The day before Caroline Fickett came to work with me for the first time, she asked me what to wear. It was a fair question – as a lifestyle reporter, I often find myself asking the same thing. One day, I’ll be tromping around on an island, dressed in jeans and a waterproof jacket. The next, I’ll be in Augusta, wearing a suit and interviewing policy-makers in the arts.

This day, we had planned to interview a man who recently opened a gallery. No jeans, I told her. Khakis, or whatever you would wear when you weren’t wearing jeans – you know, “dress-casual.”

She showed up in pink pants. Fuchsia, actually. I knew then that she and I would get along just fine.

In February, Caroline and I met as part of the LINC (Learning in Community)-Arts program, which pairs gifted Hancock County students with mentors in their chosen field. Caroline originally thought she wanted to be a fashion designer, but after immersing herself in a summer design program at the Pratt Institute in New York, she found herself longing to take writing classes instead. She wanted to give journalism a try, specifically lifestyle and the arts.

That’s where I come in.

But this isn’t a story about me. It’s a story about the LINC program. It’s a story about Caroline. And it’s a story about her peers and their mentors, 24 in all, who spent part or all of the 2002-2003 school year working in an intensive, one-on-one environment that delved far deeper into specialized arts topics than classroom time could allow.

“These are the kids who really need to be challenged in their art form,” said Carol Trimble, executive director of the Maine Alliance for Arts Education. “They have talent; they’re willing to work hard; they’ve just gone as far as they can in the school curriculum and they still need more.”

That was the case with Caroline, a Winter Harbor resident who just finished her junior year at Sumner High School in Sullivan. She grew up in a creative environment – her dad, David, is an author and artist and her mom, Liz, works as a teacher. But if it hadn’t been for them, she said, her only exposure to the arts would’ve been through her weekly art class. As a gifted student, she needed more than that.

On a personal level, LINC has helped Caroline thrive. This is her second mentorship – last year she worked with graphic designer Michelle Snowden at Downeast Graphics in Ellsworth – and she now has a better idea of what she wants to do after graduation, and, more important, how to get there.

“My mentors introduced me to life in the ‘real world’ while providing hands-on activities that improved my skills,” she said. “I was allowed to grow as an artist in a specified area, rather than being guided by a limited curriculum.”

Robert Shetterly learned the value of mentoring when he took a drawing class in college. The Brooksville painter, who served as a mentor to George Stevens Academy junior Tyler Weeks, said there’s no substitute for the experience of sharing specialized knowledge with an interested listener.

“This is the kind of teaching that’s especially valuable to me and hopefully for other people, too,” Shetterly said. “It’s very intense. It’s one-on-one, and usually the person you’re teaching really wants to be there.”

For Allison Chamberland, a student at Ellsworth High School, her mentorship with Acadia Repertory Theater’s artistic director Ken Stack was an equally intense study in character development. For the culmination of the mentorship, a performance at the end-of-the-year LINC celebration, she explored the emotions and motivations of Trudy, a homeless woman waiting for aliens to pick her up in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”

When it came time for the performance, Allison had the audience from the first line, and she held them for a flawless half-hour monologue. She breathed life and compassion into the character, and as the audience watched, they nodded their heads, laughed out loud, and some even shed a tear.

“I’ve always been confident on stage, but knowing I can do a 30-minute show by myself with no one else there has really been a big boost,” she said. “The only person I had to rely on was myself. I think that was a really good opportunity.”

Though Stack has given private theater lessons, the mentorship program was a new experience for him. Through its process- and product-oriented approach, it gave him a fresh look at theater, which after years on the stage can seem a bit “old hat” for him.

“It’s a chance to see someone explore and blossom and grow within the discipline,” he said. “One of the things Allison blossomed in was that her analytical abilities just stretched and stretched. ‘Why do we do what we do as people?’ and then translating that on stage. This is what acting is about – it’s about portraying people and the foibles of people and bringing that to an audience.”

Among the people in the LINC audience was Will Stecher, a classmate and friend of Allison’s from Ellsworth High School. He plays trombone in the band, and when he graduates, he plans to study music. He’s already preparing for his college auditions, and to do that, he needs a bit of coaching. But there are 40 people in the band this year, and there will be 80 next year.

Enter John Haley, a retired music teacher and veteran trombonist for the Virginia Symphony. Since he and his wife moved to Surry a year ago, he has joined several community bands and volunteered at local schools, including Ellsworth High School. When Nancy Patterson, the gifted-and-talented coordinator for Ellsworth’s middle and high schools who also coordinates the LINC program, approached Will about a mentorship, Haley sprung to mind.

“I knew I wanted him as a mentor because 31 years in the Virginia Symphony has gotta mean something,” Stecher said. “The band director isn’t able to work with everybody one to one, but working with Mr. Haley allowed me to do that.”

That’s the beauty of LINC-Arts. For Caroline and me, the program gave her a chance to see all of the elements that come together to make a newspaper – writing, photography, design and editing, to name a few. In fact, one of our photographers fondly refers to her as “the girl in the pink pants.”

We interviewed, we wrote, and when it was over … oh wait, it’s not over. The program requires 20 hours from the mentors, and in return, we get paid $500. I don’t know of a single pair who stayed within the 20-hour mark. Next week, Caroline and I are going up to Lincoln to meet an old friend of mine, a veteran reporter for The New York Times.

She seems to have the journalism thing down pat, though. For the LINC celebration, she planned to write a feature story on LINC-Arts. Her deadline was 5 p.m. At 1 p.m. I got a frantic e-mail from her telling me she changed her mind: the story would be about me instead, and would I mind answering a few questions?

I started to get nervous. “Now I know how my editor feels,” I thought, as I whipped off a reply.

I arrived at the celebration at 6, and Caroline was already there, with a full-length story, matted and displayed on a table near the work of a jewelry student and her mentor. Like me, she pulled it off at the last minute, under pressure, without a moment to spare.

Like I said, I knew we’d get along just fine.

For more information on the LINC-Arts program, or if you’re interested in becoming a mentor, call Carol Trimble at 667-7707 or Nancy Patterson at 667-5813.