Staged

I loved almost everything about camp, but I definitely came most alive when there was a performance to plan. The main thing I remember from those performances is that we, the teenagers, were entrusted with creating them. There was always a staff member in charge, but the burden was definitely on us. And we loved it.

Sometimes we were given a script; sometimes we created our own. There was a very talented staff member in camp who custom-composed beautiful, meaningful theme songs for the big end-of-summer performance, but she left the rest of the songs to the teenaged choir heads to choose. The dance heads were given a basic theme or scene — Cossacks, schoolchildren, nightmare — and trusted to do the rest. If there was a counselor who’d taken drum lessons that year, a drum set was brought in and she was appointed drummer.

The Nine Days Cantata was a hallowed and solemn institution — rows of fresh-faced girls singing Eichah-based songs with pathos, filling the stage with phrases of Churban and hope. There were complex vocal arrangements to compensate for the lack of music, actresses in improvised costumes acting out dramatic scenes, solemn narration intoned from offstage. Usually the scenes had a Holocaust or KGB setting, but one year the high school-aged directors decided to get creative and chose the Spanish Expulsion as the setting instead. We opened with a Sephardi piyut for that one, and ended with the choir marching offstage into galus.

For every camp production, we used the same “sound guy.” His name was Evan, and he was the stereotypical Catskills hillbilly, down to the boots and plaid shirt. A few hours before the performance, he pulled up in a pickup truck and began setting up microphones and speakers in the gym-turned-auditorium. His assistant was a Bais Yaakov girl in a long Baby’O skirt who crisply and confidently helped him set up the system. Then she put on a headset and ran the show, literally.