised if one day you turn on the television or walk into a restaurant and be treated to the culinary talents of the one-time Best Teen Chef of 2005. Ten years from now, what am I going to read about you?

Adreena Winnfield>> Catering some big event and it was a blast. It was perfect.

Toni Guinyard>> For now, she'll stick to being a student. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> If you'd like to find out more about the cooking contest, you can go to their website at artinstitute.edu/btc for Best Teen Chef.

We don't need these anymore and this one hasn't been working for years, yet nothing says San Pedro more than the lighthouse on Point Fermin. Kristin Childs is the historic site curator at Point Fermin Lighthouse.

Kristin Childs>> The Point Fermin Lighthouse was built in 1874. It was first lit on December 15 of that year by our first lighthouse keeper, Mary Smith. Point Fermin is not your typical lighthouse. When you see it, you expect first to see that tall tower that you see as most lighthouses. We're actually a very beautiful Victorian house that includes the keeper's quarters, the oil room in the basement and then, of course, the tower access, the tower for the lighthouse, and all the keeper's functions are in the tower.

Very little of it has changed over time. A few changes during World War II with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, our lights were all blacked out on the coast here. We no longer had a light in there. They removed the light during the war, so for many years, the lighthouse just functioned as a house basically for the local supervisor. Until 2002, we had somebody living in the house. That's when our last person lived in the house retired.

So today, we are now open to the public. The entire building is open to the public. You can go on a tour through the building, see all the floors where the keepers lived their daily lives and also into the tower where the lighthouse keepers functioned and where the light was originally. It's a beautiful view. You can see all of Palos Verdes hills around here and the San Pedro hills.

My hope for the lighthouse is that it becomes a center for the community. I'd kind of like that to broaden and become a symbol of Los Angeles. We're connected to Los Angeles, we're connected to the Point, we're connected to the history of Los Angeles. We're one of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles. I think the lighthouse lasting a hundred thirty-one years here on the Point, it should last a hundred thirty more.

Val Zavala>> This is a great weekend to visit the lighthouse. It's in full bloom for their spring garden show. Just give them a call at (310) 241-0684. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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