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Life & Times Transcript
08/11/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- What's it like to be fine one day, then locked up in a mental ward the next? That's what happened to this reporter. Valerie Godines>> I felt cornered. I felt as if something ominous were after me. I felt like a wild animal. Val Zavala>> And then, taggers think twice about leaving their mark on Montebello. This city is using more than paint to wipe out graffiti. These stories and more 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>> Imagine being a successful professional, a wife and a mother, and then suddenly going insane. Well, that's what happened to one Orange County woman who woke up one day with the bizarre belief that she had killed her daughter. Well, that plunged her into the world of mental illness culminating in electroshock therapy. Did she make it through? Roger Cooper has the story based on a special series in The Orange County Register. Roger Cooper>> It's right there on the front page of The Orange County Register for all the world to see, a major five-part series that tells what it's like for a person to go mentally insane. "Brain Storm" was written by Register reporter, Valerie Godines. What makes this situation unique is that it was the writer, the newspaper reporter herself, who went insane. Valerie Godines>> On December 5, 2004, I went completely psychotic. I mean, psychotic. I thought people were following me. I thought I was being filmed for a movie. I thought I was Jesus Christ. I just went completely crazy. Roger Cooper>> How many people would tell the world they'd gone insane by putting it in a newspaper? Valerie views it this way. Valerie Godines>> It's interesting. I thought about it for a long time because initially it was something that I was very ashamed of. But the best way I think that I can describe it is that I'm a storyteller and this is the biggest story of my life. Roger Cooper>> In her series, Valerie uses her reporting skills to report on herself. For the few parts she can't remember, she interviewed people who were around her at the time. Your series is called what? Valerie Godines>> "Brain Storm" because that's what it felt like. Just turbulent weather inside my head. Roger Cooper>> Valerie tells in detail how her battle with bipolar disorder affected her, her young daughter, Gabriella, and her college professor husband, David. David Fitzgerald>> You know, the weird thing to me was that, within the span of twenty-four hours, someone who seemed absolutely normal could go stark raving mad. On that Thursday evening, she was absolutely fine. Coming home on Friday afternoon, she called me on my cell phone and I could tell that something was very wrong. She was paranoid, she was talking gibberish and, by the time I got home, you couldn't reason with her. She was in another world. Valerie Godines>> I thought I had murdered my daughter, so I called 9-1-1 in a panic. The police showed up and they interviewed me and they could tell right away that I was very sick. They told my husband, you know, "You need to take her to the emergency room." Roger Cooper>> A short time after the police came to her home, a very frightened Valerie found herself here at the UCI Medical Center admitted to the mental ward on an emergency basis. She still remembers looking out the windows to see the hotel across the street and she vividly remembers what it was like to be a mental patient. Valerie Godines>> It's funny. Everyone thinks of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and that sort of experience. There are parts of it that are like that. You know, when I first got into the hospital, the first thing they do is search your bags. They want to make sure that you're not carrying anything sharp, anything you could use to slit your wrists or hurt somebody else. But it's very bizarre because you walk in and you see so many people who are drugged and people who are sort of wandering around aimlessly and muttering to themselves. Roger Cooper>> Valerie takes her readers through her three stays in the mental ward, her treatment with medication and electroshock therapy, through her manic highs and deeply depressed lows. What's it like to go insane? Amazingly, Valerie remembers most of it. Valerie Godines>> It's a terribly frightening experience. I felt cornered. I felt as if something ominous were after me. I felt like a wild animal and my senses were heightened. You know, your shirt is black and I saw it as three shades darker and red became the color of blood. David Fitzgerald>> She would sleep eighteen hours a day. I would have to go in every twenty minutes and check on her to make sure she hadn't killed herself and it was if the woman I had married had disappeared. Roger Cooper>> Today she's on medication and still sees her psychiatrist, but is back to reporting for The Register. David Fitzgerald>> She slowly came back. There are ups and downs, but for the last six months, she's been back. Today she's just as she was two years ago. Roger Cooper>> And making up for lost time with her daughter, Gabriella. Valerie Godines>> I have a very special relationship with my daughter. When I was severely depressed, I was disconnected from the world and I was disconnected from my daughter. I would just stare straight through her as if she weren't there and I think she was very hurt by that. We do normal weekend things now, now that I'm able to. Roger Cooper>> Normal is good. Valerie Godines>> Yeah, it really is. Roger Cooper>> You'd have to wonder if doing this series might have been harmful to Valerie's condition. Valerie Godines>> I had long conversations with my psychiatrist about this. His initial concern was that it would hurt me professionally and I thought about that long and hard and sought advice from numerous editors about that. Perhaps it's naïve on my part, but I thought, you know, ultimately I wouldn't want to work for somebody who had so much trouble with mental illness. Roger Cooper>> Is there a lurking fear in you that you could go back? Valerie Godines>> Yes, definitely. I think I've accepted that I'll probably suffer from bouts of depression for the rest of my life. That, I think I can manage. The real fear is that I'll go psychotic again, but I think now that we're educated enough that we know the warning signs. I think that I have a wide safety net of support, so my friends and coworkers and family know the warning signs so we can see it coming from a distance and head it off. Roger Cooper>> Valerie's trip into insanity has left her acutely aware of street people and the many who are mentally ill. Valerie Godines>> I feel very lucky and I feel so sad when I see a homeless person because I know that we're the same. Perhaps the only difference is that I have great insurance and I have a wonderful network of friends and support that they don't have, but we're really the same. Roger Cooper>> And for anyone watching her who might still be locked in a brain storm of their own, Valerie has this advice. Valerie Godines>> I would say there really is a way out and to please, please not hurt yourself, as tempting as it is and as much as you may want to, to go get help from your psychiatrist, a therapist, and to not stop until you get the kind of help that you need, and to lean on people, to not be afraid to lean on people for help. But more than anything, I would say not to hurt yourself and there is a way out of the darkness. Roger Cooper>> The job of a good reporter is to follow the story, no matter where it takes you, and this reporter at The Register has certainly done that. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> Roger's story was produced in cooperation with The Orange County Register. Valerie's story continues this week. If you'd like to read her full story online, you can go to their website at ocregister.com. 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>> Their graffiti problem was getting out of hand, so one small town in the San Gabriel Valley decided to crack down. But they didn't just get tough. They got smart, and now graffiti vandals are doing time behind bars. That's right, convicted of felonies for tagging. How did they do it? And can other cities follow suit? I went to Montebello to find out. Montebello is a quiet town of about sixty thousand people eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The story of graffiti here is similar to many cities in southern California. Mayor Robert Bagwell says, when the city hit hard financial times about five years ago, it eliminated the anti-graffiti task force and guess what happened? Mayor Robert Bagwell>> All of a sudden, the graffiti started to climb. It went up to almost five to six hundred percent. Val Zavala>> Over a few years, graffiti went from a few thousand incidents to fifty-five thousand incidents. But even when vandals were caught, the courts couldn't do much. Mayor Robert Bagwell>> But it's really your frustration for the police department to make an arrest and fill out the paperwork. They get back out on the street and they say, "I just arrested him forty-eight hours ago." Val Zavala>> They had to do something. Enter Officer Ismael Navarro. He's become the Colombo of graffiti cases and he's done something unprecedented. He's gotten four felony convictions against taggers. The key? Documenting at least four hundred dollars worth of damage by a single tagger. That qualifies as a felony. Officer Ismael Navarro>> So now we've established some guidelines here in the city of Montebello that, when they go out and they tag, for example, two walls, they come out here and that's considered a felony because it's over four hundred dollars. Val Zavala>> Explain it again. So just tagging two walls, they could be a felon? Officer Ismael Navarro>> Yes. Val Zavala>> Because it's over -- Officer Ismael Navarro>> -- four hundred dollars. Val Zavala>> Worth of -- Officer Ismael Navarro>> -- damage. Mayor Robert Bagwell>> So they all add up, A, B, C and D. Add that total up and you get it up to the felony area. Officer Ismael Navarro>> All these vandals, whether they're juvenile or adult, always think that, oh, it's all right. I'm not going to get caught. Well, guess what? Here in Montebello, we're doing everything we can to implement this new process and it's working. Val Zavala>> So far, they've made a hundred forty arrests, gotten a hundred sixteen convictions, and four felony sentences, some as long as a year, followed by three years on probation. Officer Ismael Navarro>> What that means is that we're able to search them whenever we have any reasonable suspicion that he's committing any crimes, whether it's vandalism or anything else. Also, the restitution part. Part of his terms of his probation is to pay back the money that the city or private entity spent on repairing the damage that he incurred. Ron Calderon>> "The motivation behind this bill is to clean up our cities and to punish those who attempt to destroy them." Val Zavala>> But Montebello didn't stop there. They went to their local Assemblyman, Ron Calderon, and told him about the problem. Calderon introduced a bill that would toughen graffiti penalties and it would hit young people where it hurt, in the driver's seat. His proposal would suspend the license of adult taggers for up to three years. For minors convicted of tagging, they would have to wait as many as three more years before they could get their driver's license. Ron Calderon>> When it comes to minors, I think it's a very strong deterrent. Minors who represent a large part of the tagging population, which is alarming in itself, are anxious to get their driver's licenses unfortunately for the wrong reasons because they're in gangs. Hopefully, this will act as a deterrent to steer them away from gang activity and learn that, you know, it's better to fly straight and, if you're going to spray, you're going to pay. Mayor Robert Bagwell>> If you're thirteen and waiting for sixteen to get your driver's license, the judge says, no, you got three more years. You got to wait until nineteen if he wants to get it. It's just an extra tool. Val Zavala>> But some lawmakers raise concerns about suspending driver's licenses. Carole Migden>> "Because the problem is that when we're always taking the driver's license away, it means they're not taking their mother to the doctor, they're not going to work, they're not going to school. It creates another, I think, impediment and obstacle to kind of creating a more productive life." Ron Calderon>> "I understand. Madam Chair, the bill does, however, . . ." Val Zavala>> They compromised, allowing judges to make exceptions in certain cases. This apartment building in Montebello is a favorite of vandals and, if you think graffiti is just an eyesore, look more closely. Officer Ismael Navarro>> Taggers now are getting involved with gangs because it's a territory thing now. Like it says here, "Our block." To tagging crews, "our block" means don't come over here and tag here because this is our block. Val Zavala>> I see. So the difference is, before it might just be somebody who wants their name up there, but when it crosses over to gangs, it becomes territorial and that's what we can tell here. Officer Ismael Navarro>> This is what our message is from this graffiti here. People that drive by the block see just the graffiti. You know, it's just writing. But if you really look at it, it's tagging crews, what they're trying to say and who they're trying to say it to. Val Zavala>> So we're looking basically at gangs here now, not just taggers. Officer Ismael Navarro>> Right. They're gangs now. "Don't mess with my gang, especially you. This is our block. Leave us alone." Val Zavala>> We happened to meet one of the residents of the apartments who's frustrated by the lack of respect taggers show toward private property. Well, have you heard that in Montebello they're really cracking down on vandals and graffiti? Jonathan Alvizo>> Really? Val Zavala>> Yeah. Jonathan Alvizo>> I didn't know that. Val Zavala>> Yeah, they're really cracking down. They got some felony convictions. Do you think that would stop these guys if they knew that they could go to jail? Jonathan Alvizo>> It can. Sometimes peer pressure is so hard on you that it doesn't matter what the consequences are. Val Zavala>> Painting over graffiti and taking away driver's licenses aren't the only things coming down the pike. Officer Navarro says another tool is on the way, a camera equipped with GPS, global positioning technology. How would it work? Well, before graffiti is painted out, a digital picture would be taken of the vandals' moniker along with the exact time and location. Officer Ismael Navarro>> Once you take the picture, you don't have to do anything else. You take a picture, download it in the camera. The picture has the square footage of the damage, the location, the time, the coordinates, everything and the approximate repair costs we've been able to establish. Once that's done, it goes down into a database. Val Zavala>> And that database will provide the evidence for felony charges. Montebello doesn't have a GPS camera yet, but it hopes to get one. In the meantime, Calderon's bill has gotten strong support and he expects it to pass. Carole Migden>> "That bill's out. That's already an achievement today." Ron Calderon>> "Thank you very much, Madame Chair." Val Zavala>> So between tougher sentences, GPS cameras, suspended licenses and, of course, education, Navarro thinks that even less graffiti will mar Montebello's streets and image. Officer Ismael Navarro>> Whether we win it or not, I don't think it's an issue of winning. It's stabilizing and getting the proper education to the parents and the students and/or adults that there are consequences for graffiti. Mayor Robert Bagwell>> And maybe one day we'll be zero on our graffiti. I'm looking forward to that day (laughter). Val Zavala>> If you'd like to find out more about this anti-graffiti bill, you can go to Assemblyman Ron Calderon's website and click on "Legislation". 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>> We all know our parents and grandparents are full of incredible stories. After all, they are members of the greatest generation. But how do you bring those stories to light and to life? Well, that's where storyteller, Barbara Clark, comes in and the results are wonderful. Toni Guinyard went to a senior center in midtown Los Angeles to see how Barbara Clark works her magic. Barbara H. Clark>> "We're not going to wait. We're going to get started." Toni Guinyard>> This is a story about the stories of students. Yes, students, in a storytelling workshop. They each have something to share, a moment in time from way back when. >> "But Momma, God rest her soul, always had a way of bringing Daddy back down to earth." Toni Guinyard>> They are learning the art of storytelling. For a full eight months, one hour a day, once every week, they meet at the Vineyard Recreation Center in Los Angeles, first learning to write and then perform their stories on stage. >> "And he turned and twisted in front of the mirror again and said, 'This goes so well with my blue jeans.'" Toni Guinyard>> After months of developing, writing, telling, polishing and then retelling their stories in front of each other, it all comes down to this: their final rehearsal for their final performance with the students thinking about one thing. Bernadene Coleman>> (Laughter) Whether you can get through the story or not without making a mistake or without forgetting. I think at this age or this stage in life, that's probably in most of our thoughts. Barbara H. Clark>> "Try standing in one place, project your voice. Remember you got audience all the way at the back of the room." Toni Guinyard>> And at the center of it all is Barbara H. Clark. The retired librarian issues directions from her posts around the room. From here, she sees all -- Barbara H. Clark>> "Move closer in." Toni Guinyard>> And hears all. These are her students. The storytelling workshop is her idea. Barbara H. Clark>> To most people, when you say storyteller, they start to think about entertaining children. I don't do children (laughter). I perform for adult audiences and my stories are not fairy tales or mythology or folklore. "The title of my story is 'Five and Dime'." My stories are original personal stories, stories about my own life experiences, stories about my family background and my cultural heritage. "You see, we lived in an all-black community and the bus didn't come into our neighborhood." So they're designed for an adult audience. "Well, I knew I was colored, but I had money to spend, so what difference should it make?" They're designed to grab the audience at the very beginning, hang on to their attention and hold them through to the very ending so that they will never lose the attention. Toni Guinyard>> Clark takes storytelling seriously and expects her students to be prepared. Nelle Becker Slaton>> One woman wasn't able to do it. She said, "You go back in that room and you learn that story." Toni Guinyard>> She's serious about it. Nelle Becker Slaton>> Oh, she's serious, but she's pleasant. Barbara H. Clark>> She stood on that stage and she told her story and she did not have an anxiety attack and, when she came off that stage, she went, "Yes!" She couldn't contain herself, she was so pleased with what she had accomplished. Nelle Becker Slaton>> I love it and I tease her all the time. I tell everybody she's a strict teacher, but she's nice about it. Barbara H. Clark>> "I want you all here at twelve o'clock sharp. You can come five minutes before, but don't come five minutes after." Toni Guinyard>> One week later, before a packed house, it's time for the storytelling concert, as it's called, to begin. >> "Welcome, all of you, to 'Tell Me a Story'. This is our seventh concert." Toni Guinyard>> One by one, the students take center stage. >> "We went weaving in and out and around the May Pole, wrapping the May Pole. When it was completely wrapped and our streamers secured, Mrs. Watson said, 'Boys and girls, you were perfect. You may go to your parents now.' Momma gave me the biggest, tightest hug. 'Oh, I am so proud of you.' Oh, Momma, I love you." Toni Guinyard>> The stories take the audience from childhood to youth. >> "We decided to go to a movie. Now going to a movie in 1951 was the coolest. It was like being engaged." Toni Guinyard>> And from youth to the realities of adulthood. >> "They had talked about adoption for a long time." Toni Guinyard>> The storytellers' words celebrate life and even find the humor in talking about death. >> "One of her instructions was, 'Now, don't you have that funeral on the weekend because, on the weekends, they charge you double for closing the mortuary.'" (laughter) Toni Guinyard>> What do you feel when you're up on stage? Barbara Murray>> Initially, I feel a case of jitters. But after you hear the laughter and see a couple of smiles and you realize that people are relating to what you're saying and they're listening, it feels great. >> "Six months after I was born, the whole world went into a great depression. Now I'm not taking the blame for that (laughter). I know I was not to blame. It's not my fault." Toni Guinyard>> Somewhere along the line, the transformation from student to storyteller takes place. >> "I thought of chemistry sentences and, in my head, I heard those jingles, those songs I had made up. I had quite a few. 'Oh, H20 is water, got to pass this test 'cause I oughta.' I write it down and went to the other one, SO4. 'SO4 is sulfur, it stinks like rotten eggs, just like the hair grease Momma puts on my head' and I'd write it, write it. I did this for it must have been about five minutes into the test. I felt this hand on my shoulder and I looked up and it was Professor Burns. He said, 'Marilyn, are you all right?'" Barbara H. Clark>> The thrill is, I think, pretty obvious because everybody wants to think that there was something about their lives that was important, particularly people who have lived most of their lives. That is, you look back and you realize at a certain age that most of your life is behind you and you think there must be some value to that. Toni Guinyard>> On this day, value is measured by applause or a nod or a smile, but the story doesn't end here. Barbara C. Clark>> I would like to see storytelling take its rightful place in the theater world and have people recognize it as a legitimate -- not only just a legitimate art form, but a needed art form and a warranted art form and an art form that really does attract an audience if they're aware of its existence. "And I remembered her words from the bus. 'It might be a little harder and take a little longer, but you can have whatever you're willing to work for.' I remembered her lessons from that day until now. But I also remembered the real world lessons I learned at that Five and Dime." Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> Barbara Clark's next storytelling class starts in September. It's free, but it is limited to twenty-five students. In the meantime, you can find out more about storytelling at lastorytellingfestival.com. 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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