At some point in the 1970s, the last decade that didn’t completely suck, my parents coughed me into a summer camp with a bunch of schoolmates. Camp Wilvaken. I don’t know where it was because I didn’t know where I was. There were trees and a lake and a wood cabin, and, to quote Raul Julia in the much misinterpreted and overlooked comedy masterpiece, Addams Family Values, “the scent of pine.”
In the 70’s, family attachments were less formal and the only helicopters were in godforsaken Vietnam, so if you dropped your kid off at camp it wasn’t sure you would get them back.
(The parents pull up in the Oldsmobile)
Mom & Dad: Where is Catherine?
Indifferent Counsellor: Ah, who?
M&D: Catherine. Our daughter.
IC: Oh. Don’t really remember a Catherine…
D: Well, we’re in kind of a hurry, we gotta get to her sister’s (gestures towards wife whose middle name he can never learn) so, could you sort of.. find her?
IC: Yeah, sorry, what was the name?
M&D: Catherine.
IC: Look, honestly, I haven’t seen anyone sounds like that in weeks. But look, um, no has picked this one up (points to forlorn child). Interested?
M: In the kid???
IC: Sure. Looks like a pretty good one.
M: I mean…
D: (under breath) um, is that a he or she?
IC: Good question. We aren’t sure. We’ve been using ‘them’.
M&D: Why don’t you ask them?
IC: They don’t talk much.
D: Well… Quiet is a plus. Ok. Put them in the car.
(driving away)
M: How am I going to explain this to Linda…
D: Linda shoulda had her own goddamn kids.
…
Wilvaken was pretty much hello muddah hello faddah (possibly the most Jewish thing ever sung not on a roof by a fiddler), a searing natural ennui punctured with black eyes from volleyball.
On Saturday evenings, for the pleasure of absolutely no one, there was intramural dancing.
The age range was probably like, 8-12. A room of misdirected misfiring hormones. Some knew what to do; others became furniture against the wall. Short pants and short shorts.
The Indifferent Counsellor DJ’ing the experiment approached the task with the same lack of zeal they applied to overseeing swimming (eight in, six out, not a bad ratio). On the record player the needle was dropped onto several cuts of the soundtrack of the summer and the movie du jour, Grease. They played the shit out of that record, and the cooler kids, some of whom I knew by name, knew the words and when to fall to their knees when John Travolta’s Danny sang The chills, you’re supplying…It’s electrifying! I dunno if it worked on the potential Sandra Dees.
I just wanted to dance with Alison.
…
In grade 6, Miss Gerson’s class, maybe it was English maybe it was something else -FACE institutionalized a sort of global pedagogy unrooted from established norms- Miss Gerson arranged for our class to write and perform a few shows on a local Cable TV network. It was a station so closed circuit it might not have broadcast out of the control room.
I did a routine as a sportscaster, which was maybe fucking hilarious. And we decided to do a scene from Grease. Against all probability, I was cast as Kenickie, Jeff Conaways’s character, who was easily the coolest thing in the whole movie. I can’t remember if he smoked but he most definitely smoked. My killer line was, in reply to Danny’s whereabouts: Yeah, what’s he doin’ hangin’ around the girls’ gym entrance? The line works on so many levels, advancing the narrative, exhibiting character, and situating the story. It might be the greatest line ever written in the history of dramaturgy. We worked the scene in Miss Gerson’s class to a sharp point of a diamond. We were the Royal Shakespeare Company without all the extra words and ridiculous clothes. Fame was in the offing, and I prepared myself for the tedium of hiring chauffeurs.
…
Travolta (John) could hire any number of drivers, maids, personal secretaries who might also um, sharpen his pencil. The world marveled at his successful Evil Knievel chasm jump from Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back Kotter (and his W5 litany: What? Where? When? etc.) into the galaxy of movie stars with the mass outbreak of Saturday Night Fever which I could not see because it was rated 14 years and over and it didn’t occur to me that the magnificently bored teenagers selling tickets in those crummy booths might not give a fuck how old I was.
Travolta went from Saturday Night Fever, a soundtrack disguised as a movie, to Grease, a full-on musical. SNF’s ultra-cool opening with Tony bestriding the gritty streets of New York to Stayin’ Alive was transmuted in Grease into a playful animation set to Barry Gibb’s magnificent theme song they got Frankie Valli to sing because Barry and his brother Bee Gees were the Saturday Night Fever disco monsters and Night Fever was the number one accompaniment after cocaine at New York parties. Grease was more of a family affair, at least until Olivia Newton-John’s big hair ending in spandex and her final accessory, a cigarette, which she was urged by her gum-chewing posse to throw down and grind out with her boot into Travolta’s supplicating, electrified face.
I smoked for thirty years. You never know when you might run into a Sandra Dee.
There is no greater test of will than a boy kid crossing a dance floor to ask a girl kid to dance. First, the boy kid isn’t 100% sure if he even likes dancing (probably not). Also, is this stupid song from the Grease soundtrack even any good? Finally, it’ll be bad enough if she says no and he wanders shamefully back, in a harbinger of decades of alcoholism, but it’s almost worse if she says yes. I don’t know what it’s like for the girl kid. Listen to Hopelessly Devoted to You to understand the female condition, I guess.
Without the bulwark of drugs or alcohol, I cross the chasm of the shuffling disco campers towards Alison. At some point, she becomes aware of incoming. We are now locked into this thing, she and I -a confrontation way bigger than some pointless Game 7 to sell gambling addictions- she a Death Star with a tractor beam, me a Millennium Falcon without a plan B. She looking up, her friends munching on metaphorical buckets of popcorn, rapt with attention, watching how this fantastic piece of dramaturgy is gonna play out, and out it comes: Wanna dance?
…
The community TV station’s studio is actually pretty fucking cool. The ceiling is all steel frames and lights, everything is subdued like a Mark Carney lunch and the cameras look like mechanical Aliens, their protruding tops creeping forward, seething cyclopes. We are in costume, Fonzie leather jackets. I am Kenickie. The scene opens flawlessly, coasting towards Kenickie’s big moment. I am enamoured with my surroundings, mesmerized by the material wealth that is surely my immediate future. Awash in reverie when the time comes for the line that will potentially send me into a cocaine and recovery cycle that will last decades, I just stand there like some lost kid at a summer camp waiting for parents who aren’t coming, and I miss the line. For this reason, and this reason alone, I have been relegated, to quote the ubiquitous Bernie Sanders, to a life of paycheque to paycheque.
…
I never got into cocaine. Instead, today at Larry’s Place, it’s the cheese croissant. It fits.
…
Alison sems as surprised by her Yes as I am. Now we gotta dance. She sways, I shuffle. It may be the least interesting or attractive display of human behaviour in the history of human behaviour. We are incarnating a tepid weather system, neither rain nor sunshine.
We make children do this, of course, because we hate them. And indeed, looking at them sacrificing any dignity they may have acquired in their short 11 years, there isn’t much to like. Better to leave them at camp, where they can go into the woods and start again with the animals, and Catherine.
SUMMER NIGHTS
· Wilvaken is still in Magoc, QC.
· As any self-disrespecting Gen X knows, Tarantino named the character he wrote for Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Vincent.
· Beauty School Dropout, Gen X’s sinking feeling song.
· Musicals and disco. It was a nightmare for the rock industry.
o Or was it???
o Like an early social media troll, rock radio spawned an active hate campaign against disco, to harness and secure an audience. It was the usual racist homophobic shit. It worked. Disco Sucks was a campfire marshmallow for people who watch too much hockey.
· Conaway played against brilliant Stockard Channing’s Rizzo, and we all grew up a little when the condom broke.
· Jeff Conaway was in the original cast of Taxi, with a lineup including Marilu Henner, Christopher Lloyd, Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Andy Kaufman, and the Danny DeVito.
· This one was for Andy.