Slam part 2: The end of the world as we knew it?

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Poetry fans, language mavens, and wordsmiths, lend me your ears. Poetry isn’t something to be read in silence in a rocking chair. It’s not even something to read aloud to a group of latte-sipping aesthetes. The end of that world is here. It’s Slammageddon 2, live at the Skinny, June 1.

If you’re picturing Maya Angelou reciting for Bill Clinton or Robert Frost leaning heavily on the podium at JFK’s inauguration, think again. As most people know by now, poetry slams are about more than just words, though those are certainly vital. Slamming is about stage presence, sense of moment, and just plain lunacy.

Slammageddon 2 will include not only local favorite Taylor Mali, but two other poets of note and notoriety in the poetry slam world. Also playing will be up to 12 local talents, as yet undiscovered.

Long-time Second Tuesday poetry performance organizer, Jay Davis, is putting together the second annual Slammageddon, which pits individual poets in competition with one another, a change from last year’s team invitational. It will be subject to National Poetry Slam rules, including the selection of judges from the audience, with only a few guidelines, Davis says.

Judges can’t be competitors, “or sleeping with a competitor. They can, however, be bribed,” suggesting that buying drinks is often an effective way to win a poetry slam. Too many drinks, Davis warns, could make judges violate their pledge to be present throughout the event.

The competition will be in rounds, with winners of each preliminary round of four poets going on to the finals. In between each round will be what Davis calls “feature poets,” or the big names to draw a crowd.

Mali hasn’t performed in Portland for several years, so his championship talent ought to be an attraction, and the other two are strong performers in their own rights. Regie Gibson will be the lead-off feature poet. He won the individual national championship in Austin, Texas, in 1998, and while his poetry starts as words, Davis says, “by the time he’s done he’s just making noises. I don’t know how you’d spell it.”

At that Texas championship, Davis says, Gibson had “2500 or 3000 people just going through the roof. He was making Jimi Hendrix noises with his mouth.”

Gibson himself is excited to be coming to Portland, and says Mali recently suggested he head north from his Boston base. Shortly thereafter, Davis was calling. “I’m feeling a certain vague sense of fate,” Gibson says. He is a bit more modest about his reputation as a stage performer, demurring gently to rumors of his excellence and crediting the energy of his audiences for his charisma in the limelight. “It sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun,” was the only glimpse he would give of his plans for the show.

The second feature will be Ken Cormier, with a mind Davis likens to David Byrne in two different ways. First, he calls him “an insane David Byrne,” but then revises that and proposes a world in which David Byrne is the equivalent of Frank Sinatra. Cormier, he says, would be the David Byrne of that world. Angelou and Frost fans, cover your ears.

Davis hopes the event will help make poetry an even bigger part of Portland’s cultural life. He has already convinced the Skinny to revise its standing-room-only policy to include a few tables and chairs for people to enjoy a more leisurely evening of poetry. But he expects the place to be packed and rocking from its 8 p.m. start until its midnight conclusion.

Another draw should be the big money given to winners. The top finisher will get $100, which is enough, Davis says, to get the attention of poets as far away as Boston. These “big city slam thugs,” as he calls them, may come up to compete, lending a sense of gravitas to the Skinny’s ambiance, and a real rivalry between Portland poets and those from away.

Davis issues a final challenge to local poetry favorites and Mali loyalists: “Regie Gibson may be better than Taylor Mali,” he says, his voice glittering at the prospect of seeing both on stage in the same venue.

Whale spotted off Prouts Neck

Published in the Current

A whale has been feeding off Prouts Neck for the past several days. Local residents alerted the Marine Animal Lifeline on May 17, when two humpback whales were spotted.

Since that day, only one has been seen at a time, though MAL President Greg Jakush said they might be taking turns feeding in an area right offshore of the yacht club.

Police said some residents are concerned that it might get stranded in shallow water, and Jakush said others are concerned “just about having a 40-foot whale that close.”

Jakush said he and others are monitoring the situation, but said the whale does not appear to be in trouble in any way. He said he does not know what it might be feeding on, but said birds are also fishing in the area.

“A lot of the locals are calling us every four or five hours,” Jakush said, keeping them posted on where the whale is. To allow the whale to swim without getting tangled in lines, “the lobstermen have pulled their buoys out of the way to help out,” he said.

He said whales feeding in close to shore may be more common than people realize, but they are not always spotted. Last year, Jakush said, there were whales in close to shore at Biddeford Pool.

Captain Mazzone leaves Scarborough after 20 years

Published in the Current

June 5 will be Captain Angelo Mazzone’s last day at the Scarborough Police Department. He’s done nearly every job at the department in his 20 years of service, from animal control officer to youth aid officer to detective sergeant and now captain.

Mazzone has never had a home in Scarborough, but he feels like he lives here. “Scarborough’s like a second home to me now,” he said.

A native of Portland, he is leaving to spend more time with his children, and will move to Cape Cod to be closer to his parents. “This is a family decision,” he said, making a point to say he has no problem with the department and remains on good terms with everyone there.

Chief Robert Moulton said the department will miss Mazzone.

“He’s been like a right arm to me,” Moulton said. “He’s an excellent police officer. I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Mazzone has seen Scarborough change, and the police department change along with it. When he started, there were only four patrol cars, and, he said, “it wasn’t uncommon to work a day shift alone.” Now there are often four patrol cars on the road on any given afternoon.

“There have been a lot of improvements,” he said, in radios and the station facilities.

He got his start in law enforcement as a young boy, when his father, a doctor in Portland, would get called on now and again to assist police.

When he graduated from high school, he joined the Army and became a military policeman. After three years in the service, he joined the Scarborough police.

Issues have also changed since then. Twenty years ago, the focus was on child abuse. Now more emphasis is placed on domestic violence, Mazzone said.

He spent a lot of time in the detective bureau, which is his first love, and for which his colleagues say he has a gift.

Detective Sgt. David Grover, who will become captain when Mazzone leaves and followed him heading the detectives, said Mazzone is a dedicated and committed investigator. “He goes home when the work is done,” Grover said.

Mazzone said he liked the work as a detective, and enjoyed helping victims of crimes. “I always looked at it as ‘what can I do for the victims,’” he said.

But he is also experienced at standard police work, and at handling hard situations, including the James Levier shooting and the Virginia Jackson murder.

“Every time something really big happens, I’m there,” Mazzone said, shaking his head at his “luck” and saying, “I’ve never missed a hurricane, never missed a blizzard.”

In the future, he said, the department will continue to grow to reflect the needs of the community. Technology, too, will play different roles. “Police work will always change,” he said.

With the area of the town and its growth, there is more pressure on patrol officers, he said. Many calls take more time now, with additional procedures and paperwork that he said help police do a better job – an hour or so for a domestic dispute, for example, rather than 10 or 15 minutes 20 years ago.

“I think we need to grow some more in the patrol area,” he said. He also expects the department will someday be allowed to conduct its own homicide investigations.

State law now prevents most towns from handling murder cases, instead passing them up to the state attorney general’s office.

He recently reaped one reward of his tenure at the department. He saw a marriage announcement saying that a person Mazzone knew as a victim of a crime several years ago had gotten his life back together.

“It kind of makes you feel happy,” he said.

There will be a small ceremony honoring Mazzone June 5, his last day, and a larger ceremony is planned for October, after the summer activity settles down, Moulton said.

Cape Elizabeth reaches accord on school budget

Published in the Current

Cape Elizabeth School Board members are breathing a little easier now that they have some financial help from the Town Council. The town has agreed to pay $25,000 from this year’s budget to replace the high school’s walk-in freezer, which has been deemed a safety hazard.

That takes pressure off the School Board, which had included that item in next year’s already tight budget. Several councilors had questioned the need for a new freezer.

But in a joint letter to the town and the public, the finance committee chairs of the two bodies laid out a plan by which the freezer will be replaced and
school spending will be capped at 4.5 percent, rather than 4 percent as previously requested by the council.

The total school expenditure for next year under the new plan will be $14,918,677. The tax increase for residents, covering both the school and municipal budgets, will be 94 cents per thousand dollars of assessed property value.

The School Board’s original expenditures were to be $15,038,234, an increase of 5.34 percent. The council asked that amount be taken down to $14,846,677, an increase of 4 percent.

The board counter-proposed expenditures of $14,877,234 – a 4.2 percent increase, by making cuts in maintenance, field trip transportation expenses and the school’s portion of the freshman athletic program at the high school. A further $33,000 in savings was found in reductions of energy and telephone costs, without affecting school programs.

Some of the savings were also found by using $70,000 in surplus as additional revenue that would not impact the town’s tax rate.

The board feared it might be required to cut an additional $30,000 in spending, or perhaps even $100,000 if spending that surplus money was not approved by the council.

After the two finance chairs reviewed the budgets, they agreed that the board could use $70,000 in surplus money, and that the town would buy the freezer using money from the municipal general fund.

They also found $2,000 that the town had earmarked for the schools to support the computer network, which the School Board had not included as revenue.

After the $33,000 energy and phone savings, the board was left to cut $61,557, of which $58,000 had already been tentatively identified. At the School Board workshop meeting May 21, board Chairman George Entwistle said Superintendent Tom Forcella had been able to find $3,557 in additional cuts from the central office budget by reducing spending on custodial supplies, advertising, equipment, transportation and contracted services.

That left the board to review the $58,000 in cuts. The main issue the board discussed was how to restore some funding to freshman athletics.

The schools expected to pay $8,000 for coaches’ stipends. Briefly on the table were activity participation fees, discussed as a potentially better alternative than cutting programs, and the middle school’s outdoor education program trips to Kieve and Chewonki.

Entwistle also proposed expanding the degree to which parents pay for some of their children’s educational experiences, effectively moving some costs from taxpayers to the users of those services, he said.

“I suspect that we’re going to have to get more creative with that as we move through the next several years,” Entwistle said.

Board member Elaine Moloney pointed out that cutting freshman athletics funding put a greater burden on sports boosters at a time the School Board was trying to decrease the role of booster clubs in town.

In response to proposed reductions in funding for outdoor education, board member Jennifer DeSena defended the Kieve and Chewonki programs as important parts of the curriculum that the schools should fund more, not less.

The schools presently pay $2,500 in tuition costs for each program, with the remainder being picked up by parents of the students who go. They either pay from their own pockets or run fund-raisers to collect the money needed.

The board concluded its discussion by asking high school Principal Jeff Shedd, middle school Principal Nancy Hutton, Forcella and Athletic Administrator Keith Weatherbie to meet to find $8,000 in reductions, of which “the lion’s share” could come from freshman athletics, Entwistle said. The goal would be to restore some funding to that program and “share the pain,” he said.

The board agreed that the Kieve and Chewonki programs are exempted from that review and will not be cut. Entwistle also said he plans to write a letter to the Town Council expressing “something between acknowledgement and gratitude” for the council’s help in what he called “this difficult and challenging time.”

At the end of the meeting, Moloney encouraged members of the board to review the town’s budget. She admitted it was too late to do much this year, but said she would watch town spending carefully.

After looking through the proposed budget, she said, “I was really surprised by a lot of their line items. I can’t believe how much more we’re cutting and bleeding.”

The final amount of the school and municipal budgets will be set by the Town Council after a public hearing at 7:30 p.m., May 28, at the Town Council Chambers in Town Hall.

Fire Canteen founder looks back 50 years

Published in the Current

In the early 1950s, Eleanor Lorfano, now 85, got tired of driving her own truck to fires and serving her husband and his fellow firefighters coffee and
doughnuts out of the back of the pickup. She wasn’t tired of getting up in the middle of the night. Instead, Lorfano wanted some help and some company.

She got together members of the seven fire company auxiliaries in town and proposed setting up a canteen truck that could take food and drinks to the town’s firefighters if a blaze went on for a while.

The group, all women, found a used truck and quickly raised the $3,000 necessary to buy it. That truck went to its first fire on Ross Road with a card table in the back, Lorfano remembered at a meeting of the Scarborough Fire Department Canteen May 20 at the Dunstan fire station.

Some volunteers built cupboards and installed a stove, water tank and a big countertop into the truck, which saw many fires, including big fires in Saco
and the old dance hall on Gorham Road, Lorfano said.

During the war, Lorfano and several other women had been the fire department while the men were in the military. She was certified to drive fire trucks and even put out fires. After the men returned, she and others
maintained their involvement in the department through the canteen.

She remembered taking coffee to men fighting fires at the town dump, affectionately called “the Scarborough Town Park” in the canteen’s logbook. When rats would sometimes escape from the fire and run over near the canteen truck, Lorfano remembered men and women racing around trying to chase them away.

As learned from the logbook, long thought lost but recently located in a drawer in the canteen truck, the routine then was not much different from today’s canteen.

One difference: the truck – the third used by the group – is now maintained by the town rather than the canteen volunteers.

If a fire sounded big over the radio, canteen members would get up and start boiling water to put in Thermos bottles before going to the station to pick up the truck. Women who lived closest to the station, Lorfano said, would have the biggest Thermoses.

One night, Lorfano remembered, she was wakened by a call from a canteen member, in the days before pagers and radios sent out the signal “21” to summon the canteen truck. “She said, ‘You want to go to the fire?’and I said, ‘Yeah, what time’s the fire?’” Lorfano said. The reply came: “‘Right now, if you want to go.’”

Big calls now are rarer, canteen members said, because of better fireproofing in buildings. Smoke detectors and sprinklers are also more commonly used, making fires easier to catch and faster to fight. Shorter fires don’t require coffee and doughnuts the way long-haul battles against blazes do.

The canteen’s last call was at the Grand Avenue fire in Old Orchard Beach earlier this year, though it has served food in other towns at large fires, as well as at funerals for firefighters killed in the line of duty.

Lorfano was also a school bus driver in town for 25 years, starting in 1953. She was paid her “greatest honor” at that job, she said, when she was the only female bus driver; the boys’ basketball team asked her to be their driver, when there were several male drivers they could have chosen.

In that job, she had only one accident, sliding off the Black Point Road bridge with a busload of kids on board. Nobody was hurt, as the bus landed right-side up just next to the river, she said.