Springtime at the Adderley School of Performing Arts will see a whole garden of Broadway musicals bloom on the local stage. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the Adderley School has matured into a serious studio where kids and young adults learn the magic of the musical using Broadway as their text. Responding to a request from families in Santa Barbara, founding director Janet Adderley opened a second studio there at the end of February, offering five classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. She also imagines that her year-long advanced students in the Palisades will have an opportunity to tour their spring musicals in Santa Barbara. Now that she has opened the studio on State Street and hired musical director Linda Brandt, Adderley is back in the Palisades. ‘I’ve missed my roots in the Palisades,’ says Adderley, who is teaching more than ever. She is preparing one group of six-year-olds for ‘Annie’ and another for ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ and she is coaching two of the three year-long classes. With an enrollment of about 350 kids in any given semester, Adderley has a staff of 8, who from time to time have been former students. She is also assisted by two current students, Palisadian Alicia Dougherty, 14, and Layla Briscoe, who are members of the Adderley Repertory Company. ”But it’s showtime in the springtime that all the students are working towards. The Adderley Junior Repertory Company, which includes students from 7 to 14, will stage ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ at the end of April; ‘Anything Goes and ‘Hairspray’ will follow. The Adderley Repertory Company, made up of the 15- to- 17-year-old actors, will stage ‘Chicago’ the first week of June at Pepperdine. Adderley, a singer and actress of obvious talent and ambition, redirected her enthusiasm towards shepherding young students. ‘When a child does a good job, I am thrilled and blessed that the spirit has given me a purpose in life and something that gives me such joy. Not everybody gets that.’

A picture in a Ziploc bag is worth more than 1,000 words. This is where Jill Pizitz-Hochstein keeps an old color snapshot of her grandparents protected and close at hand. It tells the story of Senior Smiles, the non-profit organization she and her husband, Erik Hochstein, launched to better the lives of the elderly. Sydney Cooper Senior Smiles is named after Jill’s grandfather, a pharmacist who died in 1987 before he could realize his dream of creating an affordable care facility for seniors. While Jill inherited her grandfather’s philanthropic nature, it’s her grandmother, Sylvia Cooper, now in her 90s, who gave Jill’s mission to aid seniors clear direction. ‘She would sit and cry all day,’ Jill recalls about her grandmother’s condition five years ago. Jill and her husband live in the Palisades; her grandmother resides many miles away in a nursing home in Stockton. ‘The staff’s solution was to give her more medication and put her back to bed.’ Jill, whose warmth and enthusiasm is peppered with steely determination, easily pinpointed the problem. Her grandmother, suffering from heart failure and dementia and confined to a wheelchair, was lonely. While Jill visited the person she describes as ‘her best friend’ every month, it clearly wasn’t enough. The devoted granddaughter sprang into action, reaching out to high schools near her grandmother’s facility hoping to find volunteer programs associated with the elderly. And when she came up empty, she pushed forward to create her own, training kids at a local Catholic high school how to befriend the elderly in nursing homes with the added incentive of enhancing their college application forms. ‘It’s a pretty simple formula,’ says Jill, whose teen volunteers began regular visits with her grandmother and others. ‘It’s about putting normalcy back into a sterile environment.’ The presence of loving volunteers, whose kindnesses included holding Sylvia’s hand and brushing her hair, worked magic in slowly transforming her emotional and physical well-being. ‘The staff lowered her anti-depressants, she doesn’t cry anymore and she’s healthier than ever,’ says Jill, who quickly realized how her grandmother’s case could be the model for improving the quality of life for seniors throughout California. After a slow beginning’Jill and Erik started out four years ago with five volunteers at one facility in Santa Monica’Senior Smiles now boasts over 500 volunteers who serve seniors in 27 facilities from San Diego to Tarzana as well as in private homes. The eventual goal is to expand Senior Smiles throughout the country. This noble aspiration is coupled with the Hochsteins’ busy ongoing work as private geriatric consultants. They help clients deal with family members afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and other debilitating conditions by matching them with appropriate caregivers and facilities. When Jill and her husband decided to join forces to create Senior Smiles and Cooper Senior Care Consulting (Erik runs the business and financial aspects of the organizations), both had good jobs in other fields. Jill was a director in an acute psychiatric hospital; Erik was a successful software engineer. ‘We were incredibly miserable working for other people,’ Jill explains. Both have degrees from USC and Pepperdine, and educated themselves as authorities on the special needs and care of seniors. About 90 percent of Senior Smiles volunteers are female, and many hail from countries such as Korea, where caring for elders is inherent in the culture. They arrive at the organization through Web searches for volunteer opportunities and by word-of-mouth. After training, they are matched with a senior and commit to visiting that person one hour each week. ‘We’re not Habitat for Humanity, where you can drive away once the project is over,’ Jill says to new recruits during a recent training session held at the Palisades-Malibu YMCA. ‘It should never feel like charity. It is about forming a lasting relationship.’ Stories abound about meaningful bonds between volunteers and seniors in the short history of Senior Smiles. Legendary among them is the ‘awakening’ of Eugenia. When Senior Smiles volunteers started work at an assisted living facility in downtown L.A., the nursing staff told them not to bother with Eugenia, a 99-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s and partial blindness, whom they considered a ‘lost cause.’ This directive sparked in Jill and her crew the desire to do just the opposite. Volunteers, mostly USC students, began visiting Eugenia regularly, reading and speaking to her. Her head was bowed, her eyes closed, her arms crossed, and she seemed oblivious to her new companionship. A couple weeks passed before a volunteer decided to bring in a CD player. It was the USC fight song that finally roused Eugenia, who began tapping her feet and bobbing her head to the music. She even lifted her head and smiled. Later, she begin speaking for the first time in five years. When a volunteer told a colleague that Eugenia had said ‘Hi,’ Eugenia chimed in and said ‘Yup.’ ‘When you give, you get much more back than what you’ve given.’ While this is a common sentiment among volunteers, these are the words of Claire Berger, a 96-year-old resident of Pacific Gardens in Santa Monica, who regales a steady stream of Senior Smiles volunteers with her wisdom and joie de vivre. With the help of one of her volunteers, Berger is close to finishing a novel. ‘I dictate and he types,’ she explains. Palisadian Lisa D’Andrea-Nunez and her sons Noah, 9, and Diego, 3, are among Berger’s ‘extended’ family who have visited regularly for the past two years. ‘We think of her as another grandmother,’ says D’Andrea-Nunez, who learned about Senior Smiles via a handout sent home from Village School. ‘It has broadened my life and filled in the empty spaces that were there,’ says Berger, who is welcomed into the Nunez family home for holidays and other occasions. Financing of the organization comes through private donations, grants and an occasional fundraiser. Offshoots include Baby Senior Smiles, which sends mothers and infants into senior facilities to meet with residents, and PAWWS (Pets Also Work With Seniors), which enlists dogs, cats and even rabbits as the program’s newest ambassadors of comfort. Not only has Senior Smiles affected the lives of countless seniors, it also has changed the career direction of many volunteers. All 10 of the original high school students Jill trained in Stockton to aid her grandmother have gone on to study premed, nursing or psychology. ‘We’re grooming a younger generation to be more respectful of the elderly,’ Jill says. ‘Seniors need the same love and attention that we all do.’ To find out more about Senior Smiles, call 459-0490 or go online to www.seniorsmiles.org.

Compiled by LAURA WITSENHAUSEN Associate Editor Students at St. Matthew’s Parish School have been busy collecting money to contribute to the tsunami relief efforts. Students have been encouraged to do jobs at home and bring in and share the money they have earned. Funds have also been raised at school through the sale of special reminder wristbands, a bake sale and a talent show. Preschool II students made pins and note cards for sale. The note cards were created with two methods. In one process students dipped their colored chalk drawings into water, then lifted them out to discover a unique piece of art. The other process involved painting with frozen watercolor ice cubes. ‘We saw the devastating effect water had in Asia,’ said teacher Amy Weiss. ‘Our use of water has created something beautiful.’ The preschoolers raised over $200. o o o The 6th, 7th and 8th grade students of Corpus Christi School presented a $10,000 check to Barbara Curtis, principal of St. Raphael’s Catholic School in South Los Angeles on February 28 to benefit the school’s scholarship fund. In appreciation, St. Raphael School’s gospel choir, led by vice principal Peter Scott, performed a soul gospel concert for the entire Corpus Christi student body. The Corpus Christi students raised the money from a giant flea market on January 22 as part of the school’s outreach program. These funds will provide one-year scholarships for four students at St. Raphael’s, Corpus Christi’s sister school. The unsold items from the flea market were donated to the Boys and Girls Club of Venice. The Corpus Christi Outreach Committee would like to thank Ralphs and Gelson’s for their donations of bags and butcher paper, and Mr. & Mrs. Robert W. Joyce for sponsoring the hot dog stand. o o o MIRANDA HALLEY has been named to the Lewis & Clark College dean’s list for the fall semester of 2004. The dean’s list honors academic achievement each semester. Miranda is a freshman at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. o o o BRIAN BUCE, a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, was named a National Merit Scholarship finalist. As such, he is being considered for one of 8,200 National Merit Scholarship awards, worth $33.9 million, which will be offered in the spring. He is the son of Robert and Barbara Buce. o o o Two Palisadians were named to the dean’s list of Emory College, the undergraduate college of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. They are SHANNON GARRISON, daughter of Phillip Gregory Garrison and Kathleen Maria Garrison, and JEREMEY KLEIN, son of Dr. Irv Klein and Sue Obadiah Klein.

Alvin Mills was 13 years old when he first heard the L.A. Philharmonic perform in downtown Los Angeles. Maestro Pierre Monteux was conducting. ‘I couldn’t believe that one person making motions could produce all this sound,’ Mills says. ‘I saw this little man’Monteux was 5’ 4” ‘ hardly moving. He had a small beat and, all of a sudden, big sounds were coming out.’ Mills, who’s also a short, compact man with a warm openness, knew then that he wanted to conduct. Years later, when he was in his mid-20s, he had the opportunity to study under Monteux at the Ecole Monteux in Hancock, Maine. ‘One hour with Monteux was like a lifetime,’ says Mills, who took four trains and a bus to get there from California. Mills made his debut as a conductor with the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony Orchestra, which he founded in 1953 with the late Robert Turner. He had been a pupil of Turner’s at UCLA, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in music. The community orchestra began with about 15 or 20 members who performed in a tiny dance studio on San Vicente near 26th St. ‘We rented chairs and had to buy light bulbs because the studio only operated during the day,’ Mills says. Over the years, the orchestra moved around to various venues, including University High School, before settling at Paul Revere Middle School Auditorium. They have been offering their free Sunday afternoon concerts there for over 35 years. Each season, the ensemble presents four free concerts, depending on budget. The Brentwood-Westwood Symphony is supported by fundraising, with donations from various organizations and some help from the city or county. Mills, 84, is fascinated by the diverse group of musicians, ranging in age from 17 to 75. ‘I look around and I see a psychiatrist and he’s sitting next to someone who’s only 24,’ he says. A Midwesterner, Mills began studying the violin with Julian Brodetsky at age eight, when he moved with his family from Chicago to Southern California. ‘I loved the violin right away,’ he says. ‘I became the classical [musician] of the family.’ His mother, Lillian Heuring, was a jazz pianist who played for the silent movies, and his father, Harry Mills, was a jazz drummer. Even Mills’s stepfather became a musician later in life, taking up the viola when he was in his 80s. Mills also studied under Peter Meremblum at USC , and in his early 20s, he was a performing member of the Kansas City Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, playing under the direction of Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Efrem Kurtz, Eugene Ormandy and others. ‘Stokowski was tough but I learned a lot from him,’ says Mills, who earned his master’s degree in music from Mount St. Mary’s College in 1961. His sensitivity as a conductor comes from both his early experiences as a musician and from Monteux’s instruction. ‘Musicians in an orchestra are very fragile people and their feelings are what make them play,’ Mills says. ‘I try to follow Monteux’s advice about respecting a musician’s feelings.’ For example, Monteux taught him ‘when you stop an orchestra, be sure to tell them why.’ So Mills will often tell his musicians to start the piece again or try playing it differently ‘for my sake.’ ‘A good teacher has a great deal of respect for his students and knows what they can and can’t do,’ Mills says. ‘I’ll get them to work in such a way that they’ll do more [than they thought they could].’ The number of performers at each concert depends on the program. About 50 to 60 people will play in this Sunday’s performance, which includes pieces by Dvorak, Schubert and Bach. Mills has arranged the Bach piece for his orchestra. In addition, soloist Dennis Trembly, the first bassist of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, will perform Nino Rota’s ‘Divertimento Concertante.’ Tiong-Kiat Yeo will be assistant conductor. Other great artists who have played with the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony under the direction of Maestro Mills are: Martin Chalifour, concertmaster of the L.A. Philharmonic; Mark Baranov, assistant concertmaster of the L.A. Philharmonic; Evan Wilson, principal violist of the L.A. Philharmonic; Gary Gray, principal clarinetist of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra; and John Novacek, internationally acclaimed pianist. Mills has particularly enjoyed working with David Shostac, the principal flutist of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra, who was 13 years old when he began to play with the orchestra. ‘He still treats me like a father and I treat him like a son,’ says Mills, who has five of his own children and eight grandchildren. Leonard Slatkin was also a teenager when he started with the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony. Today, he is the conductor of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C. Sheryl Staples, assistant concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, and Timothy Landauer, principal cellist with the Pacific Symphony, also started with Mills’s orchestra. Devoted to encouraging talented youth and building an interest in classical and contemporary music, Mills initiated a music education outreach program in 1994 to bring music to children of the inner cities and Westside public schools. His orchestra performs about six of these outreach concerts per year, usually for students in grades 4, 5 and 6. ‘I prefer elementary school-age children because they’re more receptive and open,’ says Mills, who also teaches students a bit about conducting during his visits. As a conductor, Mills, who only makes about $600 a concert, looks upon the orchestra as his needy child. ‘I won’t retire as the conductor of the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony,’ he jokes. Mills spent most of his life as an instrumental teacher, working at various schools in Glendale. He currently teaches an instrumental ensemble class at the Westside Community Adult School. His position as conductor and music director with the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony was jeopardized once, in 1992, when the board considered replacing him with ‘an ambitious conductor who wanted to come in,’ according to Mills. Letters of support poured in and he kept his job. That same year, Mills married Grusha Paterson, a singer and dancer who concertized throughout Los Angeles with her Continental Gypsies group. Originally from Russia, she grew up dancing in New York under Nadia Chilkovsky and Martha Graham, and was at one point partnered with Michael Kidd, who later won fame as a Broadway choreographer and producer. After marrying Mills, Grusha began working as executive secretary and general manager of the orchestra, in charge of preparation and publicity for concerts. She says she likes to sit in on and tape the main, Saturday rehearsal before each show. ‘I tell Alvin what mistakes I hear,’ she says. ‘He’s a miracle maker’he tells them and fixes it all for the concert.’ Working with people for 52 years may be one reason why Mills hears words and laughing in the music he conducts. For example, he wrote the words ‘for peace of mind’ to the famous musical phrase in Beethoven’s Fifth, ‘Dit-dit-dit-daaaah.’ He also has an affinity for Spanish music, having studied in Madrid, Spain, at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Musica in 1970. The orchestra rehearses every Tuesday from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. ‘I teach it like a class,’ says Mills, who is a member of ASCAP and the National Association of Composers, USA. ‘What I try to do is encourage and inspire them.’ Sunday’s concert, March 13, takes place from 3 to 5:30 p.m. at Paul Revere Middle School, 1450 Allenford. Admission is free Contact: 829-3149.