Not a Happy Camper Read online

  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.

  Surprisingly, Dana was not a shoo-in for the lead. With the fourteen-year-olds auditioning as well, there were several girls who could pull off Do-Re-Mi. Dana, who took private voice lessons in Manhattan, narrowly did capture the role and I wasn’t entirely jealous. As the daughter of an Orthodox Jew, I wasn’t sure how my father would feel about me cavorting on stage in a nun’s habit. The role of Liesl, the beautiful girl who sings Sixteen Going on Seventeen was the one I secretly coveted. I fantasized all the time about being a beautiful sixteen-year-old. That was the age at which my parents had promised I could get a nose job.

  There were a couple of decent-sized non-singing female roles and I read for the part of the elegant but disliked Baroness. As soon as I spoke my first line, Rhonda yelled, “Stop!” and went into a coughing fit. But what at first appeared to be her standard round of hacking turned out to be a moment of elation.

  “Everyone, listen,” she said. “Do you hear how loud this girl is?”

  Terrific. Now I was too loud.

  “This is how I want you all to sound.”

  I was stunned. Rhonda asked me to turn my script to the page with Do-Re-Mi while motioning to the Kin-A-Hurra waiter-turned-accompanist to play the piano. This was it. My big chance. If I could sing, Rhonda could replace Dana with me. And if I could replace Dana in the play, then maybe I could replace her once and for all in Kenny’s heart.

  I got as far as, “Let’s start at the very beginning,” and then I remembered Sherry Merlin’s words: “Sometimes not singing is just as important as singing,” and I stopped.

  “Is there a problem?” Rhonda asked.

  A problem? Was she kidding? If Sherry Merlin was right and I couldn’t sing, then everyone else was about to find out. And worse, if it turned out that I could sing and I won the part away from Dana, then Dana wouldn’t like me and then everyone else would hate me.

  I answered Rhonda’s question. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Rhonda was very disappointed. I would not be her newest discovery. I told her I would feel more comfortable with a non-singing part, but instead of being cast as the glamorous Baroness, I got the role of Frau Schmidt, the frumpy old battle-ax housekeeper.

  “How come you gave up?” Autumn Evening asked me later. “You sounded okay on that first line. Maybe not for Maria, but you could’ve had some other singing part. You could’ve had mine.”

  I wanted a lot of things Autumn Evening had. Cast as Liesl, she would be performing Sixteen Going on Seventeen with Kenny as Rolf, the misguided Austrian youth. And not only would she get to sing with Kenny, she was also well on her way to achieving her long-term goal of becoming a famous writer. During the winter, Autumn Evening’s piano teacher had helped her complete a musical comedy about the philosophy of Pure Reason, You Kant Take It With You, for which casting would begin in early August. Encouraged by her family, she was always coming up with interesting ideas and finding ways to make them come to life. She was a totally free spirit and no one ever stepped on her spontaneity and joy.

  While most Jewish children are named in memory of a deceased relative as a means of keeping that person’s spirit alive, Autumn Evening’s parents wished for her to be an original. They named her after a season filled with awe-inspiring color and a time of day associated with calm. I was named after two great-aunts who were killed by the Nazis. In Yiddish, my name means “Sea of Bitterness”.

  After getting over my initial envy, I was happy she’d gotten the part. Autumn Evening was not looking for a boyfriend and if I couldn’t play opposite Kenny, she was a safe second choice.

  Fourteen-year-old Borscha Belyavsky was a recent emigrant from the Soviet Union whose new synagogue in Canarsie, Brooklyn had paid her camp tuition and sent her to Maine in attempt to hasten her Americanization. This might have worked out if she hadn’t already decided for herself what being American meant. She’d seen enough of our finest primetime TV to know what to do. Modelling herself after J.J. from Good Times, she shouted out “Dy-no-mite!” when cast in the role of Mother Superior. I was curious to hear Climb Ev’ry Mountain sung with a strong Russian accent. Mindy Plotke and my bunkmate Hallie Susser would be the other singing nuns.

  We had exactly one week to prepare and, like a trained summer stock company, we focused all of our energy and attention on the play. With the exception of meals, sleeping and running to Boys’ HQ to use the bathroom, we spent all of our time in the social hall. My bunkmates and I brought along cards and jacks and taught the boys how to play since their chosen indoor activity, floor hockey, was deemed too noisy and disruptive during rehearsals. I tried to get close to Kenny, complimenting him on his voice and how well it blended with Autumn Evening’s soprano. “She’s okay,” he said, “but I wish Dana was playing Liesl.”

  “Can you believe it?” I commented to Autumn Evening one night on the truck ride back to Girls’ Side. “He doesn’t get it. He keeps on chasing after someone who just isn’t interested.”

  “It’s the story of the ages,” my bunkmate assured me.

  After a few days of being rebuffed, Kenny gave up and found an excuse to get out of the social hall, volunteering to go down to the Arts & Crafts shack to help make the flats for the scenery. During a lengthy choreography session for So Long, Farewell (Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu), during which my part was to stand off to the side and nod my head as each child exited, I sneaked out and went down to see if I could help, too. The Arts & Crafts shack was full of girls, several of them fawning over Kenny, but that wasn’t going to get in my way. Philip Selig was going to get in my way. He was the only other boy there and when he saw me come in, he practically lunged across the table to strike up a conversation.

  “Had any good schnitzel with noodles lately?” he asked.

  “Not exactly one of my favorite things,” I replied.

  The sad truth was, I found Philip fascinating. He had the best memory of
anyone I’d ever met and could recite the entire Gettysburg Address, the American Dental Association’s message on the back of the toothpaste tube and all of the countries in the world in alphabetical order, but I did not want to flirt with him. I wanted to help Kenny pound nails.

  Before volunteering my skills, I noticed that the two boys were doing the carpentry and the girls were doing the artwork. This was so typical. On Girls’ Side we were forever stringing beads and making sand candles while the boys got to do the good stuff. Here on Boys’ Side, they made Centauri model rockets and shot them off in the middle of the softball field, next to the Giant Teepee. Because the field was surrounded by woods on three sides and by the lake on the fourth, once a rocket was launched, its designer was unlikely to get it back. Eventually, they realized that building rockets was a waste of time and switched to gluing used Popsicle sticks to the engines, not caring what happened after take-off.

  “Got any more green?” I asked. Afraid to flaunt my strength and coordination once again in front of Kenny, I grabbed a brush and joined in painting pictures of shrubbery, while ignoring Philip and gazing at the object of my so-far-unrequited love.

  Dana lost her voice the day before the performance which caused Rhonda Shafter to smoke a fourth pack of Salems and pull me aside and ask, “Darling, do you know Dana’s lines? The words to the songs?”

  I did. I could recite everyone’s lines from the play as well as several choice scenes from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the entire Haftorah portion from my Bat Mitzvah and, like Philip, the verbiage from the back of a tube of toothpaste.

  “If she doesn’t get her voice back, you’re the singing nun.”

  “Really?” I questioned her. “Would it be that big a deal if we just waited until tomorrow night or the next night or whenever she got it back? I mean, that only seems fair.”

  “Kiddo,” she told me, “show biz ain’t about what’s fair.”

  It was like something out of an old black and white movie or a miracle from the Bible—or at least it might have been if it had come to pass.

  After spending the entire day resting and drinking tea with lemon (which Kenny was only too happy to fetch), Dana got her voice back an hour before the show. It was time to get into our costumes. Once out of her nun’s habit, Dana would get to wear a fabulous blue dress which tied in the back and showed off the fact that, unlike mine, her body went in at the waist and out at the chest. I got to wear a size eighteen maid’s uniform which someone on the Boys’ Side kitchen staff had borrowed from a relative who worked in a retirement home. Maddy did my hair for me, pulling it back in a bun to look more maid-like, but it only made me look the way I did at the Springfield Pool in my bathing capped all-nose days.

  Philip, in charge of opening and closing the curtain, told me I looked cute so I stuck my tongue out at him. The play was well received and no one seemed to mind that the seven von Trapp children were all approximately the same age as each other and their parents and everyone else in the show. Dana, of course, got a standing ovation.

  At my former camp, there was a counselor, Lorelei Cohen, who was studying to be a professional choir conductor and after plays she would lead us in the Camp Cicada anthem, the words to which were shown on an overhead projector. The song contained many phrases I found repugnant and I was relieved to be only mouthing the words “Happiness has found us/Pure love surrounds us/Cicada, I pledge to thee.” After that, we’d crowd out the door, pushing and shoving for no good reason other than that was what we did. I expected pretty much the same thing here, but Camp Kin-A-Hurra had no official theme song. Instead, we sang Taps:

  “Day is done/Gone the sun

  From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky

  All is well/Safely rest

  God is nigh”

  Because there was no overhead projector, a lot of people sang it wrong and the last line came out “God is nice.” A pleasant thought, but I was a stickler for accuracy and let this error bother me all summer.

  We were the second group to put on a play this season and I wondered if the same thing would happen after Taps that had happened the week before, following the nine-year-olds’ production of The Me Nobody Knows. Sure enough, everyone in the audience ran up onstage and congratulated everyone in the play. Even me. People I barely knew were hugging me and telling me I was great and they sounded like they meant it. This went on for about ten minutes, and when the crowd onstage finally cleared, Philip headed toward me, arms outstretched, so I waved, jumped down and looked around for Kenny.

  I found him. He was watching something in the shadows at the back of the stage and he had a sad, hurt look on his face. Kenny was watching Dana and Aaron, partially hidden behind the stage curtain, locked in an embrace and a long, lingering kiss. Their secret was out. Now everyone would know they were a couple. Even Kenny. Dana was no longer available for the role of girlfriend.

  And I was the understudy, waiting in the wings.

  “Second verse, same as the first

  A little bit louder and a little bit worse...”

  5

  “JUST FIVE MORE MINUTES. PLEEEASE!” EXHAUSTED FROM HER WORK on the stage, Dana wanted to sleep through breakfast and Maddy, who lived to avoid confrontation, gave in. The rest of us trudged down to The Point for reheated eggs while Dana went back to sleep. Or so we thought.

  About twenty minutes later, with her stomach growling, Dana heard the Food & Garbage Truck rumble by and figured she’d hitch a ride halfway down to the dining room. Another one of Saul’s bargain purchases, this small blue roofless vehicle, a poor cousin of the Green Truck, was used to transport meals from the boys’ kitchen to the girls’ dining room. Maddy rode it back after her morning jogs around the lake. The driver, a wild-eyed toothless local man named George, would deliver the food and then use this same truck to pick up the big metal garbage barrels around camp and take them to the dump in the next town.

  Evidently George was a gentleman who wouldn’t dare enter one of the girls’ bunks to use the bathroom, so while he was taking a whiz against a tree, Dana secretly climbed onto the back of the truck and hid behind one of the barrels. Her plan to discreetly hop off at the flagpole was foiled when George didn’t stop there—or anywhere else on Girls’ Side—and Dana soon found herself, clad in red-and-white striped Dr. Denton feet pajamas, speeding down the dirt road and heading for the highway.

  “Hello! Stop! I’m back here!” Dana yelled, but George couldn’t hear her over Jim Stafford’s Spiders and Snakes, blaring from the radio as the truck careened onto US Route 2. Hanging on for dear life, Dana was pelted with spoiled produce, empty Herbal Essence shampoo bottles and pages from discarded issues of The Weekly Reader. George finally came to a stop at the Skowhegan Dump. When he hopped out and walked around to the back, he found Dana lying on the floor, filthy and gasping for breath.

  “Look at the mess ya made,” was his lone comment. George had other “errands” to attend to (code for shooting at rats in the dump) and ordered Dana off the truck.

  “But I’m not even wearing any shoes,” she complained.

  George pointed into the Skowhegan hole.

  “Might find some in there.”

  Forced to walk a mile down the side of the highway, destroying the cozy feet part of her evening wear, Dana found a pay phone at a Flying A gas station. Not having any change with her, she called the camp’s Main Office (one of the dilapidated cottages adjacent to Saul’s grand house) collect.

  “So sorry,” the woman from Yorkshire, England who’d been hoodwinked into working in the office all summer replied. “We mustn’t accept collect calls.”

  Dana’s first three attempts failed. On her fourth try, she said, “This is Dana Bleckman’s mother” and the call went through. Fifteen minutes later, Aaron picked her up in the Valiant and drove her down to The Point.

  Their entrance prompted a Dedication. The Dedication is a means of mass communication across a dining hall, what smoke signals were to the Indians, what semaphore wa
s to the Navy, what the Internet is to nerds. Upon sighting the new couple, everyone spontaneously paddled their hands on the tables, then shouted in unison, “Quiet, please, dedicated to Dana Bleckman,” and then began to sing to the tune of My Darling Clementine:

  “Dana Bleckman, Dana Bleckman

  Take some good advice from me.

  Don’t let Aaron, Aaron Klafter

  Get an inch above your knee.

  He will tell you that he loves you

  And he’ll fill your heart with joy.

  Then he’ll leave you broken-hearted

  With a bouncing baby boy.”

  Dana tried to blush, but I suspect she was pleased to be serenaded. Aaron was embarrassed for real and left (and later, at Maddy’s suggestion, packed up and moved back to Boys’ Side, though he was still welcome to visit on a regular basis).

  Meanwhile, the attention focused on Dana didn’t end there. She was next called upon to sing one of her songs from the play and did a reprise of My Favorite Things. Autumn Evening, Borscha Belyavsky and eventually everyone who’d sung the night before got a chance to belt out tunes in front of The Point’s big stone fireplace. This had happened a week earlier with the cast of The Me Nobody Knows and before that, girls who’d sung in shows in previous summers were also put on the spot. At Kin-A-Hurra, accomplishments were celebrated over and over again, year after year. Only Betty Gilbert (who’d somehow landed the role of the Baroness) and I were left out.

  Just as things were winding down, Head Counselor Wendy Katz announced that we’d been invited to a day of inter-camp games with Camp Morningside, an all-girls facility in the nearby town of Waterville. The mention of Camp Morningside brought snickers from the old-timers. I imagined there was some deep-seated rivalry. Wendy came over to my bunk’s table and asked if any of us played softball.