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January 15, 2010
Saturday night dances in denim
Mastering the cultural currency of summer camp has a long-lasting impact on identity.
MIRA SUCHAROV
David (I’ll call him), eight years my senior and a counselor for the oldest boys cabin, couldn’t find his jeans. They were the ones he had wanted to wear that night, I later learned. They were probably Levi’s orange tab – it was 1981. Why he couldn’t find them was because I had snuck into his cabin an hour earlier and made off with that very pair of denims, a nondescript white T-shirt and his blue-and-white satin Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate jacket.
That Saturday night was the final dance of the session and, as per Camp Massad tradition, was a masquerade ball. In my nine-year-old creativity, I had decided to dress up as David.
At the time, I thought the whole caper hilarious. It’s only with the hindsight of having passed through adolescence that I realize that a 17-year-old boy and his favorite jeans should never be separated – especially when a camp dance involving Doobie Brothers, the Doors and Led Zeppelin is but hours away.
The music at Camp Massad dances was almost never contemporaneous with the era. Bits of REM (the band that made its mark on American college radio by being billed as “alternative”) had begun to sneak into the lineup by the late eighties. But for most of the decade the soundtrack to rikud zar (“foreign dancing” – the term we used to contrast our Saturday night dance with the rikud am, Israeli folk dancing, of Friday nights) was decidedly classic rock. The most muscular of the counselors served as DJs, rigging up hot stage lights that glowed red and blue off the polished wood floors and the yellow, graffiti-covered walls of the ulam Ben Tzvi.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” gave us an unconscious link with the American south; the Kinks’ “Destroyer” tested our physical stamina; the Hollies’ “Bus Stop” introduced us to line dancing, the envy of any Nashville bar; and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” forced young dancers to face their sexuality – for seven minutes and 55 seconds, at least.
My taste in music remains anchored in those decades, though recently I have invited bands like Coldplay and Arcade Fire onto my iPod – for in my opinion they share a vocal and guitar sensibility with their classic-rock forebears.
When I finally saw David that night, he didn’t try to mask his annoyance. I didn’t get a chance to examine the substitute jeans he was wearing, embarrassed as I was. I also don’t remember if he made me relinquish my costume on the spot. I did retain a bit of war-hero hubris though, feeling that I, a solitary girl on a mission, had managed to occupy the ranks of successful prankdom usually reserved for groups of marauding boys. I also never discovered whether his irritation was tempered by being even slightly impressed or altogether flattered.
I wonder if David remembers the episode, or even still cares to remember.
That 10 years I spent at Camp Massad would see me taking leading roles in various all-Hebrew Maccabiah plays – as Tom Sawyer, as Lady Macbeth and as Diana in A Chorus Line. I would learn how to make a perfectly symmetrical crêpe-paper cat tail, tell a knock-knock joke in Hebrew, write jaunty Hebrew jingles and eventually lead a Maccabiah team and serve on the hanhala (head staff). I learned that a little dramatic pluck and an enthusiastic Hebrew singing voice was instant currency for garnering the respect – and later friendship – of many of my most esteemed counselors.
My enthusiasm for Hebrew has remained; I ended up spending three discrete years in Israel in my twenties, and now I speak only Hebrew to my two kids. So too has remained my interest in the dramatic arts; I was active in theatre all through high school and have recently rekindled that with a foray into community theatre in Ottawa. I still love musicals, and I still love songwriting.
But memories of sneaking into David’s cabin and rifling through his clothes have stayed with me vividly, perhaps since the prank represented a bit of me that I knew I would eventually lose as my youth fell away. Now it is my job to teach and guide – both with my university students and my own children – rather than to seek out mischief.
I wonder if David still owns that high school jacket and whether he wishes someone would still want to steal it for a night. The last I heard, he has kids of his own. Maybe they borrow it from time to time. As for the jeans, he probably has a new favorite pair.
Mira Sucharov is associate professor of political science at Carleton University. Her favorite jeans left her after Grade 5.
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