Awesome People: Simon Moore - College Visions

Originally appeared in The Phoenix

The story of Janelle Williams is an all-too familiar one: a bright, young woman perfectly capable of going to college, but like so many of her friends, she couldn't help but feel like the deck was stacked against her. She was shut-off-the-gas-poor, attending an underperforming high school ("it sure isn't Classical") and despite living in a crowded household, she had no one she could really turn to for advice.

And then she came to College Visions, the seven-year-old advising program founded by Simon Moore that helps low-income and first-generation college-bound students navigate the treacherous waters of the college application process, from selecting the right schools, to filling out the dreaded financial aid forms, to making the final decision.



Moore grew up in Providence (he went to Classical and played basketball for a year at Brown) and other than the couple of years he spent working in Harlem and the Bronx, "I haven't gone outside of a two-mile radius."

He started College Visions because he saw a clear void when it comes to college advising in Providence public schools. Most schools don't have someone focusing solely on those who need help applying and guidance counselors simply don't have the capacity to meet with students more than a handful of times during their junior and senior years.

That's where College Visions comes in. Funded through private sponsorships and the AmeriCorps VISTA program, the nonprofit's full-time staff of five recruits students for its College Access Program during their junior year. The program is completely free for the students, who meet one-on-one with their adviser every couple of weeks (often much more) to discuss taking the SAT or ACT, filling out applications, writing the essay, and understanding financial aid packages.

It's not all fluffy "you can be whatever you want" or "we'll find a way to pay for it" advising either. As one struggling statistics student found out, staffers have no problem giving it to you straight.

"You need to make a decision," an adviser told the student. "You need to pick a day every week to get extra help. Colleges don't like Ds."

It's that level of honesty and open dialogue that had a half-dozen or so students hanging out in the College Visions office in the Mercantile Block Building on Washington Street well after 6 pm on the Friday night before April vacation. They trust Moore. They trust the staff. They trust the process.

"I wasn't thinking about college at all," Janelle said as she sat in a room lined with school pennants sent in as gifts from College Visions alumni. "I didn't even want to apply. I didn't have any money. But then I started meeting with my adviser here. Now I'm going to show my little brothers they can do it too."

Now Janelle has a decision to make. She has to choose between Salem College and Guilford College, two North Carolina schools well-known for providing maximum financial aid packages, and the University of Rhode Island.

But the support won't end there. College Visions also offers a College Success Program, which helps alumni make the successful transition to college. College Visions advisors mentor students, serve as financial aid advocates, and make sure their charges are able to find work.

The goal of this program, according to Moore, is to help address the most underreported crisis in American education today: the college dropout rate. Research from the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education suggests one in three low-income students will enroll in college; just 11 percent of those graduate within six years.

"There are huge consequences for starting college and not finishing," Moore said. "We want our alumni to graduate because it will expand their access to everything. We commit to ensuring they complete college."

They've been wildly successful compared with the national numbers. The first class of College Visions graduates completed the program in 2005. It had ten members. Seven have graduated from college. Two are still enrolled.

This year, Janelle is one of 70 students enrolled in the College Access Program. As a group, they've been accepted to dozens of schools including URI, Rhode Island College, St. John's, and Holy Cross. Another 140 alumni remain active in the College Success Program, which has students at Brown, Boston College, Clark, and George Washington University.

The future for College Visions is as bright as it is for its alumni. Moore said the demand to join the program continues to rise, but while he's open to expansion, he wants to make sure all of his students continue to receive the constant one-on-one advising they deserve.

It always goes back to the students. And for someone who has barely left Providence, Moore has opened doors for so many.

Just ask Janelle.

Read more...

Awesome People: After 'Black Friday,' a local poker player's lament

Originally appeared in The Phoenix

If you think the only thing on television these days other than those silly P90X infomercials is poker, then you're probably on to something. But that all stands to change, now that the feds handed three popular online poker websites what effectively amounts to a death sentence in the United States.

An end to online poker means an end to all those sponsorships and commercials that make televised tournaments possible. And without those glitzy ads around to lure moms, dads, and the 35-year-old sons who still live with them, the game is likely to revert back to its pre-2003 days, when the only people playing cards regularly were wannabe cowboys and guys named Huck.


Which could mean the very premature end to a potentially lucrative career for one Rhode Islander.

Bill DelSanto doesn't call himself a professional poker player yet. He still wants to sleep with women and finish college and he even works a part-time job at Citizens Bank to stay active. But considering he won $31,087.50 sitting in his bedroom on a single Sunday last May, it's safe to say the 21-year-old is more than a recreational player at this point.

DelSanto estimates poker has provided 90 percent of his spending money since he was a 16-year-old Bishop Hendricken student, when he would sneak into Foxwoods to play cash games for hours at a time. It's rare (and illegal) for someone so young to get their start playing live games in a casino, but he says, "I never wanted to leave a high balance online just in case they picked up and left some day."

When he finally entered the Interzone in earnest, his game took off. With the ability to play in four tournaments at once, he quickly began to master a number of less popular poker games. On television, the game of choice is almost always no-limit Texas hold 'em, but DelSanto prefers H.O.R.S.E., a mixed version of poker that many veterans avoid because of the difficultly.

It was a major online H.O.R.S.E. tournament he was prepared to enter earlier this month when he found out PokerStars had had been shut down to American players.

Players refer to it as "Black Friday."

"The feeling on Black Friday literally felt so depressing that it was numbing," DelSanto says. "I was driving home from work and got a message on Facebook and Twitter about the shutdown and I literally almost crashed."

The founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker were among 11 people indicted on charges of bank fraud and money laundering. The federal government reportedly hopes to recover $3 billion from the companies, which until recently ran commercials alongside every poker tournament on television.

Without the low buy-in qualifying tournaments held online, many poker enthusiasts believe the World Series of Poker, which normally pays over $5 million to the Main Event winner, will suffer from a severe downturn in players. And if the game wanes in popularity, ESPN will likely be the first to pull its support.

But DelSanto remains upbeat about the game he eventually wants to make a career out of.

"I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing with a lot more traveling in the picture," he said. "I'm still going to work at the bank, work on my degree, and play poker. I have the World Series of Poker in June and I am looking forward to seeing the world while hopefully amassing a fortune in the process."

For now, though, there is some unintentional irony in the online screen name he used to play under: ItbDone.

Sooner than he ever thought.

Read more...

Awesome People: The Beer Guy

Originally appeared in The Phoenix

The next time you're chugging that seemingly endless cup of stale Keystone Light following a losing game of beer pong, Patrick McGovern wants you to think of it as a liquid time capsule.

McGovern is one of "maybe 10" molecular archeologists in the world focusing primarily on ancient booze and chocolates, which makes him a hit with a wide variety of crowds, ranging from the Discovery Channel nerds to NPR loyalists to, of course, college students, who believe time isn't wasted when you're getting wasted.


The Scientific Director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, McGovern was in town this week to present "Uncorking the Past," an hour-long lecture that basically confirmed something you probably already suspected: Greek mythology was likely created under the influence of substances even the Waterman co-op kids can't get their hands on.

McGovern, who has penned two books about his research, said he and his team first discovered a 2700-year-old beverage recipe when excavating the tomb of King Midas in present-day Turkey. The group recovered an Iron Age drinking set and analyzed the chemical fingerprints left on different vessels to identify the ingredients used in the cocktail.

What they learned was that if King Midas and his buddies went on a pub crawl today, they probably would be looking for beer garnished with a lot of fruit. Flavor overload was all the rage in the Persian Empire. The fingerprints contained compounds for tartaric acid (grape wine), beeswax (honey mead) and beer stone (barley, for beer), all in the same drink.

In other words, the Persians drank jungle juice too!

sublimefront13_main
Furthermore, if you've ever poured out a little liquor for your homeboys and girls, you'll be happy to know it wasn't Ice Cube who came up with this novel idea. McGovern explained that when King Midas died, his supporters threw a party and also shared the booze with their fallen comrade. You know, so he wouldn't haunt them.

McGovern eventually brought his findings to a variety of brewers hoping someone might be able to take the recipe and concoct something even remotely enjoyable to drink. Ultimately, Delaware-based Dogfish Head prevailed, creating a 9% ABV beer appropriately named Midas Touch.

Dogfish Head, which recently announced its products would no longer be available in Rhode Island, sponsored a tasting of Midas Touch and two other McGovern discoveries at the Brown Graduate Center Bar following the lecture.

Although McGovern billed Midas Touch as recreated for a king, it tasted more like something you would offer to an undergrad who "doesn't like the taste of beer." Yet. It was sweeter and fruitier than the beer you're probably used to, but not as sugar-filled as a Smirnoff Ice, which only pussies drink anyway.

The other drinks offered were Chateau Jiahu, which tasted like a combination of sweet boxed wine and flat beer, and Theobroma, a delicious mixture of chilies and cocoa powder that appeared to be the most popular in the room.

The recipe for Chateau Jiahu, according to McGovern, was inspired by a drink found in China 9000 years ago, which explains why the bottle features a seductive looking Asian woman with a tramp stamp on the label. The Theobroma has its origins in Honduras, which is believed to be the birthplace of chocolate-based alcoholic drinks.

These ancient brews can be tough on the modern drinker's palate. Plenty of "bitter beer faces" proved that right away.

But hey, King Midas probably wouldn't have any love for Keystone Light.

Read more...

Awesome People: Woman Donates Kidney on Valentine's Day

Originally appeared at GoLocalProv on 2/14/2011

Chocolate, flowers and jewelry all make for great gifts, but Elise Swearingen is going above and beyond this Valentine’s Day. The 27-year-old policy associate in Providence City Hall is spending the day at Rhode Island Hospital where she will donate a kidney to a colleague’s brother-in-law -someone she’s only known for a short time.


But the length of her relationship with Dr. Robert Robbio (the recipient of the kidney) means very little, the laid back Swearingen says. Simply put, she’s making the sacrifice because she believes it’s the right thing to do.

“It didn’t matter who it was,” Swearingen said. “There are a lot of people who need this and I wanted to help. It’s a personal decision, but I haven’t questioned it. I’m just like, I have two kidneys, I don’t understand why I can’t give one to him.”

We Barely Knew Each other

Swearingen isn’t the only person who wanted to step up to help the 59-year-old Robbio. He says there were eight others who went through the extended process that comes with donating a kidney. But for one reason or another, they were all unable to move forward.

Robbio learned that he was in urgent need of a transplant about a year ago after a routine doctor’s appointment. He said he’s had kidney problems for the last decade, but never thought it would get to a point where he would need to be hooked to a dialysis machine for five hours each day. But when his doctor called him one Saturday last February, he knew it could only be bad news.

That’s when he started searching for donors. He never thought of asking Swearingen.

“I had met Elise once or twice because she’s friends with my family,” Robbio said. “But if she were to walk in a room, I probably wouldn’t know who know who she was. Now she’s a member of the family.”

I Just Said I’ll Do It 


No one ever asked Swearingen to step up. Robbio’s sister-in-law, Sue, happens to be a colleague of Swearingen’s in City Hall. Sue approached her one day about setting up a Facebook group to generate awareness and possibly find Dr. Robbio a donor.

Almost immediately, Swearingen offered something better.

“I just said I’ll do it,’ Swearingen recalls.

Since then, she has constantly been on the go, from visiting doctors to making arrangements and Sue, who in a recent Facebook post she referred to as “my friend/sister/mother figure/sidekick,” has been there every step of the way.

“I’ve been at every doctor’s appointment and every blood test,” Sue Robbio said. “I can’t even begin to describe this. We had gone through our whole family and I just needed to make a Facebook page.”

A Second Chance

It was Swearingen’s altruistic spirit that put her in the position to meet Dr. Robbio in the first place. She grew up just outside of Kansas City and moved to Providence to volunteer with the City Year program. She expected to be in Rhode Island for a year. That was five years ago.

She took a job at City Hall and was quickly befriended by the Robbio family. Now she’s saving one of their lives.

“She’s giving a gift of life,” Dr. Robbio said. “It’s Valentine’s Day, but I look at it like it’s my birthday. I should have been dead and Elise has given me a second chance.“

Read more...

Awesome People: The Renegade Wrestling Alliance goes Raw

Originally Appeared in The Phoenix

For most boys growing up, professional wrestling, with its salacious storylines and otherworldly characters (who could forget the Ugandan Giant, Kamala?) serves as a rite of passage into adulthood. But at some point, boobs tend to replace bodyslams, Sasha Grey becomes your favorite entertainer and just like that, Monday is no longer the most important night of the week.

That wasn’t the case for Anthony DiIorio. The 29 year old says he fell in love with the sport after watching WrestleMania VII (in 1991) and has wanted to be a wrestler ever since. He can vividly recall an epic match between his hero Shawn Michaels and Bret “the hitman” Hart from 1996 and admits to spending hours browsing the internet for rumors regarding upcoming WWE storylines.


If that doesn’t qualify him as a hardcore wrestling fan, you ought to meet his two boys. Austin and Adam are named after -you guessed it- two of DiIorio’s favorite in-ring performers: Stone Cold Steve Austin and Adam Copeland, who goes by Edge in the squared circle.

DiIorio, his children and over 20 friends and family members were out in full force at The Dunk Monday night for WWE Raw, which bills itself as the longest running episodic television show in history. But unlike the majority of the other wrestling enthusiasts in the building, the group wasn’t there simply to be entertained. Many are members of the Renegade Wrestling Alliance (RWA), DiIorio’s backyard wrestling league, and were in attendance to pick up new moves and critique what they view as the big leagues.

The RWA was founded in 2007, about a decade after DiIorio and his wrestling-obsessed buddies started rolling around on mattresses set up in his Pawtucket backyard. From the very beginning, they videotaped their matches and before long, with encouragement from DiIorio’s mother, purchased a custom-designed ring for $2,600.

“We wanted to become legitimate and make a serious go of it,” DiIorio, who wrestles under the name T-Phoenix, said. “We didn’t have any real goals going in; it was just a bunch of us who loved wrestling. Now we’re a team and a family and we want to put on the best show possible.”

DiIorio said the RWA is split between guys who treat wrestling as their version of pick-up basketball and ones who really hope to make it big one day. He mentioned Stan Styles, a wrestler who drives in from Philadelphia on weekends, Jason Devine and JP Hansen as three performers who have the potential to become professionals.

The league gets together a couple of Sundays each month and rents out an old building just off the Nate Whipple Highway in Cumberland. The free shows are taped and aired on Public Access Tuesdays at 11:00 p.m. and Fridays at midnight. DiIorio has no clue how many people tune in (it’s gotta do better than the Joe Trillo Show, right?) but said he was surprised by the league’s growing internet following. Since starting a YouTube channel last July, the RWA has 123 subscribers and over 22,000 video views. Its Facebook page has 650 fans.

It’s not quite the same as the WWE’s rabid following, but DiIorio noted that a few RWA wrestlers do get spotted by random Rhode Islanders from time to time. For Raw he admitted to wearing the same Pittsburgh Pirates coat he often wears during RWA tapings just in case anyone recognized him.

So what did the backyard amateurs think of Monday night’s show?

DiIorio said his group can be pretty critical of the WWE and admitted to despising his kids’ favorite superstar, John Cena, who is the closest thing to what Hulk Hogan was 20 years ago. But for the most part, they all enjoyed themselves.

As for Austin and Adam?

“They loved it,” DiIorio said.

Of course they did. It’s in the blood.

Read more...

Awesome People: Corsets, Goggles, and Game Geeks in Warwick

Originally Appeared in The Phoenix

Are you an aspiring warlord, dragon slayer or munchkin? Do you find Queen Victoria strangely sexy? Well TempleCon 2011 might be right up your alley.

The sixth annual convention of gaming and retro-futurism — think geeks getting off on old-timey visions of the future — returns to the Crowne Plaza in Warwick February 4-6 and is expected to bring in as many as 1500 attendees from all over the world.


The event attracts both hardcore and casual gamers, fans of science fiction and fans of fantasy. TempleCon will offer dozens of competitive tournaments (three Flames of War national qualifiers!), alongside panel discussions, presentations, fashion shows, and a retro-futurist ball.

The idea, according to TempleCon co-founder "Madame" Ximon Dundaine, is to provide a little something for everybody, whether you're the intense gamer or the poor significant other who gets dragged along for the ride. She said her event has become known as a couple's destination in the retro-futurist community.

"When we started this, we wanted to have the kind of event to go to that we desired," Madame Ximon says. "After going to a lot of other conventions, we hadn't yet found that. Let's say you hate gaming, we still have a lot going on."

Retro-futurism has become an entire subculture complete with games, novels, and paintings. Among the genre's most popular forms is Steampunk, which is often set in Victorian England and fetishizes steam power.

It is, among other things, a good excuse to wear corsets, petticoats, and goggles.

There are more in Rhode Island who take to this sort of thing than you might imagine. Madame Ximon, co-owner of the Temple, a retail hobby game store in Pawtucket, says the Ocean State has among the most game stores per capita in the country.

Gaming enthusiasts who have not yet registered for the conference may be disappointed — most of the tournaments are already filled. But you can still dress up like Dickens and grab an autographed copy of C.J. Henderson's Steam Powered Love: Tales of the Pelgimbly Institute for the Advanced Sciences And the Chaos It Caused.

Sounds romantic.

Read more...

Awesome People: Four Questions For A Hypertext Pioneer

Originally Appeared in The Phoenix

As both an author and illustrator, Shelley Jackson has looked beyond the limitations of singular genres or techniques to create a novel style of work. Perhaps best known for her 1995 creation, Patchwork Girl, Jackson is considered a pioneer of hypertext fiction, an interactive, nonlinear form replete with links. Jackson was at Brown University this week to read a piece from her latest project, which she calls newspaper collaging, and the Phoenix caught up with her for a Q+A.


YOU'VE FOLLOWED AN UNCONVENTIONAL PATH TO SUCCESS SINCE YOUR TIME AS A BROWN MFA STUDENT.
Well, Brown encourages experimental work, so it's not like I was having to buck the system at Brown. [The school] is unusually welcoming in that way and it was at Brown that I encountered hypertext and kind of played around with it. Partly it's just temperamental, due to the fact that from an early age I always was really interested both in writing and in art and I resisted the idea that I would ever have to choose between them. I always insisted that I could do both and other things too. It seemed more interesting to go in all different directions and that's just always how I've worked.

PATCHWORK GIRL IS CONSIDERED A GROUNDBREAKING WORK OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE, OR HYPERTEXT FICTION. IN MANY WAYS, YOU HELPED CREATE THE GENRE. WHAT WERE YOU HOPING TO ACCOMPLISH WHEN YOU STARTED THE PROJECT?
In the beginning, I realized that it provided a way to explore things I was already interested in exploring in print in a way that was a lot more natural. I'm not a particularly linear thinker in any case and that's not what most interests me in writing. So in a way, my goal even in print was to find ways to slow down that propulsive drive toward an end . . . and set things in parallel — not just a line with a beginning, middle, and end. Hypertext provided a way to really literalize that because you could start at one window and go in multiple directions from there. To me, it felt like moving around in a physical space and it made it easy to see that I could incorporate visual art or sound or any number of other things in a way that is really hard to do with a printed book.

YOU ALSO CREATED THE SKIN PROJECT, WHICH TOLD AN ENTIRE STORY BASED ON TATTOOS ON THE BODIES OF VOLUNTEERS. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THAT IDEA?
My ambition increasingly has been to push the boundaries of what writing is, what it can be, and resist defining it more narrowly. It seems to me that even a book is a more multifaceted object than we credit it with being. Every time we read, we're also engaging with this sculptural object; we're using our hands to move it, to manipulate it. It's a kind of performance; it only comes to life in our reading of it and in the particular experiences we bring to it and so each performance is unique. So it seems to me the text already leaks off the page in all directions and engages human bodies in interesting and complicated ways. A lot of my work is thinking about the body as it relates to text, so I thought I'd push that and make it more literal and the obvious way to do that seems to be this way we already publish on our skin.

YOUR LATEST VENTURE INVOLVES TEARING OUT THE FRONT PAGE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND RECREATING A STORY USING ALL OF THE WORDS AND ADVERTISEMENTS LOCATED ON THE FRONT AND BACK OF THE PAGE. IT SEEMS TO PROVIDE A DARK-BUT-HUMOROUS TAKE ON OUR CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS.
I think it just came out of the material. That particular front page had a dead man's face smeared across it. He was a member of Al-Qaeda who had been killed and confirmed dead. That may have been working on an unconscious level as I engaged with it. I think all of these newspaper collages have been sort of clownish in some ways with some kind of comedy, but then a balance of the creepy seriousness. That seems to be a mode that I really enjoy, those two things weighing against each other. But I didn't specifically try to push it in a dark direction; it just seems to be in the subconscious of the New York Times. I think, in a way, the news is dark.

Read more...

Awesome People: Hangin' With Lizz Winstead, Co-Creator Of The Daily Show

Originally Appeared at Rhode Island's Future in July, 2010

Everyone remembers that one person who helped set them on their career path. Maybe it was a teacher, a coach, a relative or some kind of mentor. For Lizz Winstead, the credit goes to a douchebag.

About two decades ago, Winstead was having drinks on a blind date in New York City when everybody’s eyes turned to the bar’s television. It was right at the onset of the Gulf War and Winstead recalls being taken aback by the pageantry of the events taking place – the graphics, the reporting, the way violence was being sold to the public. She says it made her sick.


Her date’s response? “Wow. This is so cool.”

In that very moment, Winstead, who had been a standup comedian since the early ‘80s, says her act changed. She hated the way hypocrites in the media were packaging the war and decided to start focusing on politics and current events. Within a few years, Winstead began working with Comedy Central to create an everyday show that would respond to what was happening in the world, with the media as a central character. The Daily Show was born.

Winstead has become a leading voice among progressives around the country, co-founding Air America Radio, where she also hosted a show with Rachel Maddow and Chuck D. Last month, she served as a keynote speaker and panelist at Netroots Nation, where she called the progressive movement the voice of sanity in our country.

Winstead is in Rhode Island this weekend to perform her latest solo project, called My State of The Union. The Mixed Magic Theater in Pawtucket is hosting her for a pair of shows this evening at 7:00 and 9:00 and another two at the same time tomorrow night. Tickets are still available.

I caught up with her Wednesday before she spoke to a large crowd at Drinking Liberally at the Wild Colonial. Aside from learning that she orders her steak rare (Paragon may have dropped the ball on that one) I found her to be as insightful as she is hilarious. We talked a lot about women in comedy and she said she believes that a female will have a late night show on a major network within ten years.

Unfortunately, thanks in part to the internet and 24/7 media, she thinks the Letterman’s and Leno’s of the world (she doesn’t put The Daily Show in this class) have started to lose their relevance. In her opinion, radio is a great way to connect with an audience. She said she loves how listeners can keep the host honest and how they’re the ones dictate how the show goes.

Winstead said she feels the right still owns talk radio because the goal of conservatives is simply to “scare the shit” out of the audience. She thinks people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are willing to shovel dishonesty down their listeners’ throats because they are the most opportunistic people in the world and given the state of the country, it’s easy to take advantage of the public.

She said progressives need to roll up their sleeves and find a way to be heard. She pointed to all the brilliant people on the left who are well-known (Bill Maher, Jon Stewart) but said the next success probably won’t come from television because there isn’t any syndication money out there. She said she wishes MSNBC “had the balls” to put a real progressive show on its network.

Her key message to progressives, however, is to bring the internet to real life.

“A lot of times, we only get together two or three times a year,” Winstead said. “Progressives need to meet up for social occasions – have BBQ’s and rallies, start attending school board meetings and city council meetings. Infiltration is fun. “

Someone ought to find that douchebag.

And thank him.

Read more...