How I Survived Summer Camp

Being the youngest here, I haven’t had many jobs, at least not official jobs. I’ve done your carnival face-painting gigs and moving furniture, character meet and greets, baby-sitting, teaching kindergarten art classes but my paid, resume-building jobs have been far and few in between due to a bad economy and a constantly changing location.

Survival jobs are usually the kind of jobs you pick up to afford working in theatre. My survival job story is short and about the job that I struggled to survive a summer working at. There’s an old show business rule along the lines of never work with children or animals. That summer three years ago, the children were animals as far as I was concerned and I, as the day camp counselor, was the zookeeper.

In a perfect world, working as the Arts and Crafts counselor would actually be fun: there’s scrapbooking, magnet making, jewelry projects, sun catchers, dream catchers, eye of god toys, collages, picture albums…you name it, we’d make it. And there were trails we could walk, outside play time while the glue dried.

Except the kids didn’t want to be there. When I was a kid and went there, we were allowed to have fun and play dodgeball but these days, the Health Department deemed it “too dangerous” and now we had bored, bratty children with very little for them to do. We were supposed to be working with children only aged 7-12 but somehow we ended up with four and five-year-olds who are simply too young to keep up with the program yet they are old enough to ask me questions about my sex life? Don’t even get me started on the brats who whine and refuse to play with the other kids and then try to run away—you can run, but you are half my age and can’t out-run me and I will catch you but I’m not allowed to discipline you with a time-out, so it doesn’t matter anyways. And if the kids (or my co-workers) weren’t bad enough—we were robbed and vandalized by some local teens. I got to sit and watch the security tapes with the other counselors to identify them for the police. Then there was the lice epidemic. 200 kids shrunk to less than 40 by the end of summer. Luckily, I stayed lice-free, much to my relief as I was working on a show at the same time (which also had children, much better behaved children then the ones at the day camp. I find children who appreciate theatre are by far, much better behaved).

In short, that’s my survival job experience. A summer of minimal wage and major drama (not the theatre kind) and not one I plan to repeat. Thankfully, I start my new job for the summer working for a theatre where the only children are in the audience and with an adult.