Friday, July 31, 2009

Summer Camp

Three days ago I got back from spending four weeks at Camp Becket in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. I have many mixed feelings about my time at camp, but over all it was a fun time.

The first week I was constantly tormented by someone who will go by the miscellaneous pseudonym of “Bill”. This “Bill” had the top bunk right above me, and was the first to tell me of my non-existent snoring problems. The incredibly frustrating part of it all was that my parents didn’t receive the letters I had sent them telling them about my predicament with “Bill” until one or two weeks into camp! Thus without the letters I’d sent them, they knew not of my troubles, and so I didn’t get any help from my councilors, until a week or two into camp!

Luckily the camp director was very helpful, that is, once he knew what the problem was. After the first week and a half, I had a pretty good time at camp, even though “Bill” was still being a jerk. As it buckled down to the last week of camp “Bill’s” evils only spread. At one point some people realized that I wasn’t actually snoring, and stood up in my defense. Since “Bill” had the bunk above me he aggressively retorted that, “I have the bunk above Josh, and so I should know whether he snores, or not!”

Finally, now that it is all over I look back on my time at camp and think, hey, there are people like “Bill” everywhere and what I’ve taken out of my experience is that sometimes life gives you creeps, and you might just have to make creepo juice. That didn’t come out right at all, but the message it there; Sometimes there are mean people out there, and most of the time you just have to deal with them.

During the third week, was when other cast members and I preformed the “Big Show”! Every day is either an M day or a T day (except when on Sundays we skipped electives to have an idiotic chapel). Each M and T day we had 3 electives (Big Show is a 2-block activity, so we only had two electives on T days), and on every T day we would have Big Show for our second, and third blocks. To sum it up we had a lot of practice.

On our third week at camp we preformed the Big Show. This year’s Big Show was all about a group of campers who were trying to put on the Big Show. So really it was all about a play within a play and the play was the Tempest. I played the part of Spike, who in the Tempest played Miranda.

In a nutshell I think the play turned out wonderfully, and that we as the cast did a great job. There were a few little errors, and one big error, when someone forgot their lines and we missed out on about 20 minutes of conversation, but all in all it turned out great.