A new installment of my weird and embarrassing audio confessions.
I never went to a “normal” summer camp. When I was nine I almost went to a Girl Scout summer camp with some of my friends, but I think we all lost interest after we found out there weren’t any actual tents or cabins, just “outdoor sleeping platforms.” I would have been way too afraid of getting malaria from mosquitos to go. Apparently, they’ve since built A-frame cabins.
The summer camps I went to were all “specialized”: first I went to an aviation camp, sort of like Space Camp, but about aviation. My dad had been a pilot and we’d had a lot of fun talking about airplanes together, so it seemed like a natural fit. But it was on an Air Force base and got a little too militaristic for me my second year. That’s when a former fighter pilot came in to talk about his job (and to complain about the inaccuracies in Top Gun — “Goose wouldn’t have died! He would have gone right through the glass! For all we know, Goose is still alive!”), and told us that if we wanted his job we’d just have to “accept” that at some point we’d probably end up killing civilians as well as “the enemy.”
That’s when I decided being a pilot was not for me; I very much did not want to kill anyone. Commercial piloting seemed out, too: I had terrible motion sickness, and my favorite part of camp was not the super cool, high-tech flight simulators, but outdoor survival skills. (Here’s a tip: if you’re ever in the woods, look for clustered berries, like blackberries or raspberries, they’re always safe to eat. Blue or black berries are safe about 85% of the time, but stay the hell away from white and red berries.)
Then, of course, there was theater camp. This was much more my speed. Though it got a little weird there, too: my first summer session at Idyllwild Arts, I was not in something kid-friendly like Guys and Dolls or You Can’t Take it With You, but an adaptation of a book called I Never Saw Another Butterfly, about the children who lived in the Holocaust-era ghetto, Terezin. Lots of parents drove up at the end of the session to see their mostly Jewish children perform dark poetry in striped uniforms with yellow stars.
My second session started with my new roommates asking me “Are you into slash fanfiction?” and ended with us all crying over the Queer as Folk season one finale. Somewhere in-between, two of them burst into our room right before lights-out, gleefully shrieking “We just paid two boys to kiss!” (They, and the boys, assured me it was all in fun and no one had felt pressured.)
Finally, before my senior year of high school I did a summer Shakespeare intensive near my aunt’s house in rural Pennsylvania, a place my parents would ship me and my sister off to in the summer because, 1) our aunt and uncle were way more fun to be around, and 2) they figured we wouldn’t get in trouble out in Amish Country. I was lucky enough to get the part of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and felt right at home with a group of fifteen girls and two boys who played the drinking game Kings with non-alcoholic drinks, and drove around Lancaster County yelling along to Tenacious D songs.
Like I said, the 2000s were a weird time to be a teenager.
Stuff I Did This Week: My episode of OCD Stories is now up! Also, I started a public Instagram! It’s @MaraNotLikeSarah.
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: A Smattering
Midnight Confession #21: Notes on Camp