Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 9

ljc Hartford ounint CONNECTICUT PAGE A9 MONDAY APRIL 8, 1991 Student poet speaks volumes to classmates They come in giggling, sleeves pulled over their hands, trying to look like little girls. But what they have on their minds is some very big-girl stuff. Can we see something by Melinda? they ask. And Serenalda Pleasent, one of those cool teachers you never forget, obliges them. She pulls out the poetry of Melinda Solis, 14, and her classmates usually girls pore over the words.

Did you ever notice me when I look into your eyes and can 't turn away? That one's a favorite. The girls don't give nearly this much attention to Zora Neale Hurston or J.D. Salinger. But Melinda's poems are different. Not technical, like a psychology book.

She writes For Opening Day, open baseball book By JOCELYN McCLURG Courant Book Editor you feel an inexplicable urge for a hot dog? A sudden need to chew bubble gum? A slight-i I ly alarming desire to cram your jaw with chewing tobacco? Yes, it's Opening Day, and you aren't the only one with baseball fever. Book publishers have penciled in their spring lineup, and as usual, baseball titles are among the heavy-hitters. The splashiest of this year's crop is "Baseball in America" (Collins Publishers San Francisco, $45), brought to you by the same folks who produce the "Day in the Life" series of coffee-table photography books. More than 50 photographers, working in larger-than-life color format, have captured America's pastime in all its myriad forms from the aw-shucks innocence of kids in the back yard to the megabucks excitement of the big leagues. There's an appealing naivete and old-fashioned pluck to many of the pictures in "Baseball in America," almost enough to make you forget how unhappy Rickey Henderson is.

Here are other highlights of the baseball-book season. Unless otherwise noted, the books are now in stores. "The Great Rivalry: The Yankees and the Red Sox 1901-1990" by Ed Unn (Ticknor Fields, May). A couple of years ago David Halberstam had a bestseller with "Summer of '49," an account of the famous season when the Red Sox and the Yankees battled down to the wire for the American League pennant. In his new book, Ed Linn takes an overview of a near-century of the rivalry that is often linked to Red Sox owner Harry Frazee's infamous sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $125,000 in 1920.

"My Favorite Summer 1956" by Mickey Mantle and Phil Pepe (Doubleday, In 1956 we liked Ike and loved Mickey Mantle. Please see Baseball, Page All AM about feelings. She knows because she's a teenager, too what it's like to wonder about the future and worry that maybe she's shooting too high. (After all, doesn't every adolescent girl want to be Julia Roberts?) And what if she does become the great actress she wants Snapshots to be? Will she be scared? And on a more day-today level, why are parents so difficult? Don't they remember being kids? Susan Campbell in soft-rock radioK there's cold thinking behind sad songs 35A Lite "If a girl talks about a guy in front of her parents, they get upset," Melinda says. "Did they never go through! what we go through? Were they never our age? Parents try to keep that from a child.

I want to be successful, and I am not going to ruin my life. I love to make my parents proud of me." That's how most of the other girls feel, too. And so they come to see her poetry. Not just her best friend, Wanda, but also girls she doesn't even know, who sometimes get copies to pass around the halls. Even the boys read her stuff, albeit grudgingly.

Her brother in high school reads it out of the corner of one eye. "He doesn't want me to know he's interested," Melinda says. "It's about love, you know." Here I sit in a place that was once called my home. Now to find that comfort once again, I will roam. HrMI II s.

Illustration by EMILY LISKER II VI jt I II Special to The Courant busy. (More music, less talk.) They need to relax. (Keep it mellow, don't repeat.) And they're willing, maybe eager, to hear a lot of awfully sad songs. They've been around the block, bub. Just keep it soft and romantic, OK? Thus you get a radio format driven by the stodgier tastes of aging baby boomers; mild radio pretested for its lukewarm hipness by their peers and by far-flung sharp-eared music consultants; tear-stained radio that's computer-blended into a smooth-flowing, longer-listening audio shake.

You get WIOF and Please see Lite, Page All galleries and cellular-phone dealers might have invented him. He tunes in the right listeners for their ads. As does Neil Diamond. And Carly Simon. And Kenny Rogers.

There's nothing about lite rock or "soft adult contemporary" as it's known in the biz that's any more demographically driven than the other specialized formats on today's radio dial more than say, hard-rock stations that pitch medicated pimple pads. Upscale advertisers just want to reach ready-for-prime-time consumers, full-fledged adults aged 25 to 54, especially women. The difference is in this crowd's special mix of cravings. They're By DAVID JACOBSON Courant Staff Writer You are thinking about Mr. Barry Manilow all wrong.

The guy is not just some saccharine, self-pitying balladeer. No. Beamed out at 50,000 watts from local mountaintops, he's like a super-glowing bug light on a summer night. He sucks in fluttering middle-aged consumers by the thousands so they can get zapped by ads for furniture and mortgages. Same goes for Gordon Lightfoot.

If this felt-tipped folkie had not existed already, the oriental-rug AW I Collins Publishers "Baseball in America" is among the books on the national pastime out this spring. In the red, Channel 18 fading to black For at this point there no other choice. So here I begin my journey. Most of her poems are about love. "Whenever someone tells me something, when I feel cluttered up, I write it out," Melinda says.

In fact, her first poem was "(My) Problems." She included parentheses in the title because, really, the poem was about a friend who couldn't make a decision. The friend wanted to talk to her mother but was afraid. Melinda figured that in the course of growing up, she'd come across the same trouble, too, She wrote the poem last year. Before she got into Quirk Middle School's gifted and talented program, she wrote on the sly, behind a notebook, and tried not to get caught by her teachers. All these wild love games are definitely getting to my head.

Or maybe it's the fear of feeling rejection. Oh, Lord, whatever happened to affection! But c'mon. Boys aren't the only things her friends think about. (Although sometimes it looks that way. Sometimes, a girl will have a fight with her boyfriend, and that's all she talks about all day, Melinda says.

How long can you let a guy run your life?) For now, Melinda will do her research via her friends. "I don't reajly want to jump into dating right now," Melinda says. She has school-work to attend to, and this summer she wants to get a job. And expand her horizons. "I want to write more about feelings, rather than love," she says.

By the end of the school year, Melinda will have written an entire book of poetry, and just in time, too. This fall she enters Hartford High. Quirk will publish the collection in a hardbound copy and put one copy in the public library downtown. (Other students have written books about Puerto Rico, and one student wrote a comic book.) Melinda can't wait. when we are sad, we often try to cover our sadness with a smile.

And when we're happy we often try to keep a strong hold on our may feel as if we can fool any suspicious eyes that may look our way. But in reality, we're only fooling ourselves. They really liked that one, too. Potential kinks cloud new symphony pact rk James VI Endrst L.ONTV the station into Chapter 11 involuntary bankruptcy 2V4 years ago, asked last week that the filing be converted to Chapter 7, which would force liquidation. This despite the fact that Planell cobbled together a combination of the "Home Shopping Club," program-length commercials hawking everything from woks to religion, locally produced and minority-oriented syndicated programs, reruns such as "Mission Impossible" and, most notably, sports programming, including Boston Celtics games, generating a positive cash flow for more than a year.

(The station also had tentative plans to broadcast Mets games starting Please see Forced, Page All dated to pay off its $11.6 million in debts. "Needless to say, I'm extremely disappointed," WHCT general manager Terry Planell said Friday. "But I feel that personally and professionally I did my best proving to the creditors committee that Channel 18 was a viable business, and, if nothing else, I can walk away knowing that I've done that, and I've stuck with it and believed in it." Indeed, until just days ago, Planell who joined the station's staff as program director in 1985, eventually becomfng general manager in mid-1989 believed the station would survive. But creditors, most significantly major TV programmers who forced By STEVE METCALF Courant Music Critic It's too early to say that storm clouds are gathering over the Hartford Symphony. Let's just say the horizon is being watched closely.

At the end of June, the current 3-year contract between the musicians and the symphony management will expire. The last time the symphony faced a new contract, in 1988, the result was a bitter 11-week strike by the players. This year the combination of shaky fiscal conditions and lingering issues from the strike will pose a tall challenge to the negotiating teams for both sides. In addition, there is a new wrinkle: Connecticut Opera and the Hartford Ballet, which for the past Please see City's, Page All When WHCT (Channel 18) signed on in September 1985, its competitors said there wasn't room in this town for another television station. It turns out they were right.

On Tuesday, WHCT, a Hartford independent television station with a colorful, controversial and litigious history that includes a Supreme Court case, is expected to be liqui already! girl, the mortality rate for the next daughter is as high as 53 to fewer immunizations and scant education. Music to sip by high of 865.7 million units, according to figures just released by the Recording Industry Association of America. Cassette tapes continue to edge CDs as the configuration of choice, while vinyl dropped another 66 percent from the previous year. Music videos showed a 53 percent growth rate from 1989, the report said. Indian women, beware Inside Almanac A12 Ann Landers A12 Crossword A13 Games A14 Horoscope A12 Jumble A13 Showtime A 14 Television A 10 Words All i few- Watch for a special promotion this summer from Sony Music's Columbia and Epic labels and Coca-Cola.

From May to July, the music giant will put 5.6 million 3-inch For some time, there have been reports from India of brides' being burned to death for failing to meet the groom's dowry demands. Widows were similarly dispatched. Mother of the bride Diane Keaton has been set to co-star with Steve Martin in Touchstone Pictures' remake of Vincente Minnelli's 1950 "Father What's going on today CDs in multi-packs of Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Coke and Sprite. Another 100 million 1- and 2-liter bottles will offer a "video sampler" of 10 Sony Music Video artists for $5.99. CD sales up Strong growth in compact disc sales helped the recording industry Now an article from the "Indian Express" on "India's Lost Women" offers alarming revelations from census figures.

The sex ratio has declined from 972 women for every 1,000 men in 1901 to only 933 women in 1981, although women are biologically stronger than men. "This disparity is the result of a conscious bias in favor of the male and against the female," the article said. Two recent studies have concluded that in both rural and urban India, "boys and men are consciously treated better than girls and women." This bias is expressed from infant neglect Punjabi families where there is of the Bride." The roles were played in the original by Joan Bennett and Spencer Tracy. The movie will be updated but will remain a story about an exasperated father experiencingMie tribulations of his only daughter's wedding. Martin Short has been signed for a cameo, but the role of the daughter played in the original by 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor is still uncast.

The director is Charles Shyer. OSi prow last vear to a $7.5 billion "Defending Your Life" Film playing at area theaters; please see Showtimes on Page A10. "Mr. Lucky" TV film, 8 p.m., WTWS (Channel 26). "Scapin" 8 p.m., Yale Repertory Theatre, 222 York New Haven.

Information: 432-1234. A industry despite a recession, new fieures show. Joe Tabacca The Hartford Courant Melinda Solis, 14, of Hartford, is writing a book of poetry. Classmates can't get enough of her new verses. A 38 percent increase in shipments of CDs was noted in an overall 7.3 percent increase in the number of recordings shipped a new.