Denise Zaccardi is sitting in the controlled chaos of her Bucktown offices looking uncharacteristically glum. She’s just gotten back from a trip to suburban Lincolnshire, where she met with officials of a large corporation and asked them for a contribution. This is the part of her job she most dislikes, and it’s the part that consumes most of her schedule these days.
But try explaining this to funders. The corporate people in Lincolnshire listened attentively but made no commitment. They told her she would get a response soon: either a letter and a check or just a letter.
“There’s always a high level of ambiguity here,” says Streit. “We’ve learned to adapt.”
Torrey Taylor, a 15-year-old sophomore at the Community Christian Alternative Academy on the west side, says Hard Cover has been a godsend. “I’ve been sitting in front of a TV since I was a baby,” he says. “I’ve had this thing about directing and writing for TV since I was five. Now I’m learning how to do everything connected with it. I’m gonna direct professionally some day.”
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Hard Cover is organized so that a team of teens spends one Monday afternoon coming up with ideas for a 30-minute program, setting up the format, and assigning details to individuals. The next Monday afternoon they gather at Chicago Access and film the show under the eye of the instructors. A new show runs on Channel 19 every other Monday at 5:30 PM (with reruns on the other Mondays). It’s a schedule that doesn’t allow a lot of time for polishing or fine- tuning, but what the program lacks in sheen it more than makes up for in gritty authenticity.
In a Hard Cover program on spirituality, three black teen panelists–two Baptists, a Muslim, and a nonbeliever–are extraordinarily candid (and tolerant) in discussing how they were brought up, what religion now means to them, and how belief or the lack of it affects their daily lives.
Instead of wallowing in disillusion, she became determined to help in any way she could. She attended Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, but switched to the University of Dayton after a year because Dubuque seemed too staid and provincial. In 1970 she pursued graduate studies in education at Buffalo State College in New York as a recruit with the federally funded Teacher Corps. “I was into everything in those days,” she says: “civil rights, antiwar, the women’s movement. I was fascinated by the disparity in society and the fact that most people didn’t even notice it.”
