Dancing Is Not a Crime
My first job was at a theater camp on Long Island. I had regularly attended the camp in my childhood, partly because I enjoyed it, but mostly because my parents didn’t have any better ideas. What parents fail to realize time and again is that summer camps will not only feed your child a strict diet of popsicles and Kool-Aid, but will set your children up with their own recipe for the rest of their lives. Kids who say, “I miss the days of mess halls and talent shows” certainly should not be trusted
When it came time for me to tie on my job shoes, they could not be open-toed or have heels in any way. I made a whopping five dollars an hour, and when I questioned the fact that it was under minimum wage, I was greeted with a sly smile and a short, “You’ll be making tips.” Soon enough, I would be showered in an amount of five dollar Starbucks cards that would wildly surpass my expectations.
I worked with our youngest kids, all between the ages of 7 and 10. I had eight children in my group — seven of which were girls — and a senior counselor named Jason who had never worked in our program before. I patted his shoulder and said I’d show him a thing or two, as the rest of my co-workers chanted, “One of us, one of us…”
I eagerly made every single name tag with the neatest handwriting. Our name tags had cupcakes and owls on them, while the older group’s were taken out of a Narcotic’s Anonymous’ waste basket. We sang songs from the musical we were putting on, Footloose.
My uniform was a blood-red polo shirt with a white Y embossed over my heart; my shorts were the perfect length, the hem reaching just past where my fingers landed on my thighs; and although it wasn’t a requirement, I was wearing “fun sneakers”, which were blue hightop tennis shoes with shiny new laces. I clutched my lanyard and bounced with our giant white binder, which contained our camper’s names, an attendance roster, and restraining order copies against fathers during difficult custody battles.
At 8am our campers sauntered in. I recognized many of their faces from the open house the previous week. I ran up to one little girl with glasses, and remembered greetings from our orientation. “Hi Rebecca! It’s great to see you today. Hey, I love your backpack. Purple is my favorite color too.” She stared at me for several long seconds, and then responded with a low groan. I reached into my binder’s front pocket and removed a cupcake-patterned sticker. “Here’s a name tag for you! I picked the design because you’re just sooo sweet!” She peeled the name tag from the paper and slapped it crookedly on her chest. She then proceeded to slump into the folded auditorium chair next to her and doze off for twenty minutes.
The rest of our campers filed in, dragging their shoes. I gave the same, overjoyed greeting to Natalie, Ariel, and two Isabella’s. When my one boy camper, William, sauntered up to me, I gave him his name tag. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked me. I told him I did, not thinking much of an eight year-old’s blunt question. He took his fingers and made a gun shape at my face.
“Bang, bang!” he shouted.
He made more fake explosion noises and threw himself into a seat.
The next few hours, we lead our tiny group of singers, dancers, and cynics around the perimeter of the middle school we were renting. I sang ridiculous camp songs in order to get them to focus, classics like “Bananas of the World Unite” and “Tarzan Swinging From A Rubberband”. I clapped patterns to get them to quiet down. I even gave Natalie my fruit snacks in order to cheer her up when her sandwich got smushed in her backpack. Just before she could eat them, I stared right into her eyes and asked, “You’re not allergic to Red Number 5, right?”
Children in my group and others would pull on my shirt and say:
“Miss Maura, can you take me to the bathroom?”
“Miss Maura, can you retie my friendship bracelet?”
“Miss Maura, Amanda is going into anaphylactic shock.”
Luckily, I didn’t have many children with allergies. One camper, a little girl named Sophia, had one scrawled under her name and I pulled her mother aside to ask her. “Oh, she’s allergic to sulfate. You know, like in shampoo?” What I still can’t understand is why her mother would ever think for a moment that one of our daily activities would be washing each other’s hair.
During lunch, Rebecca had finally woken up from her narcoleptic stupor. She was talking at a rate of 300 wpm. She pointed at a tiny cut on her knee and said, “You see that? I got attacked… BY MY DOG!” Jason flinched at the sudden volume change.
She grabbed Jason’s hands and stared at them. “Why are your fingernails white?” she asked. It was something I hadn’t noticed. He shrugged and said he didn’t know. She glared into him. “Are you an alien?” He laughed, but didn’t confirm or deny her accusation.
Then, from her tiny backpack, she extracted a magic 8-ball that was in the shape of a skull. It had a plastic bow on one side of its head. She shook it and asked it if Jason was an alien. It said, “That is the truth” and she pointed and laughed in his face. He asked where the toy was from, if it was from a tv show or movie. She gave him a dark, suspicious look.
“It’s the skull of your girlfriend,” she replied, “after you ate her.”
Right then, I knew what a real actress looked like.
As we headed to a dance workshop, Ariel kept pushing the other students to get to the front of the line. Ariel, like many children, was diagnosed with ADHD. This caused several problems, one of which being that she didn’t eat lunch as a side effect of her medication and the second being that she often did random things with no explanation. I chalk it up to childhood whimsy, but a doctor chalks it up to a chemical imbalance in the brain.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Ariel’s tendency to push was not malicious, and I explained this to the children. They were very understanding, especially Isabella 2 and Sophia, who often made macrame and duct tape flowers with her during free time. One girl in our group did not like Ariel however, and would insist that her existence was a burden to her. “Miss Maura, she’s staring at me!” Jenny would point, as Ariel’s eyes wandered the room, watching a fly or a rogue feather.
Jenny’s mother was also not a fan of Ariel’s, and once a day we would field a complaint. “She should be punished!” she would insist, “Or kicked out of camp!”
“Ma’am,” I would reply, “You realize you’re talking about an eight year-old girl, right?”
“There should be consequences to what she does,” she explained, “She shouldn’t be allowed to be in the play.”
“Ma’am, this is the YMCA,” I told her, “not Guantanamo Bay.”
I sat Jenny down one day after a long day at camp. She was upset and accusing Ariel of punching her in the head. My co-counselor Noelle got her an ice pack, despite seeing Ariel sitting on the other side of the room eating chicken nuggets. I explained to Jenny, “Well, she doesn’t mean to hurt you, she just thinks a little differently.” I smiled at her. “Understand?”
“No.”
“Well, uhm, all people think differently and have multiple ways of expressing feelings, and Ariel and you think differently. That’s just a fact. Get it?”
“No.”
I have never so badly wanted to shake a child until that very moment.
“Jenny, she thinks one way, you think another. Do. You. Understand?”
“Yes,” she finally said, “but I don’t want to.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “Then I can’t help you.” I stood up and Jenny pouted at me. I wanted to tell her that life isn’t fair, that she will never get her way, that she’ll always be a miserable person unless she helps herself and removes herself from her toxic mother and think beyond her privileged life. Instead, Ariel sauntered up to her and, mouth full of ketchup, and said, “I don’t understand why you don’t like chicken nuggets. They’re soooo good.”
I was in charge of costumes, since we couldn’t afford a professional crew to take care of set and costume design. After measuring some of the dancers for A-line skirts, I went to the bathroom for a few minutes. On my way back, I walked into the Green Room to check on the group and saw Jason, Rebecca, and Isabella 1 playing Game of Life. Rebecca shouted at me, “Maura, you and Jason are married!” she pointed at the board. “You just got married!” I blushed and beelined back to the dressing rooms.
As the show got closer, tensions got higher, even for my younger campers. Ariel decided to call another counselor a bad word. It was heartbreaking, having to explain to her why you couldn’t just call counselor’s names. I was almost hoping she would have said he’d called her a bad name first, but she didn’t.
When the middle school was being fumigated and we had to rehearse in the gym of a nearby Catholic school, I felt Natalie tug on my shirt and say, “Miss Maura, Chrissy broke her ankle!” Chrissy has decided it was a good idea to play basketball barefoot. As my co-counselor Lesly and I rolled her across the street to the YMCA, I said, “Chrissy, you’re in theatre camp, not sports camp. We’re not coordinated enough for basketball, even with shoes on.”
But even in the chaos, there were rewarding moments. The girls in my group decided to have a peace circle, overlooked by a different counselor. They decided then to all be friends, to never forget each other. Ariel wrapped her arms around Sophia. Jenny had a tough time with it, and walked away to tell Noelle that she was worried that they would “stab her in the back.”
We all met the kids after the show at a local dinner. They were on a high from closing night, but also pumped full of sugar. “JASON, JASON,” Rebecca yelled, waving him over. She whispered something into his ear. When I asked him later what she said, he laughed, “She just wanted to remind me she was the flower girl at our wedding.” I giggled uncomfortably and leaned back in the booth, deciding on another cup of coffee.
It feels like a lifetime ago that I waved goodbye to those children every day, avoiding eye contact with their stage mom’s and boring father’s. I’ve watched many of them grow up. Just last summer, Chrissy was a counselor to her own Group 1. Rebecca was the lead in her junior high production of Legally Blonde. And Ariel, well, she’s a moody, crafty teenager, waiting to take on the world with her sass. But whenever I see her mother, she never hesitates to tell me that Ariel’s been thinking of me.
And when I would say goodbye, I’d say, “We had a great day today, right?” And they would gaze up at me, weak with hunger, and give me an awkward, medicated smile. These children were all teeth on the outside, but I knew would grow up to be weird, creative adults. And every year, when the air smells like sunscreen, chlorine, and spilled fruit punch, and I hear cicada’s humming, I think of those eight children and their Devil-may-care attitudes and I know that the world could learn a thing or two from them without falling apart.
