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Any and all similarities were completely intended. Like this will ever see the light of day.
When I was a kid I wanted desperately to go to sleep away camp. Around March of every school year I would go on the computer and start scoping out camps with fun activities and a reasonable amount of time away from home. Every year I was rejected and so I was condemned to three months at home—home where the temperatures would venture into the triple digits on the cooler days, where the hillsides would sooner burst into flames than song… Riding your bicycle around the block three thousand times is only so much fun, especially when you discover a black trail of melted rubber on the sidewalk behind you. Summers weren’t fun for me like they were for other kids. I’d sit in the back yard while the sun set, spinning on our homemade swing until the stars came out. Making myself sick was the only form of entertainment I had. Then one summer my salvation came. My aunt had read about a theater camp close to home, and although it was a little out of price range, I had ‘earned’ the money by cleaning out some litter boxes a couple of times. Considering the fact that the amount of cats she’s accumulated over the years expands on into the infinite, I’d say that it was a fair trade. I walked into auditions that year, a bright-eyed, overweight twelve year old girl who had wanted nothing more than to act. I was cast as an extra chorus member in “The Hobbit.” So it hadn’t been the role of Veruca Salt or Violet Beauregard in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which had been playing in the theater down the hall, or even an extra in “Cinderella,” which had the big theater and the most ticket sales… Still, I got over my disappointment fairly quickly, and between that, acting, voice, and improv classes, I was in heaven. Even dance class was fun. The second summer I was joined by three of friends from school and my sister. We had an even better time, and while I felt a little snobbish the first week or so (because I had been here the summer before, you see…), I soon got over it. I immersed myself in the wonderful world that was theater, and because I had a bigger role this summer, one with a fair amount of lines (the fact that they were cheesy kid show lines aside), and a cast of people who were just as ashamed of the show as I was, I was able to have fun. We worked that play, and even though it was possibly one of the worst plays I’d ever read, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. The third summer was my last. I had been cast as a small role in the big musical—a role with no singing or dancing, aside from the big group number at the end—and I had traded in my improv hat for a playwright’s beret. Perhaps it was the fact that I had just started getting into writing and as a result I had been unintentionally observing everyone, but I couldn’t help but see this darker side to performance art. It was a world of jealousy and snobbery. Half the kids at this camp, kids my age who were now starting to get recognition for their singing/dancing/acting abilities, or who had been recognized as wunderkind from our first year on, were starting to get this ego about them. I think that comes from going through puberty in a theater camp. Teenagers already seem to have this sense of egotism—even if they’re the biggest fuck-ups on the planet. Try telling a teenager she’s wrong. See what happens. If you’re a “shining star” in a theater camp, it’s only a matter of time before you become a diva, and that’s exactly what happened to a lot of the kids I knew. The musical theater kids were the worst—Triple threats, I’m sure they call(ed) themselves. They were the ones who ran the show, who you went to for advice on a particular director or who you looked up to in your first year. They were the ones who got cast in all the big roles, and I think it’s because they’re the ones who took themselves the most seriously. Acting was not a joke for these kids. This is what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives. They all wanted to go to New York and make it big—to be a better Elphaba than Idina Menzel, or the greatest Broadway actor since Michael Cawford. That’s fine. To have aspirations such as these is impressive for a bunch of kids from ages twelve to eighteen. Personally? I was there to have fun. The Improv kids were all the kids who wanted to go on to do serious acting. You saw a lot of kids from the Shakespeare plays in this class. A lot of the younger kids (like me) took it because we watched ‘Whose Line is it Anyway’ and figured that there couldn’t have been much to the whole thing. Kids in Improv were a little more easygoing. They were the older kids who were more welcoming and liked talking to you. They were the kids who would quote Monty Python for an hour straight, one line moving seamlessly into the next. I never was very good, or I couldn’t remember being very good, and I think this was mostly because I was still at that point in my life when I cared what people thought of everything I said and did. I was the weird kid—the one who laughed and got everything the older kids said, but couldn’t seem to be funny herself. I was (and am still) awkward. Then you had the forgotten electives: Playwriting and Design/Tech. Design/Tech was for the kids who were forced by parents to engage in some sort of social activity, kids whose parents were probably involved in theater at some point and who were starting to live vicariously through their pubescent children. The class wasn’t big, if I remember. It was taken by kids who wanted to experience every elective at least once. They were a little socially awkward, give or take the one or two kids who thought they’d be designing all the costumes and instead got stuck with patching up smelly old costumes from the annex. Nothing, however, compares to the social awkwardness of a writer. The first day of playwriting… I remember walking in and thinking to myself ‘So this is where they all go…’ The room was filled with kids I’d seen before but I’d never really talked to them. They were the kids that no one really talked to if I remember correctly. I may not. They were the shy kids who were always in the back, who may have gotten in a witticism or two throughout the course of a rehearsal, but who otherwise remained silent and stoic observers. They were the kinds of kids that probably scared the shit out of normal people, but I somehow felt more at home in that room than I had in the last two summers of what I thought had been the greatest times of my life. I’d been sad that our time would run out at the end of three weeks. Writers may be the most fascinating and most entertaining people on the planet. Why? We’ve been through a lot of shit, as has everyone. However, there’s something in our brains that makes us want to slice open our veins and let the world share in our sorrow. Looking back on my life, a lot of things I’ve been through aren’t that funny or entertaining, I’m sure that’s the same for all writers. Somehow we see things through this special lens. We talk to ourselves, converse with people who aren’t there, use the opinions of our characters to justify a decision we’ve made… If a normal person were to step into the head of a writer, it would look something like the world passing by at light speed. Images would be morphed, colors would be more vivid—a writer’s mind looks like complete and utter chaos. Two agonizing seconds in our heads and normal people would wonder how we get anything done, let alone how we distinguish anything that we can write about. If we couldn’t write, we’d be in straight jackets, because writers are just literate lunatics. In short, I would not exchange my time in theater camp for anything. It gave me the ambition and the drive to help start a company at school and gave me what little discipline I have. Most of all, theater camp made me realize that I didn’t want to be an actress. While over the years I have enjoyed any praise I’ve gotten for my roles in school plays, and while I’ve had more fun than imaginable just improvising back and forth (something I’m finally good at), nothing compares to the feeling I got when my first and only play was produced. I was fourteen, and I had written about a very mildly exaggerated shopping trip with my grandmother with characters based off of my sister and myself as the stars. We didn’t get to perform it, which I suppose is better. The girls in the play did a great job. The sense of gratification I had when people had told me that I was funny, that I had captured something so well, sent me over the moon. I wanted to be a writer. Even if I never produce another play in my life, even if I don’t get published until I’m long dead, the fact that I’ll have been able to put into print a character that someone can relate to, that someone can laugh with, will be enough for me.
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