New Haven Independent

The occasion was a grand party — er, a “Supporting the Arts in Education” silent auction— Thursday evening at the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) performance hall at the corner of Audubon and Orange streets. The event raised money for Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES), a regional not-for-profit whose showpieces include the ECA arts public high school.

ECA’s classes include a circus and street theater workshop taught by Jake Weinstein. He’s the guy in the banana suit.

Weinstein put students in costume and on stilts to welcome visitors to the party and direct them to the hall. Weinstein handed out animal crackers for visitors to feed the giraffes. One of those giraffes was Kaila Collins (pictured), a freshman at Foran High in Milford who commutes to ECA in the afternoon.

Weinstein’s class originally planned to have a gorilla chase after the banana, but he had a prior engagement.

The star of the evening was the Mayor Of Audubon Street, Bitsie Clark. She’s the woman at left in the photo above schmoozing with Rabbi Herb Brockman of the ACES board. ACES honored Clark for her decades of boosting the arts in New Haven, especially in building the Audubon Arts District of which ECA is an anchor.

Clark, one of the warmest, most upbeat and encouraging spirits in town, lives in one of the brick condos on Audubon Street. She ran the Arts Council of Greater New Haven for 19 years, during which time the arts district blossomed. After retirement in 2002, she began a new career — in politics. She’s serving her second term as alderwoman from the 7th Ward.

Actually, politics wasn’t a new career. It was a delayed career, Clark, who’s 74, revealed while greeting her fans near the asparagus bowl (pictured) at Thursday’s shindig. It was her second honor of the week; she was one of the winners of community-police awards last Sunday.

“Listen to this,” Clark said, grasping a reporter’s elbow and speaking in that half-whisper that makes all her tales sound vaguely confidential. “It should happen to everyone.”

The year was 1948. Clark, president of her 24-member junior class, was invited along with other New York City high-school government types to an “Education for Public Service” conference at the Waldorf-Astoria. (Clark was president of her 24-member junior class.) The Democratic Party sponsored the event. Students met state senators and other politicians in small groups.

Eleanor Roosevelt gave the luncheon address. Clark was mesmerized.

“Why leave government to the hacks?” Clark remembers Roosevelt saying. “Politics is a noble profession. We need people like you.

“I said, ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m going to do.’”

So Clark majored in political science at Vassar. She started law school.

“I hated law school,” she recalled. She took a break while her husband finished law school. Bitsie didn’t go back. She did start a career with the Girl Scouts of America, then the Arts Council.

When the chance came to return to her original dream after all those years, Clark snapped it up and won the 7th Ward seat on that melting pot of legislative deliberation, New Haven’s Board of Aldermen.

She’s having the time of her life, of course. And so are we, when Clark’s in the room.

“Don’t you think the Democratic Party was smart” to hold that conference in 1948? Clark asked. “I think the Democratic Party should do it again. It was fabulous.”

The news of the evening was the launch of ACES’ $500,000 capital drive to refurbish the Little Theatre on Lincoln Street, the charming 1930s-era hall (and former movie theater) that the group rescued and first renovated in the late 1980s. The new drive aims “to bring back the luster and realize state-of-the-art for today’s students and arts organizations that make the Little Theatre the lively community asset that it is.” The drive will also fix up space ECA uses at 70 Audubon St. To contribute, call 498-6800.