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20 April 2006
Summer Camp! What kind of summer camp did you attend, if any? Sleep away or no? Tell!
I went to a pretty competitive performing arts camp for two or three years. "Fame" was big at the time. Anyone with a similar experience must rent the movie "Camp", which I found to be just a riot, but maybe a little in-jokey.
We had some cruddy church camps that I went to. Not a whole lot of memorable activities except for one massive Capture the Flag game with around 200 people, three teams, and a huge forest area.
I remember one of the kids (age 12 or 13 or so) asking a camp leader why oral sex was considered a sin, and he told the kid that it's because it's too close to homosexuality. The kid said "If I'm licking a pussy, how is that similar to guys doing it up the butt?" Mr. Camp Leader had no answer for that one.
I went to a YMCA sleepaway camp in the Berkshires for one week, because my sister went to it a bunch of times and loved it. We pissed out the windows, the toilets were backed up with huge piles of shit, I ate nothing but Apple Jacks for a week straight. I was in a fistfight every fucking day, one kid shot me in the foot with a bb gun, so I reversed my bb gun and butstroked him in the forehead (like my dad taught me to do) and then I went home. The rocketry was pretty good. Oh and this kid that everyone in the bunk accused of fucking his teddy bear tried to poison us with insect repellant. I'm kinda ambivilant about camp, but it made me appreciate the fact that my dad made me get a summer job when I was 15.
I went to sleepover church camp three summers- I think the summer after 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades- it was fun, we got to do all those camp things like rafting, crafts, singing songs around the campfire, capture the flag, etc.
I just googled it- here's the website. The same guy who was running it when I was there is still running it today, although it looks like they've moved campsite from the Poconos to a space in VA.
I went to a lot of YMCA day camps. Once to sleep-way camp, but I got homesick (for reasons which are lost to me now) at 11, but got homesick and came home after three days. I never heard the end of that. Whenever I got angry with the parents, they'd say "I wanna go home.." in a whiny voice.
(oddly I had spent weeks at a time at relatives houses further away, and not gotten homesick at all. go figure)
A bunch of day camps; despite prodding from a more adventurous cousin, I was a big scaredy cat when I was younger about going to sleepaway camp. So I went to a couple of JCC camps, the Bobby Clarke Day Camp (yes, the Flyer Bobby Clarke, who would occasionally stroll around and survey his kingdom), and finally to a theater camp at a haunted theater in NJ. At the theater camp, we would write, produce, and perform a musical each summer. It was awesome.
I spent my summers watching scrambled porn on SuperTV ... only organized summer camp was the day camp at church called "Camp Friendship" I'll shout it from the mountaintop! PRAISE GOD!
But there was Boy Scouts and "environmental ed" was a week-long field trip during the (middle) school year where you learned about the food chain and climbed rope ladders. First time I ever heard the word 'blowjob'. "...and at the end she kind of blows on it, right counselor Dave?" "Um, yeah."
Vacation Bible School a couple times, but that was a day camp. Also went to Girl Scout day camp one summer.
Best summer camp was ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars between seventh and eighth grade. Sleepaway camp; we stayed in the dorms at Northwestern. I took a creative writing class. It was amazing, possibly the best summer of my life. We made a movie about the Unabomber. It had Elvis in it. It was awesome.
I spent my high school summers at a succession of stupid supermarket/restaurant type jobs or getting in rather stupid trouble with my moron friends or sitting around the house listening to college radio and reading wierd librrary books that nobody had taken out in years.
Argh, I had managed to mentally bury the week-long field trip to the Marin Headlands that I had to take in the 4th grade. I got to be around the same bullies I was around in school, but with more rocks and sticks!
Thanks a lot, jerks, it took years of therapy to forget that.
Church camp, six hours out of town in Door County Wisconsin. The church part was tiring, but I remember having a lot of fun hiking and swimming and being a teenaged boy. and I remember hanky panky. Those dirty religious girls!
Camp Orcila (YMCA on Orcas Island) and Camp Parson (Boy Scouts on Hood Canal).
We were on an overnighter from Orcila to Jones Island when the Gulf of Tonkin thing blew up. Our counselor had a forbidden portable radio and he pulled me off to the side and gave me the news. The next day we found an expended 5" shell dump from the WWII gun emplacements and we all smuggled huge brass shell casings back in our sleeping bags.
Did a church camp sleep-away thing a few years in a row - the only thing I remember from that was making buttons, and a massive chocolate syrup fight.
In my teenage years, I went to another Lutheran retreat at Agustant College in the Quad Cities (the name escapes me) and attended spiritual classes, and then found dark corners to make out with boys at night. I remember that quite fondly...
Man, you people were deprived. I am the camp champ. My mom's a single mom and I was a holy terror of a child (shockingly), so I spent all summer at camp: about half at day camp and half at sleepaway camp.
I attended Camp Oakes (featuring three-walled cabins and a donut lake thath was the site of my great kayak comeback), Camp Fox, Camp Osceola, and Camp Round Meadow. Best of all was Rawhide Ranch--cowboy camp! Then in high school I did those resume-enhancer summer schools: Yale & Oxford. And always winter camp, so we could play in the snow.
Though I was always in trouble and stuff, I do remember it fondly. And my mother must have spent a fortune.
14 hours, pans of the same fucking photograph of the two of you in the elevator. Slow, lugubrious voiceovers. Does he still have that ridiculous Kenny Loggins/George Lucas lobo silver head wedge haircut?
I did go to Marine Biology day camp for a minute, which was totally awesome. Horseshoe crabs and bruising games of red rover.
Pocono Plateau, baby!! Specifically music camp. Summer camp was my favorite thing in the world. I looked forward to that week all year and would cry when my parents came to pick me up.
I was also the drama instructor at a day camp for a few summers. But it's not the same as sweet, sweet sleepaway camp.
*cue old timey music* Dearest Pips:
We are on the 3rd floor now. The descent has been steady and uneventful. We move and yet stand still at the same time. When will this madness end?
Your beloved,
jonmc
Yeah I saw him years ago, I was all (in my head) "Dude, way to make baseball even more boring!" (I'm ok on Ken Burnz, hectually, but jeesh, editing yo!)
I also went to YMCA day camp in Chelsea, all I can remember is a stack of tables falling on my friend.
(although me and mister burns (who I do kind of like, but he does need to learn about brevity) were going up. He got off on the the sixth floor where The Independent film magazine is. I got off on the eight, which is where I am.
As a kid, I went for a week each summer to Girl Scout Camp Nomoco (I'd link, but I think it's a housing development now).
Then in late high school, college, and into my teaching years, I worked as a counselor at Camp Dark Waters, a small quirky Quaker camp. I did 7 summers there, all told, and a few ad hoc weeks when I had a chance. It probably did more to make me who I am today than any other institution.
Right after college, I taught for two years in an environmental ed. program called Nature's Classroom, which was actually school, but in a very campy atmosphere.
Suffice it to say: I know a lot of goofy songs; crazy ideas always seem like good ones; I enjoy collective madness; paddle a mean canoe; know that you're supposed to pitch in and help out; have seen a lot of weird-ass bugs and spiders; and am fascinated by group dynamics. And then there's camplore --actually a subfield of folklore which i'd like to study more.
I don't have a Ken Burns anecdote (although I did like what I caught of his series on Jazz, but I'm with ya on the editing). So instead I'll blather on about summer camp.
The first one was a computer camp. Seriously. We spent 2 weeks in the wilderness inside learning computer programming. I was a hard-core geek. It was also, at 11, the start of my career as a serious hell-raiser who aged her parents 10 years for every one. They would've sent me home, but they really didn't want my parents to know what I'd been up to. Besides, my programming skills were coming along so well.
Unsurprisingly, the next camp was affiliated with the group home chain who provided my lodging and indoctrination for a couple of years. That one, which I fondly termed "Psychos on Waterskis", was actually fun, and we got to go on a 4 day canoe trip in Algonquin Park every summer. And the staff didn't even leave us there! There were occasional runaways, but the 17-mile dirt road to the nearest (almost completely untravelled) 2-lane highway was a bit of a deterrent.
I was sent every year to a place probably best described as "Baptist Boot Camp". Chapel twice a day, devotions, prayers and messages at meals, etc. You had about two hour of fun a day, the rest was indoctrination.
"Sword Drill!* Collosians 1:3!"
* A Sword Drill was a contest to see who can look up verses the fastest. Kind of says it all doesn't it?
I never went for any extended period of time -- I got too homesick as a kid and didn't like sleeping away. I did go to a church camp once, though, for a weekend or something. The camp was in a town that had a nuclear power plant, and there were posters next to the bunk beds with a map of the area and the concentric-circle fall-out zones. (We were in the red zone.)
I was alread a neurotic and imaginative kid. The posters didn't help.
Seriously. Actually it was only an overnighter. To the mountains. In the winter. In the snow. Longish hike from where the bus let us off to the camp. Buncha SoCal kids without the right gear. I dunno which brilliant soul thunk it up. The boys emptied a fire extinquisher into the girls' dorm while we were trying to sleep. Asshole motherfuckers. I was in a bottom bunk. One corner came unattached and fell to the floor. I "slept" at a slant the rest of the night.
I did a few different things. From the summer before 5th-summer before 8th grade I went to Mohawk Summer Camp, a day camp in Naperville. I also went to Girl Scout day camps for a few years.
As for sleepaway camps, the first one I ever went to was called Mindpower '87 at Manchester College in N. Manchester, Indiana. It was a two week summer school-type program for gifted kids. They had various minicourses you took - mine were French and photography. That was the summer before freshman year of high school.
The summer before sophomore year I went to the Illinois Teenage Institute. Back then it was held at a 4-H camp and it was just an amazing experience. The woman who is currently president of my Jaycee chapter went to ITI the same session I did, and we knew each other back then (she and my friend from school were in the same group and got really tight) but lost touch until I met her again through Jaycees many years later.
The summer before my senior year of high school I went to the Washington Journalism Seminar at American University in Washington, DC. It was held concurrently with the Washington Summer Seminar (political science) and people from those two programs lived in the same dorm and had meals and did all the evening activities together - our daytime stuff was just different. Most of the other people there were from the East Coast and many were in a very different socioeconomic class than I was. My roommate went to Andover, I think there was someone from Exeter, a couple other people went to Choate, and there was also a girl from Beverly Hills. It was a blast!
Cheapo run-around-outside day camp for grad students' kids at local university.
Expensive arts day camp at local public school.
Arts sleepover camp in New Hampshire.
Spanish immersion sleepaway camp in very very rural Minnesota.
So, Ken Burns... will he be joining us for supper?
Camp? The last one (a sleep-away) sort of sent me home for playing with a knife (it was just my Swiss Army knife; I liked to flip it, make the blade stick in the ground). Freaked the camp manager out, I guess. Beautiful skip-cloud sunsets in the Catskills, though. I liked to sit under the trees and watch the skunks scuttle back and forth from under the cabins to the cafeteria dumpsters. Plus, there was this really cute blonde counselor from England who taught me how to tack a Sunfish (I only capsized once). And the two girls who liked to lie naked with each other after afternoon showers.
I think I wanted to go home, though, with the knife thing and all. They'd fired my favorite counselor for smoking pot in the woods; the new counselor started dating cute-Sunfish-boy; someone stole my Chai; and I was convinced at the time that my parents (my biological father and his wife, who were more the age of grandparents) would die before I got back.
I went for like one week one time (still aggrieved middle child only girl blues: my brothers got to go to awesome camps for, like, weeks!) to a kind of run down sleep away girls camp. It was okay. I learned how to make gimp keychains and won an archery medal, but everyone teased me about my underpants: my mother didn't hold with those newfangled bikini pants in different colors with patterns, no, uh uh, it was plain white Carters Spanky Pants for me, giant enormous ones that practically came up to my armpits. To this day I won't wear white underwear.
My son went for a few weeks to a camp a couple summers ago that turned out to be way more Christian than we had anticipated. He came home and was like, "They tried to baptize me! They tried to give me a Bible! I had to go to Jewish worship so they would leave me alone even though I told them I was an atheist!" So we all wanted to know what Jewish worship at a Christian summer camp was like: 8 or 9 disaffected kids hanging out by the edge of the pond, turns out.
Went to smart-kid camp for a few years in middle school (basically advanced summer school with more cliques). I enjoyed it at the time, but I've grown disaffected - too much drama.
Went to environmental camp, too, and became a counsellor (see: Worst Lie I've Ever Told).
Also went to week-long Christian camps - got to go on high-ropes courses, row out on this huge fucking lake and get stranded when we lost an oar, and see an orphaned baby bear. Pretty coolio.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
