Revenge of Camp Stories: Wednesday, July 28.

Today is a day of recovery from the previous two.  I'm terribly groggy until I manage to get a nap in at that free period between classes.  Then I wake up ready to rock World Travel.  It's time to talk about packing again!  Show and tell is popular; my class enjoys squooshing the inflatable pillow and ooohing over the soft travel towel.  When I mention that in some countries women are still expected to wear skirts, I'm surprised at how many of the girls groan.  "I hate skirts," several of them say.  I felt the same way at their age, but thought I was in a pretty small minority.  (For me it was a mobility issue: I like to climb things and sit with my legs tucked up under me.  Eventually I discovered you can wear boxers or biking shorts under them, and then I didn't hate them anymore.)

Our afternoon activity is camp service projects.  Our teams are assigned tasks somewhat haphazardly.  Mine starts out pruning back overgrown paths, then joins another team in hauling firewood, and winds up helping to move buckets of dirt and gravel to create runoff channels for future rainstorms.  We had another one of those last night, though it was significantly less dramatic.  Today the mosquitoes are much worse.

Crickin' sounds pretty good after all of this.  I've begun a habit of snagging the smallest inner tube and drifting in a circle down below the rapids.  Kick sideways to get into the current near the foamy water (look out for that rock!), ride the fast flow about 50 feet toward the shallows, kick out into the backflow that takes me back toward the "falls" again (look out for that camper!).  Once I have my fill of this, I sit down on a shallow sandstone ledge and tilt my head back (upstream) to give my scalp a good pressure-wash.  The water is colder today than it was yesterday, and the current's flow is much more powerful, threatening to shove my bum off the ledge until I move farther toward the creek's edge.

Tonight's the talent show!  Aside from the usual quota of vocal solos/duets with/out guitar/piano, there are several unique numbers:  a spoken word performance (followed by a spot-on spoof of said performance), beatboxing, breakdancing, a two-man military review with "rifles", and three guys threading pine needles in one nostril and out the other (shrug?).  The "grand" finale is the song that teacher Dianne and I wrote to the tune of (parts of) the William Tell Overture.  Dianne has recruited an improbable number of people into this endeavor; I don't know how she managed it, but now that I think of it, she does every year.  There are representatives from each of the major staff groups to carry their designated verses, and counselor Bethany holds us all together with the piano accompaniment.  Here's a sample verse, the one for the teachers:

Archery, Juggling, "Ultimate Man",
Take a class, your teachers have a plan,
Fix a bike, play guitar, sing like a lark,
And we'll allllll discuss the book of Mark!

Yep.  And that's one of the better verses.  The girls' counselors were all about rehearsing elaborate choreography for their verse, while the guys' counselors completely rewrote theirs to say something like "if you want poo, we're the men for you."  It's pretty much ridiculous from start to finish, which is so traditional for the annual staff skit that, obviously, it qualifies as a success.

There's more, but I barely jot down the skeleton of the day.  Nearly every spare minute is spent catching up on my journal (which I didn't have handy for most of the past two days), and working on the next lyrics assignment: words for the Camp Song to be sung on Friday.  This time, I'm writin' it all myself.