Not a Happy Camper (7 page)

My father was thrilled when an Orthodox congregation from Newark relocated to Springfield and he expected the rest of our family to be excited about it. I wasn't crazy about converting to Crazy, sitting with my mother on the other side of a curtain. I felt like an imposter on
To Tell the Truth
, surrounded by real Jews straight out of old photos from Poland, only with better hats. But despite my confused and negative feelings, I wanted to remain attached to my religion. The Jewish people are the perennial underdogs, like lefties or substitute teachers, and I felt it was important for us to stick together.

I had no idea that most of my fellow campers were Reform and not the least bit observant at home. Sure, they

knew the words to the songs we sang on Friday nights, but they never thought twice about eating a Quarter Pounder and a chocolate shake. For most of them, this was exposure to something new and only for me was it a relaxation of the rules.

Saul's sermon was a little bit different from what I was used to at home, the blaming and finger pointing and accusations of sins I could never even think of committing.

“Are you listening, Mindy?” my father would lean over and ask.

“Uh-huh,” I'd lie, then immediately realize this was a violation of at least one of the Ten Commandments.

Saul's speech this morning, however, was riveting. Instead of preaching, he used the time to explain that the oldest group of girls, the Junior Counselors who were now in attendance, had spent the night at his house after intruders threw rocks at their bunks and called to them to come outside. “The prowlers,” as they would henceforth be known, had come by motorboat, launched from the Public Beach.

“That's who I heard last night!” I whispered too loudly to no one.

“Shhh! We want to hear what he's saying,” Betty Gilbert snapped at me.

“The girls' screams scared them off,” Saul explained, “but we'll take a few precautionary measures. No need to alarm your parents, though. No need to mention it in letters home. You're all safe.”

Saul had the perfect plan for keeping Girls' Side secure. Until the prowlers were caught, there would be no more walking around or canoeing across the lake at night alone. If you needed to go on a raid, you had to wake a counselor to drive you.

Jacques Weiss jumped up and shouted out an even better plan.

“What if we have ze oldest boys, ze Junior Counselors, sleeping in ze girls' bunks? For to protect them?” Everyone liked Jacques's idea (as well as his Pepé le Pew accent), especially the sixteen-year-old boys. Since this was the 1970s, when no one knew any better, it was approved. Until the prowlers were caught, Junior Counselor Aaron Klafter would be living with us, camped out on our front porch. Services had ended with Dana's prayers answered. Mine would have to wait a little longer.

In my father's Orthodox congregation, watching the other worshipers, I could never grasp their connection with God. But on Friday nights at The Point and on Saturday mornings at the Torah Tree by the lake, I felt something else. “Lazy-Hazy” Camp Kin-A-Hurra's version of religion worked for me. And until the prowlers were caught, there was only one day a week when I could be certain to see Kenny Uber. For the first time in my life, I started looking forward to Saturday morning services. Which made me feel guilty.

to the calypso tune
Man Smart, Woman Smarter

“We came to camp
We thought it was co-ed
But after a day
This idea was dead
A line was drawn
Across the camp
And over this line
We dare not tramp
Ah so, Camp Director he say
That the boy and the girl must be kept away
But oh no, to Uncle Saul's dismay
Biology always finds a way...”

T
HERE HAD TO BE A WAY TO MAKE
K
ENNY NOTICE ME, TO MAKE HIM
like me, to make him like me more than he liked Dana, but this would not be easy to do. On Sunday morning it was announced that my bunk and the next oldest, the fourteen-year-olds, would have auditions for
The Sound of Music.
There was no way I dared compete with Dana for the role of Maria von Trapp.

It's not that I had trouble getting up onstage in front of a crowd. In fact, I had long dreamed of a life as a performer. In my younger days, I'd wanted to be a ballerina, until first grade when I took lessons and my dreams were shattered. It was not the glamorous life I had anticipated, the one I imagined the little plastic girl spinning around in my jewelry box led.

Classes were held at three PM in my school gymnasium and we changed our clothes in the girls' bathroom with its gritty sinks and tile floors that reeked of excess Comet. Judy Horowitz's hand-me-down leotard and tights were too small for me and it hurt to stand up straight, which is not helpful in dance. What's more, I was an absolute klutz. Ballet was not my calling and I was devastated. At the age of seven, I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

There are no guidance counselors at the elementary level, and for months I wandered the halls of the Raymond Chisholm School
in silent anguish. The summer brought little relief as I struggled in vain to improve my crawl stroke at the Springfield Community Pool. I practiced in the shallow end where the old ladies in shower caps dangled their toes over the edge and never actually got in. They shouted at me to stop splashing them. My vacation was no vacation as I found myself flailing and failing at everything I attempted.

Then, in second grade, Miss Rispoli awarded me the lead in our class play,
The Cross Princess,
because I had the loudest voice. Not exactly one of the classics,
The Cross Princess
took up nine pages in my advanced reading group's textbook and could be performed in less than fifteen minutes. As Princess Annabelle, who refused to get enough sleep and was therefore cranky, I had the second-most lines in the play after Gregory Fitzgerald, five inches shorter than I, who played the King and somehow had more to say. I wore my favorite dress-up outfit, the gigantic pink taffeta ball gown my mother had saved from the 1950s and would later give away to the cleaning woman without first asking me. I was loud; I was clear; I was The Cross Princess. I knew then that I was going to be an actress. Still haunted by the ballet fiasco, I kept the plan to myself, but was relieved to once again have a long-term goal.

For the next couple of years, my life picked up. I'd even overcome my klutziness to some degree when I went off to day camp the summer after second grade. Drama counselor Winston Kemp wrote and produced an original play about a circus tiger adapting to life on a farm and I excelled in the role of a dancing ear of corn. My father hadn't been able to take time off from work and my mother hadn't yet learned how to drive, rendering them unable to attend the performance. Determined they would share in my exultation, and in spite of the fact that it had started to rain in the middle of the play, causing my green and yellow crepe paper costume to dissolve,
I wore the remains home on the bus and re-enacted the dance for my entire family in the middle of the kitchen while my mother prepared lamb chops, Minute Rice and wax beans.

But soon, oh too soon, my luck ran out. It happened during my first summer at sleepaway camp. Every play put on at Camp Cicada was an adaptation of an extravagant Broadway musical, though they kept the costs down by doing only the first act. Due to this restriction, the two oldest bunks' production of
1776
ended with Congress still in disagreement and nobody ever signed the Declaration of Independence.

When it came time for my bunk's play, I wasn't sure if I could sing well enough. Though everyone in my family loved to sing, I suspected we were not worthy of acclaim. One time, while walking around the block with my mother and learning the words to
Jeepers Creepers
, a kid passing by on a red tricycle rang the bell on the handlebars with the streamers and asked us to “quit disturbing the peace.” The King Family Singers had nothing to fear from us.

Further decreasing my chances for a plum role in the play was the fact that I was unpopular at Camp Cicada and feared I might not get cast at all. I opted to go for the biggest non-singing part, which was also a non-speaking part, and played Nana the dog in Act I of
Peter Pan
. It gave me plenty of time onstage, even if I couldn't show off my loud voice, and best of all, it was a role no one else wanted.

My chance to sing anonymously would arise later in the summer during “The Annual Girls' Side Sing,” a competition in which a theme was chosen, the counselors wrote songs and the campers performed them. There were no individual parts to play so we would all be treated as equals. Supposedly. This year's theme was
“Women's Rights” and my counselor, Sherry Merlin, wanted to win. We rehearsed for three days straight and were even excused from General Swim. Hours before the performance, which would be judged by the Camp Cicada boys, we ran through the songs one last time. In the middle of “Susan B. Anthony/You have done so much for me,” Sherry stopped us.

“I think someone is slightly off-key,” she remarked. No one responded.

Anxious to win my bunkmates' favor, I raised my hand. “I guess it might be me.”

Sherry thought for a moment, then sternly looked at me and said, “You know, sometimes
not
singing is just as important as singing.”

I nodded in agreement. What else could I do? That night, as I stood onstage, I mouthed the words. When we came in second, I knew it wasn't my fault we'd lost, but being asked not to sing in public had a lasting effect and I vowed never to do it again.

The one exception was my Bat Mitzvah. Because the Orthodox synagogue didn't offer a Hebrew school, my parents also maintained a membership at the town's Conservative temple, in spite of the fact that my father considered it slumming. My parents enrolled my brothers and me at Temple Beth Shalom where the principal, Mr. Lazar, was forever warning us that our Hebrew school grades would go on our permanent records. These thrice-weekly sessions were so excruciatingly boring that one day I brought along a Tootsie Pop and really did count how many licks it takes to reach the chewy center. Eight hundred sixty-four. I also made sure to make the Honor Roll every semester and upon graduation received a certificate with a shiny gold sticker, which I promptly stuffed in a drawer in my bedroom.

Orthodox girls don't have to become Bat Mitzvahs, but thanks to my family's dual citizenship, mine had taken place a few months before coming to Kin-A-Hurra, shortly after I turned thirteen. I wasn't thrilled about singing solo, but luckily, a Bat Mitzvah isn't like a Broadway show. The range of musical notes is limited as are the audience's expectations. The rabbi was kind enough to tape record the event and hand me the cassettes afterward. To this day I have not had the nerve to listen to myself, but I must have done all right since the invited guests handed me envelopes with checks at the luncheon following the service.

So far no one at Kin-A-Hurra had heard me sing and I intended to keep it that way. “The sound of music” was not likely to be the result of anything emerging from me. I thought about not auditioning at all, but Kenny was planning on being in the play and I couldn't risk losing a chance to be around him. It was time to go to Boys' Side and try out for a new role.

There were too many of us to fit into the Valiant. Because we were the camp without a school bus, we climbed aboard its substitute, the Green Truck. Built in the dustbowl of the 1930s and intended for moving cattle, the Green Truck had open, slatted sides and a rickety metal roof. I'd seen it for the first time when a load of boys showed up to “borrow” our softball field to stage an egg fight, then left without cleaning up. Dana caught me staring in disbelief as the truck's back gates swung open and people piled out, and she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “We think Saul bought it on sale after the Holocaust.”

Once inside, I learned that the truck possessed a hard wooden floor and no shock absorbers, so the slightest bump in the road could send you flying. All the Dramamine in the world wouldn't have been enough for my brother Jay to last a fifty-foot journey.
The rear gates had a tendency to come unlocked and swing open in the middle of traffic, so Maddy and the other bunk's counselor stood at the back and held them shut.

Fourteen-year-old Mindy Plotke leaned over to me and said, “Can you believe this thing? The Joad family wouldn't be caught dead in this.” I smiled and nodded and pretended to understand the literary reference, though it would be another three years before I'd be assigned to read
The Grapes of Wrath
. While Saul had warned me there would be a “cartload of Mindys” at camp, pretty, petite Mindy Plotke and I were currently the only ones. Since she was a returning camper and I was new, she was known as Mindy and I was Other Mindy.

Kin-A-Hurra theater director Rhonda Shafter was a former Broadway star who'd made quite a splash in a show called
Fresh Faces of 1929
. Her deep, bellowing voice had kept her out of Hollywood's new talking pictures, but she sang and danced for many years on the Great White Way and now found it her duty to nurture the next generation of stars. Rhonda was more than sixty years old and more than sixty pounds overweight. In spite of this and her three-pack-a-day Lucky Strikes habit, she danced with grace and, clad in one of her signature caftans, huffed and puffed as she tried to explain the difference between upstage and down-stage and why “stage right” meant left.