'Alex Witze and Jeff Kanipe visit the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Laugavegur, where there are more than 280 penises on display, representing 93 species. (Yes, they took pictures, including one of the handball team's silver penises.) I wonder whether the collection includes all of what The Week magazine recently declared to be "The 9 Weirdest Animal Penises On Earth." (Which, that just seems kind of lazy, doesn't it? I mean, put in the time, do the research, and come up with an even ten.) Also, and I wish this would go away and leave my brain, but it will not: There are three human penises, plaster-cast and photographed for a "patriotic comparisons" exhibit: a German specimen, and English specimen, and an American specimen. And the American one is called "Elmo."
Sabtu, 30 Juni 2012
A Trip To The Penis Museum
Julie Klausner Shows Us How Her Jimmy Jazz Works: 'How Was Your Week' Live at the Bell House
It's been a few months since I covered the last HWYW Live for Splitsider and I wanted to find out from Julie before Wednesday's event why she originally brought the show to the stage and how her approach in conception differs from that of her weekly podcasts. With her previous experience with improv and performing on stage, Klausner said that the Bell House events felt like a natural progression for the podcast. She also mentioned she liked the differences the stage brought to the show with live setting feedback and the ability to make the podcast a more visual experience.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists opened up the show with a new track 'Anonymous at 134' and then the extended HWYW theme song. Julie then took to the stage for her standard weekly culture wrap up/monologue, which was extended to a top ten of what's happened since the February show. Klausner revisited her feud with Mario Lopez and mocked his inability to hashtag, ushered in a new feud with NCIS' Hot Topic goth girl Pauley Perrette and let us know what she thought of The Newsroom, i.e. another show about men and their ideas. Julie also revealed that Mr. Ted Leo has fallen for a little TV show called Smash and that there were both curious what was in store for the Broadway drama now that Debra Messing would no longer be sporting a wide collection of Steven Tyler-esque scarves.
Julie moved right along from dishing on NBC's 2012 ' 2013 lineup full into a medley, which is where her and Ted's rendition of 'How Your Pussy Works' was the lead into Tears for Fears 'Sowing the Seeds of Love.' One of my favorite parts of the live show is seeing the rapport between Ted and Julie, and I love that she takes full advantage of having someone so awesome and talented participating in the set. Julie and Ted were not alone, as Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad and Jimmy Jazz and their flawless choreography really brought the piece together. A surprise 'visit' from Julie's recently adopted tuxedoed cat, Jimmy Jazz, or more specifically a friend in a Jimmy Jazz cat suit, was a delight for fans of the podcast as she had mentioned trying to find a way to incorporate him in the show. And really, what's a live stage performance without a man dressed up as a cat?
We were then treated to Julie's visit to the Howlabaloo, which was a hound dog festival on Long Island. And if you know Julie even just a little bit, then you will know you just described her dream afternoon, surrounded by those beautiful creatures with long ears and their wacko owners. The intertwining of songs, guests and bound to be viral videos allows Klausner's HWYW Live to go beyond the podcast format and feel much like an event. Julie understands that her audience is paying for a show that goes beyond the free downloadable podcast. The ability to extend the jokes and give them the visual cues that can't happen from iTunes makes the show a fun experience and takes the extra step. For these extended portions of the show, Julie writes with long time pal Alex Scordelis, whom also wrote alongside her for 'The Cat Whisperer' webisodes. These extended bits compliment the live format so well and keep the pace moving between guests.
Next up was the queen of the internet, Katie Notopoulos. The Buzzfeed editor deserves a prize for being able to find the absolutely weirdest and saddest souls the internet has to offer. Katie and Julie discussed one of my favorite pieces of Katie's, the 37 Saddest Failed Kickstarter projects, the Pepsi Man on Flickr, and the new must-follow Twitter account of The Real Cap 'N Crunch. As someone who makes their living off of the internet, I am somewhat horrified of the things Katie has seen on her quest for LOLs on Buzzfeed, and jealous that her earnest curiousity into these weirdos lives has given her a career that could only exist in 2012. Writer and monologist Mike Daisey then joined Julie and Katie on the stage for a truthful recap of the events so far, which was a fun nod to his recent problems regarding his coverage of Apple for 'This American Life'.
After Julie wrapped up the show with a very important list of things from the next week that she wanted us to look forward to, I headed backstage to see what she thought of the show. Overwhelmingly, this was the tightest we've seen HWYW Live and the most professional. It felt like more of a rehearsed production and yet remained hilarious, authentic and true to the Julie's goals with the show. I asked Julie if there were any plans to expand the HWYW Live franchise, especially with the recent television pickups of podcasts like Comedy Bang Bang and You Had to Be There. I knew that Klausner showcased the HWYW Live format in Los Angeles a month ago and was curious if this was leading to a possible TV pilot. While Julie's honest about her goals with the show, she also wants to remain true to both the format and her audience. At this point, she owns the show ' it's hers. And with help from Ted, Alex and Marianne Ways, who produces the live events, there is a limited amount of cooks in the kitchen, which is just the way Klausner likes it. While ambitious about the future of this steadily growing and exciting project, she wouldn't give into the highest bidder. Julie would only take the next step if all of the stars were aligned and she was given the same, or at least close to it, professional freedom she has now with guest booking, skits and men in cat suits.
The draw to both the live show and the podcast certainly is Julie's personality, her earnestness and the word of the day ' curiosity. Julie's interest in her guests and their subjects isn't often seen and allows her to genuinely showcase who she brought along for the ride that week. Whether she is discussing the Columbine tragedy with an acclaimed author or a furry convention with a close friend, she is always curious, which makes listening to the show and seeing it come to life at the Bellhouse a treat. When I asked Alex and Julie what they do now and what's the process for the next live event, they both agreed that all they needed to do it is surpass this one. And if the change in the format since February's show is any indication, I can't wait to head back to the Bell House.
You can catch Julie Klausner's 'How Was Your Week' podcast every Friday, available via iTunes. The Live event will be incorporated into future podcasts, in case you missed it.
Photos by Mindy Tucker
Danielle Johnsen Karr is a freelance writer and a social media manager living in New York City. You can generally find her talking about cute dogs or comedy on Twitter.
All The Presidents' Menus
The evolution of American taste is on display here (Teddy Roosevelt's hominy and green turtle soup traded in for Ford's spaghetti and meatballs), as are glimpses into the very different personalities of the men that have held the office. A few things to look out for: Those who gorged when under pressure (Clinton, Taft) and those who all but starved in times of strain (Nixon, Kennedy, Lincoln); those who used their station to procure the finest cuisine available in their time (Jefferson, Arthur); and those who remained attached to the dishes with which they'd grown up (Truman, FDR, and Grant). And with the Fourth of July fast approaching, here's where to find something intriguingly quaint to make in honor of our country's strange and fascinating history. I've got my eye on Daniel Webster's Punch.
Barack Obama: Nachos and guacamole, chili, burgers, Green Dragon and Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, Planter's trail mix, pistachios, almonds, water, Dentyne Ice, Nicorette, MET-Rx protein bars, apples, broccoli, and spinach.
George W. Bush: Biscuits, chicken pot pie, grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft singles and white bread, huevos rancheros, and deviled eggs.
Bill Clinton: Soft tacos, chicken enchiladas, chili con queso, cheeseburgers, ribs, cinnamon rolls, lemon chess pie, peach pie, sweet potato casserole, Egg McMuffins, and Kool-Aid. 'Heavy on the meat, dessert at every meal and tiny amounts of vegetables, the tinier the better.''Marian Burros, 'Bill Clinton and Food' for The New York Times.
George H.W. Bush: Pork rinds, popcorn, beef jerky, hot dogs, Butterfingers, and ice cream.
Ronald Reagan: Macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, hamburger soup, roast beef hash, Yorkshire pudding, well-done steak, beef and kidney pie, swordfish, baked apples, monkey bread, and Jelly Bellies.
Jimmy Carter: Ham with redeye gravy, baked grits, cornbread, pork chops with cornbread stuffing, fried apples, red beans and rice, ham and cheese sandwiches, spicy spare ribs, collard greens, kale, okra, zucchini, butter beans, fried corn, and peanuts.
Gerald Ford: Waffles with strawberries and sour cream, german apple pancakes, white bread, prime rib, new potatoes, green beans, ice cream, spaghetti and meatballs, liver and onions, lean pork chops, and lemon pudding.
Richard Nixon: Fresh fruit, avocadoes, gazpacho, cucumber mousse, cold poached salmon, cold shrimp and crab, cottage cheese, Rye Crisp, wheat germ, macadamia nuts, corned beef and cabbage, steak, spaghetti with meatballs, meatloaf, and beef stroganoff.
Lyndon Johnson: Chipped beef, biscuits with ham or deer sausage, lamb hash, chicken chow mein, chop suey, spinach soufflé, salad chopped fine and eaten with a spoon, barbecued spare ribs, cold tapioca pudding, and fudge.
John F. Kennedy: Broiled bacon, New England chowder, lamb chops, steak, fish on Fridays, mashed potatoes, baked beans, corn muffins, grilled cheese sandwiches, quiches, soufflés, and beer. 'President Kennedy was a small eater; he often had to be reminded that it was dinner time' politics always took preference over food.' ' The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Roast stuffed breast of veal, beef stew, oxtail soup, chicken noodle soup, rare steak, quail hash, trout, corn pudding, string beans, succotash, fluffy turnips, and prune whip.
Harry Truman: Hot cereal, buttermilk, fried chicken, cornmeal dumplings with turnip greens, cornbread with sorghum molasses bought on trips home to Missouri, and candied carrots and sweet potatoes. Choosing the menu for a luncheon given in honor of Winston Churchill, Truman ordered oyster soup, celery hearts, filet mignon, asparagus hollandaise, and watermelon pickle.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Creamed chipped beef, corned beef hash with poached eggs, bread pudding, fried cornmeal mush with maple syrup, kippered herring, kedgeree, Welsh rarebit, doughnuts, scrambled eggs for dinner on Sunday nights, lobster, steak, soup with fairy toast, and apple pie. Terrapins, caviar, and foie gras on occasion. When King George VI and Queen Elizabeth toured United States'making them the first reigning British monarchs to visit America'the Roosevelts served them hot dogs.
Herbert Hoover: Gumbo, lobster, roast lamb, Virginia ham rubbed with currant jelly and sprinkled with breadcrumbs, egg timbales, corn soup, homemade candy, griddle cakes, fried cornmeal mush, Oregon black cherries.
Calvin Coolidge: Roast beef, Vermont pickles, Vermont chickens (raised in a yard he had built behind the White House over Teddy Roosevelt's mint patch), curry of veal, pork apple pies, custard pies, and cornmeal muffins.
Warren G. Harding: Chicken pie, knockwurst and sauerkraut, frankfurters, corn muffins, waffles, and copious amounts of coffee.
Woodrow Wilson: Chicken salad, ham, peach cobbler, fresh eggs (sometimes raw), biscuits, strawberry ice cream, and Georgia kiss pudding.
William Howard Taft: For breakfast: grapefruit, partridge (both potted and grilled), venison, waffles, hominy, rolls, and bacon (at least once in the same meal) as well as steak, oranges, and tremendous amounts of coffee throughout the day; smelts, lamb chops, salted almonds, deviled almonds, lobster stew, lobster a la Newburg, salmon cutlets, tenderloin, cold tongue and ham, terrapin soup, Billi Bi, salads (especially peach), baked possum, and persimmon beer.
Theodore Roosevelt: Hard boiled eggs, hominy, rolls, milk crackers, cantaloupe, tea (especially Caravan and Hu-Kwa), chicken (especially fried chicken with gravy), dandelion greens, fiddlehead fern salad, pigs in blankets, liver and bacon, kidney stew, Indian pudding, white wine, shad and shad roe, game meats, oysters, green turtle soup, and coffee, into which Roosevelt sometimes stirred as many as seven lumps of sugar. His son would later say the President's coffee cup was 'more in the nature of a bathtub.''Poppy Cannon and Patricia Brooks, The Presidents' Cookbook
William McKinley: Eggs at breakfast in lunch, potatoes, steaks and chops, boiled fish, red flannel hash, and hot lobster salad.
Grover Cleveland: Corned beef and cabbage, oatmeal, steak and eggs, brown bread, pickled herring, and snickerdoodles.
Benjamin Harrison: Oysters, consommé, bouillon, terrapin, lettuce salad, corn, fig pudding, sausage rolls, chicken salad, and maraconi.
Chester A. Arthur: Coffee and a roll for breakfast, oatmeal and fish for lunch, mutton or roast beef with potatoes and fruit for dinner, beer, claret, macaroni pie, rhode island eels, salmon, oysters, turtle steak, and Nesselrode pie.
James Garfield: Squirrel soup, fresh bread, milk, tea mashed potatoes, parsnips, and Garfield pie (made with apples, not the cat). He willingly ate all foods save for oatmeal: 'Told that Indian leader Sitting Bull was starving himself to protest his imprisonment, Garfield said, 'Let him starve.' Then he thought for a moment and said, 'Oh no, send him my oatmeal.'''James Cook, The Murder of James A. Garfield
Rutherford B. Hayes: Coffee and tea, cornmeal battercakes, green corn fritters, French pickles, oyster stew, corned beef, veal cutlets, white cake.
Ulysses S. Grant: For breakfast, Spanish mackerel, steak, bacon, fried apples, flannel cakes, and strong coffee. For lunch and dinner, roast beef, wheat bread (which he liked to roll into balls and shoot at his children, pretending they were ammunition), hominy, and rice pudding, which he preferred to all other desserts.
Andrew Johnson: Fresh milk and butter (which a White House dairy was established to provide), popcorn, roasted apples and chestnuts, hoppin' john, canvasback duck, wild turkey, pine bark stew, sweet potato pone, sweet potato pie, and sweet potato pudding.
Abraham Lincoln: Apples, coffee, bacon, milk, johnnycakes, honey, and chicken. 'Mary Lincoln set a table at the White House, which included such food as aspic of tongue, pâté de foie Gras, turkey stuffed with truffles, and all sorts of wild game, such as venison, pheasant, or canvasback duck. But all too often the President merely picked at his food.''Francois Rysavy, A Treasury of White House Cooking
James Buchanan: Beef, mutton, venison, ham, terrapin, calf's head dressed as terrapin, Pennsylvania Dutch specialties such as scrapple and succotash, moss rose cake, peach charlotte, Confederate pudding and Jeff Davis pie, grape pie, and ice cream.
Franklin Pierce: Fried clams, Daniel Webster's chowder, apple pan dowdy, New Hampshire seed cookies, and New Hampshire fried pies.
Millard Fillmore: Beef stew, mock turtle soup, fish, ham with macaroni, duck, chicken, pigeon, and larded sweet breads.
Zachary Taylor: Deviled crabmeat, hominy, and Cajun food, which had developed a taste for while living in Louisiana. (Taylor was also the only president ever believed to have died in office because of a meal, in his case a large amount of iced milk and cherries on a hot day. He fell ill and died several days later.)
James K. Polk: Ham, corn pone, omelets. Of a trip to New Orleans, Polk wrote that 'all the dishes were prepared in the French style of cooking, and to one unaccustomed to it it was difficult to tell of what they were composed'. I took a cup of coffee and something on my plate to save appearances, but was careful to eat none of it. As soon as an opportunity offered I asked a servant in a low tone if he could give me a piece of corn-bread & broiled ham.''quoted in Mark Eaton Byrnes' James K. Polk: A Biographical Companion
John Tyler: Woodcock, pigeons, oysters, kidneys, ham, venison, champagne, and grateful pudding.
William Henry Harrison: Squirrel stew, roast wild duck, apple cider, cornbread, cheese, and fresh vegetables.
Martin Van Buren: Boar's head, oysters, doughnuts, figs, raisins, and apples.
Andrew Jackson: Tenderloin with jezebel sauce, corn cakes, lamb chops and leg of lamb chops with rosemary, hoppin' John, rabbits, oysters, wild duck and goose, fried ham, fried apple pie, leather britches, 'Old Hickory' nut soup, Daniel Webster's punch, and French wines.
John Quincy Adams: Quincy Adams was often satisfied with a few crackers and a glass of water for dinner, but he was fond of fruit, enjoying apricots, plums, pears, and apples from the White House orchards. "It is a matter of some curiosity that Adams, with all his exposure to diverse European cuisines, showed so little interest in food. His culinary education had certainly been extensive'Yet throughout the Adams diary food references are sparse.' 'Poppy Cannon and Patricia Brooks, The Presidents' Cookbook
James Monroe: Fried chicken with rice, biscuits, tomatoes and eggs, spoon bread, chess cakes, sponge cakes, and cream jumbles.
James Madison: Chicken and okra soup, pickled eggs, corn oysters, popovers, seed cakes, gingerbread, ice cream, and Yard of Flannel.
Thomas Jefferson: Waffles, macaroni, parmesan, figs, ragout, soufflés, and anchovies (all of which he had developed a taste for during his travels in Europe), pineapple, turnip greens, Virginia ham, crab, shad, oysters, partridge, venison, and Madeira wine.
John Adams: Baked salmon, oyster rolls, codfish cakes, Baptist cakes, cream of corn soup, green turtle soup, scootin-long-the-shore, Plymouth succotash, Indian pudding, beggar's pudding, flummery, syllabubs, gooseberry fool, and copious amounts of cider.
George Washington: Madeira wine, hazelnuts, sliced tongue and toast for breakfast, hoe cakes, rice waffles, macaroons, gingerbread, cream trifle, lettuce tart, mutton, assorted wild game, and beer.
Related: Presidential Pets
If Sarah Marshall were President she would require that the White House be stocked at all times with at least three thousand dollars worth of runny cheese. Photo of Clinton courtesy of Penn State Archives, via.
Jumat, 29 Juni 2012
Terrible Summer Camp Counselors We've Known (And Been)
Summer camp: you're in the middle of nowhere, it's hot, there are bugs, and you're being overseen by 'adults' who are just five years older than you. There are bound to be mistakes, disasters, and bad decisions being made. At the time we accept these counselors, with their quirks and rules, as givens of the camp experience'sometimes we even looked up to them as role models of young adulthood, only later realizing they had no idea what they were doing either. We asked friends to share some of their stories about the terrible camp counselors they've had (or their experiences as being those terrible camp counselors).
(Note: Some names have been changed below, because, well, yeah.)
Mark Asch
My former campers, if I asked them on Facebook, would I think remember me as a good role model, though their parents, who must surely have caught a whiff of the beer sweats emanating from me on Visiting Day, are free to disagree. But I want to talk about Tex.
I went to a boys' camp in Maine for seven summers, and worked there for five more. My CIT year, our parents drove my younger brother and I up, and our counselors were paged to the top of the hill to greet us. (We drove because we were "Furman." That is, we were, as you say with a slurry, toothless accent, "from Maine." It's maybe worth noting how a single quirk can define someone for his entire camp career.) My brother's counselor had a lump of chaw in his cheek as he shook our father and mother's hands. He drawled, 'I'm Tex.' Tex had dyed blond hair under a dirty baseball cap, a sunburned face. He was, I think now, probably 19, 20 years old.
Now. There was a kid in my brother's cabin, Bunk 8B, named, for these purposes anyway, Aaron Arensen. The year before, Aaron had represented his bunk in the talent show, singing "New York, New York" with all the control of breath and pitch you'd expect from a pale, plump kid who so clearly wasn't going to hit puberty in time for his Bar Mitzvah. For the rest of that summer, we would chant his name in the dining hall, and he would stand on a table and lead a singalong.
Aaron sang "New York, "New York" at the talent show again this summer, leading a chorus line with kicks from his stubby little legs, gasping for air, his falsetto finally cracking. In my wisdom, I grumbled that his schtick was getting old.
One night, perhaps a week later, Tex returned to Bunk 8B from the campfire in the staff parking lot, where all the counselors got drunk. He got into bed to pass out, remembering first to remove all his clothes. His bladder, though, was full. Climbing out of bed, Tex stood'naked, shitfaced, disoriented, aching to pee'in the center of the dark cabin.
One thing we never did figure out'in spreading this story in the days following, passing it down in subsequent summers, or, latterly, recalling it over beers'and which the infamy of Tex's last act as camp counselor has obscured entirely, is the question of motivation. That is to say: none of us quite know whether it was out of malice, misconceived mischief, or honest-to-god blackout blindness, that Tex stood over Aaron Arensen's bed and released a stream of piss onto him as he slept.
Aaron stayed out the first session, but never did sing again. On the last night of camp, I visited 8B to see the bunk list my brother and his bunkmates had sharpie'd onto a wall, for posterity; last was Aaron "I'm Not a Urinal" Arensen.
Lauren Belski
Mike, my counselor, wasn't actually terrible'he just smelled terrible. Like those hot patches of subway air by the bottom of the staircase at Canal Street, though I hadn't yet smelled that. The seams surrounding the gaping holes of his camp-staff tank were so yellow they were brown. I kid you not. The mosquitoes around him wore gas masks. Once'ask my friend Mindy, she'll back me up'I smelled him from around the bend on a path in the woods. And a friend of mine from the summer before told me her sister had an asthma attack because she was forced to sit next to him on a school bus' I'm not sure how much of what I said about him Mike heard, but it appears it was enough.
One minute I was walking along with my 'My Little Pony' beach towel thrown over my shoulder, bragging about how I could do a front flip off the dock, and the next, I was holding a shovel and a bucket further down the lake, scooping goose poop instead of swimming, thanks to Mike.
I'll never be able to erase the sandy curves of those turds from my mind's eye. They were surprisingly large. It was as if a field of pre-K campers had all given up on their Pull-ups at the exact same time.
I saw Mike from across the lake. He was blowing his whistle for a buddy check. It was like I'd drowned except I hadn't. I watched my buddy-less buddy, Casey, run out of the water and heard him say to her, 'You're my buddy,' revealing the jungle of his underarm as he waved his hand. I noticed that Casey had better manners than me. She went right over to him. It didn't look like she wrinkled her nose up. She held his hand.
I sighed and scooped another fecal fragment into the bucket. I'd never been all that good at using 'an indoor voice,' but anyway, this was summer camp! Still though, I felt bad.
Joe Berkowitz
I spent three decidedly non-formative summers at a place called Camp Wewa. It was owned by the YMCA, which meant contending with some deep Jew-panic while saying grace and during chapel. Nothing terribly eventful happened to me at Camp Wewa. I certainly didn't come of age, cop any feels, or forge lifelong friendships. But I did manage to make a bete noir out of a camp counselor, or rather he did me. (Or maybe not'there is every chance I'm using that expression wrong.) His name was Chad, if you can even believe that. His first offense was comforting a crying 12-year-old me who had just been stung by a bee in the goddamn ear by saying I should "tough it out." Would that I could dispatch an armada of hornets upon his face at that moment! Chad's main offense, however, was repeatedly hounding me for information that he could use to sleep with my older sister, Dana. He would ply me with buddy-like camaraderie for a few minutes, which was nice, before abruptly segueing into creepy recon mode'asking whether she dated a lot and if I knew her bra size, etc, which was not so nice. I never gave him any useful tips, however, so maybe Camp Wewa inadvertently taught me a lesson in family honor?
Dave Bry
The summer after eighth grade, I went to a camp in Maine that was sort of a hippie camp. The camp owners raised llamas. One of the counselors, a woman, probably around 20 years old, wore flowing patchwork robes and flowers and beads and head wraps and stuff, but her personality was gruff and unfriendly. One day, the girls in her cabin told me and my 14-year-old guy friends that she had stayed out all night and returned only in the morning, after they'd woken up. She was in a bad mood, they said, and had told them not to tell any of the other counselors. Later, she offered them a deal: 'Look, I don't want to be here. I know you don't want me here. Keep your mouths shut and you get to sleep, or not sleep, in an unsupervised cabin.'
We couldn't believe it; we thought maybe it was a trap. But the next night, it happened again. The counselor had just disappeared. Quit her job, I guess, without telling anyone. So the night after that, four of us waited till our counselor was asleep and we snuck out of our cabin and into the girls' and hung tapestries over the windows and stayed up all night listening to Tears for Fears' "Shout" on repeat and having a make-out party. We did this three nights in a row, until we got busted. (I still don't know how. We weren't caught in the act, we always got back to our cabin before our counselor woke up. Someone must have ratted to the camp director or something.) We got in lots of trouble, but those were surely the greatest three nights of my life. I felt like the Tears for Fears guy (okay, fine, Roland Orzibal) at the end of the video, playing his guitar solo on top of the mountain. So this is just to say that a terrible camp counselor can also be the greatest camp counselor in the history of the universe.
Chris Gersbeck
When I was 13, during my second summer at a Jewish sleepaway camp even though I'm not Jewish, we had a counselor by the name of Eric who was just a complete Phish-head and didn't really care about enforcing any kind of rules, as long you didn't go near his extensive collection of Grateful Dead bootleg cassettes. I also didn't know it at the time, but yeah, he was stoned 24/7.
Then there was Matty. Matty was one of those kids that would basically do whatever fucked up things you dared him to do, so long as you promised him something in return (candy, magazines, money, whatever). So one boring Sunday, four of us got the amazing idea to dare Matty to fuck a Snapple bottle. I don't really remember why this would be beneficial to us to see him do this, apart from the fact that we could go around telling people that "Matty just fucked a Snapple bottle!!" I believe the reward for doing so was a whopping $5, which we had virtually no intention of actually making good on. But a $5 reward was promised, so lo and behold, Matty fucked a Snapple bottle. For like five seconds' it wasn't that weird.
Afterwards, Matty demanded his $5 and we just laughed at him, which very much upset him. He kept insisting we give him his money, but I don't even think we had it. So in walks our counselor Eric, who Matty obviously feels he can gain sympathy from after having just embarrassed himself by fucking a Snapple bottle without receiving his promised reward.
Eric hears both sides of the story, thinks for a second, and then says to Matty, "Well, not only do you not have $5, now they have shit on you that you just fucked a Snapple bottle."
Last I heard, Matty is a reporter in the Middle East.
Sarah Glass
I was the terrible camp counselor, as much as it pains me to admit it. It was the summer of 1989, I had just graduated from high school and fallen in love for the first time. I made the decision months before to become a camp counselor at the Girl Scout camp I'd attended for years. I loved camp and the counselors were the coolest people ever. So off I went, days after graduation, tearfully saying goodbye to my new boyfriend with promises of daily letters and visits between camp sessions.
The first half of the summer I ran the arts and crafts cabin; the second half, I taught canoeing. But mostly what I spent my time doing was the following: writing letters to the boyfriend, calling the boyfriend, jumping to answer the one phone at the camp hoping it was the boyfriend (this was pre-cell phone days, of course). When I wasn't obsessing about him, I was listening to Grateful Dead tapes and sneaking off into remote areas of the woods to smoke cigarettes and learn to play "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd on the guitar. I sucked at that. The guitar part. I was good at smoking and listening to my Walkman.
Of course I got totally busted for smoking and nearly got caught underage-drinking beers with a couple of the other counselors down by the river. Most counselors at that camp went back year after year, or at least until they finished college and got a "real" job. I was not asked back the next summer.
Gardner Gould
I'm flashed to a sweltering summer at church camp back in aught three. It's my first summer as a camp counselor, and I have a cabin of raucous 7th- & 8th-grade gents. By Wednesday bedtime the boys have worked out their individual routines within the squealing, toothbrushing, madness that ensues nightly. I'm able to manage a simple ten-second count down to "lights-out." I hop up onto my sticky, plastic econ-mat when I realize that I still have my contacts in.
"Sorry, guys, I need to turn the lights back on for a sec." Excited murmurs with the prospect of any deviation from the routine that has become law.
I flick on the lights, and just happen to make eye contact with a simple kid named Daniel. He has this dopey grin plastered across his face, and he's staring somewhat vacantly at me. I reflexively start smiling back and ask, "Hey Daniel, what are you'"
My question trails into recognition of the unmistakably methodical arm movement that could only be a young man hard at work. My face falls; I start rummaging for my contact case. It's too late.
A feisty butterball named Sherman erupts, "He's masta' batin'!!"
Mass pandemonium. The ooOO-ing rises swiftly past accusations and chortles to hooting and banging. Rick, the muscle-bound 8th grader bunking above Sherman, is on his knees preparing to jump from his bed straight across to Daniel's. He steadies himself on the rafters as he bellows, "MASTURBATOOOR! MASTURBATOOOR!"
Improvising, I wheel around, "Whatever, Rick, I hear you masturbating every night!"
Rick freezes; I hit the nail on the head apparently. "Naw that's Sherman!" Rick claims wildly.
"Naw, that ain't me; that ain't me'" now desperate accusation are being thrown all over the cabin. The uncomfortable Lord of the Flies timbre is replaced with sheepish grins and embarrassed giggles.
"Cut it out, gents'it's past 'lights-out,'" and I kill the lights. A few chuckles then a long, quiet pause. I feel out my contact case in the dark heat, and haul myself back into bed.
My breath levels out, and then comes the slow build to a cricketing chorus. The cabin is a-thrum with the unsettling rhythm of little hands struggling against sleeping bags.
Beca Grimm
One time I was a junior counselor circa fifth grade at my elementary school's day camp. Even then I was petite but for whatever "Saved by the Bell"-inspired reason, I took on the challenge of carrying a sprightly third grader or whatever around on my back. I didn't take too many steps across the auditorium's sweeping stage before falling backward, thus squishing the child. She was OK. I think.
Alexis Hauk
Swimming was my idea of pure heaven growing up in Georgia, so it was no surprise to my parents that when I was 12, I wanted to sign up for Girl Scout 'Water Camp.'
The first thing we did at camp was meet our counselors. And since it is apparently illegal to allow middle-schoolers to know your real name, they all had pseudonyms. There was 'Rhett' (60 bucks her real name was Scarlett), 'Dingo' (from Australia, natch), and a charming young woman called 'Nails.' As in 'tough as' or, more aptly, 'down a chalkboard.'
The tough personality reflected in her name wasn't of the endearingly scrappy, Annie Get Your Gun variety, though. Hers was a demeanor that left you awake in your bunk at night, pondering your own weaknesses and failings.
Two things about Nails stand out still: the time that she taught us how to rig our sails and I got the instructions backward, turning mine into something like a sad, lumpy ghost, and she yelled at me in front of everyone like I was her dog that had just pooped on a Persian rug.
And secondly, a lunchtime canoe trip across the lake. Now, I may not be able to rig a sail to save my life, but I can certainly paddle a canoe like Burt Reynolds on steroids (Deliverance is never far from the mind of any Georgian).
This fateful 100-degree day, I was paired with my best friend at the time, we'll call her Angela, and another girl I knew from school, who we'll call Beth. Turns out that Beth, who nabbed the hardworking spot up front, hadn't had any water all day, nor had she brought any. So by the time we got to the middle of the lake, she was dehydrated and we were all out of water.
Angela, seated helplessly in the middle, offered to change places with Beth while I stayed in my spot at rudder. That's when Nails came speeding through on her motorboat, creating a whoosh of waves that rocked us to the point of almost tipping.
'What are you doing?!" she yelled, helpfully. "Don't you know that everyone is already to the other side and starting to eat? If you don't get to that other side, you are NOT GOING TO HAVE LUNCH!"
Standing from her perch on that giant boat, which easily could have towed us to shore if it was really that urgent, she continued to mock us for being hot, tired and apparently completely devoid of brain cells.
Beth looked like she'd just rather drown.
Fortunately, nothing gets between this gal and a ham and cheese sandwich. So I bucked up, helped coach Beth and Angela through the switch and, with Angela to the front, we powered through. Stumbling onto the shore like those initial plane crash victims of 'Lost,' we squinted back at Nails, who was laughing with the other counselors. Probably about us.
The next year, I quit the Girl Scouts.
Hilary Hughes
The summer after freshman year, I thought there'd be no better way to spend my time than at a lakeside, mid-coastal Maine arts camp teaching monologue workshops and musical theater classes while boozing around a campfire on my nights off. Wet Hot American Summer-style, right? Wrong. The counselors broke into two cliques on the very first day of training'those who were former campers obsessed with their childhood oasis and therefore TOTALLY the cool kids, and those who were not'which made for a social atmosphere amongst the counselors eerily similar to that of our pre-teen campers. I had told my employers that I was a lifelong theatre kid interested in improv, and so they assigned me to co-teach an improv class with one of the Camp Lifers. This kid had a serious Napoleon complex and needed to tell me that I knew absolutely nothing about improv whatsoever within minutes of meeting me. IT'S SUMMER CAMP, BRO. I had signed up for this shit to make friends and make some art and stuff, not be put in my place by somebody who wouldn't settle for anything less than 'Who's Line Is It Anyway?'-level work from 12 year olds. I opted out of the improv class and somehow wound up teaching a half-joke of a belly dance workshop that my campers loved. The majority of my memories from that summer are good ones and involve a lot of Shakira, but I'll never forget how some jackass trying to relive his childhood prowess crushed that for a minute.
Joe MacLeod
Camp Lovejoy was a day camp in Altamont, NY, run by the Boys Club of America, which was the poor kid's YMCA, pretty much, and basically if you have ever seen the movies King Rat or Empire of The Sun, you will have a feel for my day-to-day at the camp, not so much straight-up jail or refugee camp as much as Prisoners Of War: The War on Freedom, for kids to live their lives in an Unstructured Fashion when there's No More Pencils No More Books. After an endless, bumpy, diesel-smoked bus ride every morning we arrived at camp and were herded to an assembly area where we sat baking in the morning sun until our Counselors found us and put us into groups, after which we would bake in the sun some more until an Activity could be found for each of us.
The assembly area always smelled faintly of rotten eggs, which had something to do with the water fountain, the water of which smelled completely of rotten eggs, but it was OK to drink, they told us, and you could hold your nose to make it easier, but I almost never drank it, which was why I was always really thirsty when I got home every day from camp fucking Lovejoy. Anyway, sometimes the activity was doing Plaster of Paris (fun), making a lanyard (never got the hang of the 'corkscrew' stitch), swimming in the nasty pond on the campground (no thanks), or making models (the best, but could do this at home please?). One time the Activity was Archery, and I was totally into it but I shot a Counselor in the leg with an arrow so I couldn't do Archery anymore.
Many days, my activity was the core Lovejoy experience of baking in the midday sun listening to AM radio and sitting there with my kinda sleepy camp Counselor (whose name has been forgotten to Protect the Innocent), watching her knock out a perfect corkscrew stitch with the lanyards, listening to her talk about her boyfriend and how she was a Heroin addict, and that's why she always wore long-sleeve shirts, because of the 'tracks' on her arm from sticking the needle in. It really didn't make sense though, because she wore these thin, frilly blouses, and you could see right through to her arms and the connect-the-dots parts and also totally her no-bra area. She showed us her pale splotchy arms on purpose one time, held one out and let me touch it, the little red pinholes. Said the arm was the easiest place to put the needle and you could use a rubber tube or a belt to make your vein stick out really good and then put alcohol or light a match on the needle to kill all the germs and then stick the needle in kinda sideways so it would go into the big vein bulging out like a worm. I would try it at home on my own arm, to make the vein stick out. She said she switched to putting the needle between her toes, but she was always gonna have to hide the arm-tracks. I could not understand why somebody would need to stick a needle in their arm, and I didn't think she was stupid or anything, I just felt sad and tired around her, and that is what I carried away from my whole Camp Lovejoy experience, being sad and tired for all kindsa reasons. Lunchtime was the highlight of my day (unless I already ate it on the bus ride there, in which case it was another helping of sad) and I noticed that while she drank soda all the time (some stuff that was called Purple Passion, which was grape soda mixed with ginger ale, I think), she hardly ever ate anything except maybe a piece of fruit all day. She used to eat an orange in a peculiar way, carefully peeling it so it was all in one peel, and then gnawing on the peel instead of the inside part. She said the peel had way more vitamins than the inside part and was healthier to eat. The only activity we ever did with her in the weeks I was there was one day we all brought ingredients for a 'Sloppy Joe' meal and somehow she cooked it, but of course no way was she gonna eat hamburger.
Rachael Maddux
For a few summers during college I worked part-time at a gift store in my hometown. The second summer I was there, I was behind the counter with a newish employee'she'd started a couple months before, was friends with some of the other girls who worked there, and she looked incredibly familiar. We finally somehow figured out that she had been my camp counselor at sleepaway Girl Scout camp (I had been 11 or 12, she had been in college). That camp had been hugely important to me as a kid and I had adored my counselors like they were saints or movie stars and had always wondered what happened to them after the summer was over, but never saw any of them again. That summer, she and I wound up hanging out'me and her and some of our other coworkers; they were all five or six years older than me and I felt unusually cool and grown-up. It was weirdly special and also just weird. And then it got weirder. After I'd gone back to school that fall, I went home for a visit and found out she'd been fired from the store'for shoplifting? Like I think in some incredibly lame way, something like the store's owner thought she had been pilfering stuff so set some kind of completely obvious trap for her, and she fell for it, and then was promptly outed and sacked. I guess she kept me from getting lost in the woods of north Georgia when it really counted but, yeah, I'm gonna say she was the worst counselor I ever had.
Jessica Misener
I spent one fortuitous teenage summer at Bible camp in sticky south Florida. After chaperones bussed us into the wilderness, we spent a week having daily devotions, eating bland camp food and hanging out at the lake (one-piece bathing suits only, natch), which had been accessorized with that summer camp staple, the Blob.
This being evangelical youth camp, the church leaders were constantly trying to demonstrate their coolness and relevantness to Teenager Things by working clunky pop-culture references into virtually every sermon. One warm night, with scores of high-schoolers packed into a tiny air-conditioned room on folding chairs for the nightly Bible lesson, one of the counselors decided to drop some serious exegesis skills on that summer's greatest hit: "All Star" by Smash Mouth. He popped in a CD and played the track, that glorious poppy anthem of 1999, and taking his place at the podium, proceeded to break it down for the Lord. And break it down did he: "So much to do, so much to see/so what's wrong with taking the back streets?" became, of course, a reference to the Christian Way. "You'll never know if you don't go/you'll never shine if you don't glow" became an urging to get us to sign up for mission trips.
We filed out silently that night back to our cabins, I guess to start growing our soul patches for Jesus.
Almie Rose
Every summer my hardworking, stay-at-home mom would send me and my brother to Beverly Hills Sports Camp, which yes, was a real thing, and had about as much sports in it as fruit juice in Gatorade. Part of the reason why I hated BHSC so much was because of one diabolical camp counselor named Cherish. I don't remember what Cherish looks like because her personality was so awful and so at the very height of ranging Bitch-a-tude that it completely overcame her looks in my memory and I only see her in my mind now as a tall woman in denim shorts without a face who has 'In The Hall of The Mountain King' play behind her wherever she goes. I realize now she was probably only 16. One day, Cherish's co-counselor was sick and for reasons I still don't understand, she asked me to help her out. For that one day, Cherish and I were equals, or as equal as a 12 and 16 year old could be. She didn't make fun of me, she asked me to sit next to her on the bus, and she wasn't a complete and total asshole demon of Fuck You kingdom. Cherish, wherever you are, I hope you have lots of children and that they are all beautiful little nightmares.
David Roth
There were a few of your garden-variety Long Island Jews there. Which, you know: durr, because it was summer camp and that's where the garden-variety Long Island Jews go. These were alums, mostly, spending their summers home from Penn and Syracuse and the University of Maryland back in the place they'd spent their previous summers; these guys were absolutely opaque to me even then, weird prickly dentists' kids who listened to Billy Joel a lot and played card games like Asshole even in the absence of beer for the Asshole to chug. At one of these games, I remember hearing, the Asshole had to chug orange juice.
And there was a program of some sort, which was where all the Brits and Aussies and the odd South African came from, the counselors who wore Speedos down to the lake because those were the sort of bathing suits they had, who wore goofy hats and had never shot a basketball. And then there were the mystery adults at the camp'the grown men teaching and coaching and reffing basketball or baseball, or the gentle, toasted Deadhead in the nature/radio hut, or the forty- and fiftysomething men who were, for some reason, spending their summers as group leaders or camp directors.
Stuart Horton Billard'there was a Roman numeral after his name, but the number itself changed with his whim'was one of these, and he did project some authority, albeit in a strange and offhand way. That he projected any authority at all was impressive, given that he was a gray-haired, leathery sexagenarian who seldom wore a shirt, always wore a floppy hat, and spent his day at the archery range, doing his utmost to keep kids from injuring each other or the camp's bows. "Don't twang your wang," he'd say, sternly, to kids messing around with their bowstrings. Which was, at the time and in retrospect, a pretty amazing thing to say to a dozen 11-year-olds, and we laughed, but the wang-twanging'or this particular type of it, anyway'ceased. He talked constantly'his voice was pebbly either from cigarettes or yelling at the nine-year-olds to put that down or both'in shaggy, tangled monologues that, if mostly probably for himself, sometimes glanced off of us. It's hard to say how much we listened to him.
There were stories about Stu, things confidently asserted about him which seem unlikely in retrospect'he was a millionaire or he was the prodigal son of a millionaire or he was a professor of religion or politics. There were stories about all the adult counselors, if only because grown-ass men choosing to live in a bunk with a dozen pubescent Jews named Seth and Zach and Zack and Scott kind of demands an explanation, but the stories about Stu were different'the others were scurrilous, mostly, limited by the capacities of the tweenage imagination, unlimited by any sense that these were real people we were talking about, or that we could ever be that old or unknowable. And anyway why was this shirtless older dude hanging out with us at the freaking archery range, instead of doing something else, someplace else? Every summer, a kid or two tried to escape from camp. Stu had been there, by choice and as an adult, for decades. Stu's stories, though, had a sense of the legendary about them'there was, as I remember it, almost something melancholy about the narrative journey we wrote for him, and the implausibility of his being there earned a more implausible and ornate backstory. I don't recall the details. I'm not sure they matter.
If Stu seemed like a mystery then, though, he is less so now. There is still no real explanation for how or why he put up with and put himself through all those awful Umbro-clad bougie-brash Seths and Zachs, one after another summer after summer. But it has become easier for me both to imagine and respect whatever it was that kept Stu coming back to camp.
The kids made fun of the adult counselors, because that is what kids do, but we didn't really goof on Stu, despite his aforementioned goofiness and shirtlessness and those half-bawdy monologues and the general incongruity of his place in our summertime lives. We understood him, to the limited extent that we could understand anything, to be a man doing something that somehow gave him some peace and enjoying the doing of it, even if we couldn't quite get why he liked it or how he enjoyed it. There was a cool presence and a good-humored grace in the way he inhabited that particular choice and did his weird job. Stu seems less the strange influence I figured him to be then'another inexplicable and incomprehensible adult, another person telling me not to do something'than one I wish I'd listened to a bit more closely, or at least asked a few more questions. I would've started with "Why?" because that's usually a good place to start. I would've looked forward to hearing where his explanation wound up.
Oriana Schwindt
I decided the best use of my post-freshman-year summer was to be an RA at a journalism camp. One Friday afternoon, I took the camp car to the grocery store to get a cake'we were going to be celebrating some of the kids' birthdays that night. I had left my phone in the car and returned to an incredibly angry voicemail from Leslie, one of the head instructors asking where the car was and demanding I return it immediately. Puzzled and cake in hand, I went to give the keys to the overly outraged Leslie. Ten minutes and a loud, humiliating lecture in front of the rest of the staff on making sure the proper people knew the car's location later, I returned to my room nearly in tears. That was when I looked out the window and noticed the car leaving the parking lot; Ron, the instructor I had a giant crush on, was driving, and Leslie and Ben were his passengers. Ron returned an hour or so later without them, and I noticed their absence at dinner and breakfast the next morning.
Leslie and Ben got married a couple years later, and I learned the truth from Ron: they had needed the car for a little getaway that officially cemented their relationship. They have a beautiful baby boy now, too, which did a lot to melt that chip, but goddamn that little episode rankled.
Brett Smiley
There's not much I can say about Peter because he only lasted three days. At age 13, I was sent reluctantly to a sleepaway camp in New Jersey for four weeks with a friend of mine. Peter greeted us immediately after our parents dropped us off, and we noticed right away that he was pretty hyper. We didn't know any British guys so we figured that's how they all acted. On his bed, which was adjacent to mine, Peter kept a Kermit the Frog doll that was missing all of its appendages. Kermit dolls aren't sold that way. He came home rip-roaring drunk the first two nights, verbally abused all of us (we were "wankers"), and put the kid next to me in a headlock. Peter also sexually harassed a female staff member, unless it wasn't sexual harassment to tell a woman that he'd love to put his face between her breasts. Peter was fired that day and replaced by a guy named Jason, who gave me and my friend our first pornographic magazine. We got along with Jason much better.
Katie Vagnino
So, maybe this is too dark, but I had a creepy counselor that I only realized was creepy in hindsight as an adult. I used to go to an all-girls camp in Maine, a seven-week sleepaway camp. My second summer there, when I was 9, I had this counselor named Amy. The counselors got, like, one night off a week, and Amy would always tell us about her sexual exploits, most of which consisted of meeting random guys in bars and making out with them in their cars. I think she thought she was being progressive, giving us sex-ed, but it wasn't really educational. She also once showed us an issue of Penthouse. Not really appropriate for 8-year-olds, but of course at the time I thought she was cool and mature and I could learn about boys from her stories. She also was frequently topless around us and I was fascinated because the only other boobs I'd ever seen were my mom's.
Josh Wolk
When I was a camper, I loved going to archery, because it was run by a counselor who was only peripherally interested in archery. He would disinterestedly let us take a couple of rounds on the range, but that would quickly get put on pause in order to entice us kids to play a variation of dizzy bat, which would end with the field strewn with vertiginous kids lying flat on the ground, clutching onto the grass to keep from falling off the tilting earth. He had a bow that he kept strung in the normal fashion, but then he also attached a longer string with lots of slack to the ends; this way he could attach an arrow to that limp line and it would look like he had an arrow cocked, even though there was no tension on the line. And then he would chase his friends around as they begged him to stop.
Some days we'd tape balloons to the targets and try to pop them with our arrows. After one such shoot, he solemnly detached a limp, broken rubber balloon corpse that had been shot and proceeded to solemnly dig a small hole and perform a funeral service for it, sticking a tiny cross made of sticks into the ground to mark the memorial. When the kids laughed, he gravely told them that he truly believed that balloons had souls, and that they should be treated with respect, and then went on with his service. When the period ended and the kids had left, he pulled out the tiny cross, dug up the balloon and threw it away, scuffing dirt over the old grave. The next day one of the kids from that period came back to archery and was telling everyone else about the grave. But it was gone, and the counselor denied it had happened, saying to this 11-year-old, "Why would I possibly hold a funeral for a balloon? That would be weird." And he never admitted it.
I went to archery at least once a day not because I wanted to become an expert marksman, but because I wanted to learn more card tricks and head games. But then he played a prank on me for which I would never forgive him. After five summers and endless hours at his activity, I was accepted to be a CIT, and I eagerly signed up to work in archery. I could just picture my summer apprenticeship in which I would be the one passing out the dizzy sticks. I would work with my mentor to come up with brand new ways to make campers doubt their sanity. I would be the head gamer instead of the head gamed. It would be glorious.
And then I showed up, only to find that he had decided not to come back that summer. Instead, they had gotten someone new to camp, someone who really really loved archery. Someone eager to teach kids the nuances of target shooting and wrist guards and sighting. In short, the least fun things you could do at archery. But his enthusiasm proved contagious, and soon archery was being taken seriously by kids. And as I sat there, trapped, for two periods a day for eight weeks, I was expected to concentrate on nothing but proper form and helping kids not to jerk the string as they let go of an arrow, and counting up the scores on target after target after target after target after target. And if you suggested breaking for a card trick, you were met with bewilderment and impatience from all the kids who just wanted to keep trying to get that next goddamn patch.
Some said the old counselor decided not to come back because he needed to make more money. Some said he was taking summer classes. I suspect that this was all part of an elaborate practical joke on me, six years in the making. Well played, archery counselor, well played.
Previously in series: Bad News Brenda, Drunk In China, The Writer With The Pink Velvet Pants, A Little History Of Blackmail, Drinking While Pregnant and Giving Bad Advice To Kings
Nadia Chaudhury was a city kid who never went to summer camp, but imagines it's exactly like Wet Hot American Summer, right down to going into town.
The Complete Guide to Summer Tech, Tools and Gear
Kamis, 28 Juni 2012
A Poem By Ben Purkert
U-Haul & the Dream of Arrows
a little pink lemonade in the nick of
my thumb, a little radio
static ringing in my lungs & each lung works
like a cut-out since the body
can't be everywhere, can't be all things
to all mirrors & with my windows
down I'll pretend this isn't a U-Haul but
a huge-ass space bot bearing me
in its gaping mouth & the two of us
could throw around ideas for
miles, we could blow by a million
signs lit up, high in the sky with arrows
pointing down & I think maybe
that's what sky is, just a whole mess
of extremely sharp ends
& the U-Haul has something he needs
to say, he nearly breaks down
from not saying it
Ben Purkert's poems are forthcoming in The New Yorker and Denver Quarterly. He's currently completing his first manuscript, One Good.
We keep the rest of the poems in the archives of The Poetry Section. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.
Dating Myself
At the concert I sneak up closer to the stage and end up sitting next to a very cute boy who instantly strikes up a conversation. So embedded in the diaper/breastmilk/no sleep/spitup haze am I that I don't realize the cute boy is flirting with me until I mention my husband, and he immediately turns to the girl on the other side of him. Then I realize: flirting! I was flirted with. I float home on a cloud of 'Cowboy Dan' and Still Got It.
May 2007: Myself, hubby, son who's now four and daughter who's almost two are on vacation in Portland, Oregon. The city is gorgeous and full of good weather and perfect activities for a young family. My son loves every minute. My daughter refuses to sleep in a new place but quite enjoys the Japanese Gardens. My relationship is desperately unhappy, but neither of us will admit it. I sneak out one night intending to go see a band called The Shaky Hands that I read about in the local paper. Instead I ride the bus around town, have conversations with strangers about God knows what, buy an Air CD in a big indie record store, shop at Powell's, and realize I am starving for self discovery. I pick up a big thing of gelato, take it back to the hotel, and have the first of the conversations that will eventually end my marriage.
June 2008: Post divorce. Post finding-out-he-was-cheating-on-me-for-a-year apocalypse. My two lovely offspring are now spending weekends with Daddy, so I have a lot more free time. I go on so many dates that summer that I label it 'Summer of Lust' because that sounds better than 'Summer of Being a Complete and Total Wreck.' None of the dates are with myself. I later make note of that. Go on dates with yourself.
March 2009: After the Summer of Lust runs its course, I spend seven months with a very sweet, very wrong for me man who gives me shelter from the obliteration that is my life. I am healing and becoming restless. On a Friday night, I announce my plans to go out alone. I get dressed and head to the Art Walk. I drink craft beer and see a funky world music band. Crammed in a swarm of people sweating and drinking and swaying to an entirely unfamiliar beat, I become aware that there are universes of myself that I don't yet know. I break up with my boyfriend a week later.
May 2009: Having decided to take a break from dating, and having not yet built up a network of single girlfriends, I take myself on a date more from necessity than desire. An acquaintance's band is playing at a local bar, and there's where I see her, out on the dance floor all by herself. I join her. We spend the rest of time being best friends.
April 2010: A friend is playing violin at a pricey, catered beer fest at the botanical gardens. She sneaks me in. I casually jump in the line for my tasting mug and coupons. I spend the evening getting buzzed on fine beer and walking the beautiful gardens alongside the hundreds of couples that have come out. I eat the best baked good I have ever eaten. It's German and flaky and filled with cream. I will kick myself forever for forgetting its name. Maybe it's the beer or the pastry or the walkways lined with succulents, but that night I feel that I am not only on a date with myself, I am head over heels in love with me.
May 2011: The very handsome but not-great-at-being-a-grown-up musician I'm seeing leaves my house on Sunday morning, then gets a much earlier than expected call about a job. I get an email on Sunday evening letting me know that he has moved to NYC. Since the relationship was fairly new and consisted mostly of gin connoisseur-ing and a ridiculous amount of sex, I am less heartbroken than disappointed, but still, I liked him. I feel a road trip is in order, so the following weekend the kids go to Dad's, and I throw a bag in the car and make the long drive from Phoenix to San Francisco.
I couch surf for the first time. The apartment is way more beautiful than I could ever actually afford. Major score. My host invites me to a Meklit Hadero concert, and I accept. At the show he leaves for a moment and comes back with a flower. When the waitress asks us if we're on a date, I say 'No,' at the exact same time he says, 'Yes.' In this moment I realize that he is not gay, and that couchsurfing.com could also be called easyhookup.com. We go back to his place, do not have sex, and he disappears for the next two days. I gorge myself on Thai food, sushi, SF coffee, and books. I buy a Yoga Tree pass and do yoga twice a day. In the middle of Anusara I unexpectedly forgive everyone for everything.
June 2012: I spend the day teaching yoga at behavioral health centers, a.k.a. the places where you're committed for severe mental health disorders. Some of the women are so drugged that they can barely move on their mat. Some of them spend the whole class lying on the floor talking to someone I can't see. Some look at me with fierce eyes and ask for core work and hip openers. One of them pops randomly into full wheel. One twitches the entire time. I go home and cry for two hours because of their immense bravery. Because the possibility of being so lost, so at the mercy of pills and chemical surges, terrifies me. Because I know each of them walks through fire every day.
I put on sunglasses and take myself to see Hunger Games at the cheap theater. It makes me feel better to think that at least my children aren't at risk of being taken by the state and forced to fight for their lives. There may be heartbreak, divorce, or mental health struggles a simple roll of the genetic dice away, a long and winding maze of finding their own hearts, their purpose in the world, but at least they won't face a reaping. At least there's that. I eat popcorn and Jr. Mints for dinner. I am incredibly grateful.
Jane Ysadora is still single, if you know anyone. (Kidding!) She lives in Phoenix, writes a lot, and has foam light saber battles whenever her small people ask her to. She's currently working on a fictional Midrash collection.
Can 'Diablo 3' Point Us Toward A Grand Unified Theory of Nerdrage?
Within 24 hours of Diablo 3's May 15 release, about 3.5 million people had bought it, either that day or as a preorder. Many of them have been playing it obsessively since the release. But all is not well, because, alongside the enthusiasm, the game has unleashed a torrent of nerdrage. White-hot, screeching nerdrage. Nerdrage about how the game is balanced, about technical issues, about the nonresponsiveness of Blizzard's customer service. And I propose that the nerdrage sparked by Diablo 3 can help us unravel a mystery that has long eluded scientist and sociologist alike (not really): What causes nerdrage? What are the factors that determine its intensity, its duration, and its contagiousness?
Here's where I should probably mention that I am one of those aforementioned fans. Diablo is one of the most persistent relics of my nerdy, awkward past (now I am so cool and not awkward), and as the release date approached, even though I knew it was a very bad idea given the game's potential to suck me in, I felt compelled to email Blizzard and say something like, Hey, I'd like to write about this for such-and-such website. Could you send me an e-copy? They did and I did and then it was hours of sitting hunched over at my computer, making my wizard, HugPatrol, kill hordes of zombies and skeletons and demons of every stripe and watching randomly generated items, or 'loot,' pop out as they die. The game tracks your playtime, and I've logged about an hour and 20 minutes a day'some of that during the prime of spring!'since the game came out. This sounds like a lot until you ask around; in a brief, unscientific, poorly-responded-to Reddit poll I conducted, fans copped to playing six or seven hours a day, and if the habits of World of Warcraft fans are any indication, it wouldn't shock me to find out that there are a lot of people playing 10 hours a day or more.
And this is part of the reason the nerdrage has gone supernova, as I'll explain. But first, let's define some terms:
nerd: someone who cares deeply and irrationally about something in a way that is very hard for someone who doesn't care about that thing to understand.
nerdrage: the overwhelming feeling of anger engendered when a nerd is disappointed by that thing he or she cares so deeply and irrationally about'an anger that non-nerds, or different species of nerd, find very hard to take seriously or not scoff at, because of that whole opaque-to-outsiders thing.
I'm actually not a Diablo 3 nerd. A fan, but not a nerd. I am a nerd, however, about certain things, including the New England Patriots and the Boston Celtics. I devote far too much of my time to reading about and watching these teams, and when they lose in a painful manner (which both have managed to do a lot of in the last few years) it sticks to my gut in a way that something so frivolous shouldn't. I can't help it. I am a nerd for these teams.
I bet you're a nerd, too, about something. Most of us are. Some of us are nerds about a lot of things (I can't decide if these are the lucky or unlucky ones). Maybe you cried when Jim and Pam first kissed on 'The Office.' Maybe you're really into Dr. Phil (ew). Or maybe you've had multiple religious experiences on shrooms while listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and you just can't stop thinking about that album, and every time you listen to it you notice some new semi-submerged thread of sonic perfection, and it fucks up every first date you go on because you start evangelizing about it in this weirdly persistent way that adds an unwelcome manic tension to the proceedings.
Of course, all but the most extreme sports fans and music fans and whatever fans aren't viewed as nerds, while, until recently at least, anyone who played a game with even a single sword in it was generally swept into the nerd category (doubly so if there was a mace in the game'no one knows why, but maces are way nerdier than swords; Diablo 3 has both!).
But nerdiness is nerdiness, whether it has to do with gaming or otherwise; and the symptoms that run across its different forms are always quite similar, even while they may vary in intensity. So while the object of nerdrage might be something very specific, the emotions that fuel it are pretty universal.
The Diablo 3 nerdrage started pretty much immediately with the game's release, as Blizzard's servers, crushed by the onslaught of nerds hoping for their first taste of sweet sweet demon blood, instead served up an error message. Once fans got in and had some time to poke around, a lot of them quickly began to feel that Blizzard had not delivered on its decade-plus promise (for one thing, Diablo 3 has many streamlined, console-like elements to it'the ultimate insult as far as PC gamers are concerned'sanding down the nerdiest strategic edges of its predecessors). Now, it's difficult to take a strict measure of how this instance of gaming nerdrage compares to prior manifestations, except to observe that Diablo is at least no Daikatana. It's not as though the game was poorly reviewed or is being abandoned en masse. But still, this is certainly one of the most notable outbreaks of nerdrage in recent history.
If you want to get a sense of the tenor of this nerdrage, one of the epicenters is in the Battle.net forums (Battle.net is the online service through which players play Diablo 3). There, some of the franchise's most ardent fans express white-hot outrage at Diablo 3's shortcomings. 'What killed this game for you?' asks one post. 'We demand a new game designer!' trumpets another. Then this (blanket sic):
Please do not let the same game designer work on another game !Make a 'Game company Black-list' like in the casino's and write his name on nr. 1
We want fun games again,
And if your in-house testers/game designer's do not understand what fun is,LISTEN TO YOUR FANBASE.Uninstalled.
Um, yeah! So there's a lot of anger, most of it orbiting around a few standard gripes:
' The Inferno difficulty mode (which Blizzard promised would be really, really hard) is really, really hard.
' Cool, powerful items don't pop out of the bad guys with nearly enough frequencydrop'conspiracy theorists see this as a ploy on Blizzard's part to push people into using the Real Money Auction House, which lets people buy or sell in-game items for real-world cash. If players can't find great items, some detractors insist insist, they'll be forced to buy them in the auction house, from which Blizzard takes a cut of each purchase. (There is also an auction house using gold, the in-game money.) (Also, yes: Real-life human beings spend real-life money on not-real-life swords and armor and stuff.)
' The story and voice acting are unspeakable horrors, much like the game's final boss, the Lord of Terror himself.
' There is far less customizability than in previous games'every new skill you acquire is acquired at a preset point, and unlike the previous two games in the series, you're not forced to make any big, permanent choices about your character and where his or her strengths and weaknesses will lie.
' Etcetera, etcetera.
Don't be judge-y; like I said, it's universal. We, most of us nerds of one stripe or another, get irrationally mad about stupid things. But I contend that gamer nerdrage is a bit more focused and intense. It's a speculative argument, of course, until scientists come up with a way to reduce subjective emotional states down to cold objective numbers (and seriously, scientists'get on that!). But if it's true, it's true for three main reasons:
1. The long development cycle. Now that gaming is on equal footing with Hollywood in terms of funding and and fandom and news coverage, there's arguably no form of entertainment that gets as heavily draped in hype and anticipation and controversy as the development of a new video game. A space of almost twelve years separated the release of Diablo 2 and that of the frequently delayed Diablo 3. That's a lot of screenshots, developer interviews, and hyperbolic presentations at conference in the meanwhile, and a lot of time for fans to develop sky-high expectations, to internalize every rumor and scrap of journalism that gets squeezed out of the protracted development cycle, to come up with things to be disappointed about once reality arrives and can't live up to a million nerdy fever-dreams.
Diablo 3 (and every major release) elicited significant nerdrage because a perfect version of it already existed in the heads of gamers years before it was released. Then the actual game had to come along and ruin everything.
2. The unparalleled intimacy between gamer and game. There are only so many hours of sports on a week, and most people don't follow more than two or three teams closely anyway. Loveless is a discrete, bounded thing. You can play it over and over but it's still just 48 minutes and 36 seconds long.
Games like Diablo 3, where so many of the levels and items and encounters are randomized, are different. You can play Diablo 3 forever, basically. This leads people to become very, very attached to it. They play it constantly, and when they're not playing it they're reading about it or complaining about it or, in the direst cases, writing torrid fan-fiction about it. The stakes seem higher, the slights more visceral, when you're so tightly entwined with the object of your nerdlove'and it's a thin line between nerdlove and nerdrage.
3. The endlessly seductive hope that Maybe Things Will Get Better. Most forms of nerdrage are starved of the oxygen they would need to burn for very long because what's done is done. Wes Welker dropped that ball so he dropped that ball so he dropped that ball. That's it and there's no way to reverse it. George Lucas isn't going to unmake the crappy new 'Star Wars' trilogy he made; that trilogy is a thing that, barring a heroic time-traveler, exists now and will exist forever.
Gaming'or PC gaming at least'is different. Because a game like Diablo 3 gets patched regularly (meaning the designers release a set of tweaks, often geared at making the game more balanced), there's always a chance'a chance!'that the game's publishers will suddenly do a 180, prostrate themselves before the nerd-hordes, and cede to all their demands. Now, it's a bit delusional to think this could actually happen, both because Blizzard obviously has their reasons for making this or that design decision, and because, given the nastiness of the nerdrage that has been unleashed so far, to fix the game to the nerds' liking at this point would entail its developers saying, 'You know, I think the 15-year old who just sent me a photoshopped picture of my head on Hitler's body makes some really good points. And boy, do I admire him for not being shy with those punctuation marks! I'm going to give him what he asks for.'
But still. Because games can be improved, gaming nerdrage has a motivating fuel that is absent in nerdrage's other manifestations.
***
Interestingly, but maybe not surprisingly, the vast majority of people spouting the hottest nerdrage over Diablo 3 seem to still be playing it. It's a hellaciously addictive game, and they, like so many others, have been yoked at a very primal level to Diablo 3's stimulus-reward schedules, which seem precisely attuned to elicit addiction.
It's a weird disconnect, this idea of being hopelessly addicted to a game that pisses you off in so many ways. There's something ominous there, a hint that the brutal logic of the slot machine has become fully entrenched in 'higher' forms of entertainment. Because sure, at its core Diablo 3 is about killing monsters, but it's also supposed to be about characters and plot and graphics. At least that's the story fans tell themselves.
Here is where the rage over Diablo 3 becomes universal nerdiness writ large. Something essentially unimportant pleases us in a primal way we couldn't ever fully put into words, and we conjure up a complicated tale to explain why we've become obsessed. So don't make fun of the ranting obsessives of the Battle.net forums'they're just being flamboyantly human.
Related: When Exactly Did It Get Cool To Be A Geek?
Jesse Singal is a reporter at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. You can vent your nerdrage at him via email or on Twitter.
Rabu, 27 Juni 2012
How Much More Do Bridesmaid Dresses Cost Today?
Weddings are, obviously, a large industry, a $47.2 billon sector (pdf) of the American economy as of 2009. And wedding attire is a 12.4% subsector. Bridal gowns are iconic (preserved, cherished) and the tux of the groom is, well, rented. Bridesmaid dresses, however, come with a bit of controversy, and rarely are they mentioned without some sort of complaint appended. So to look at the expense of weddings over the past decades, let's focus on the bridesmaid dress.
But has this controversy always been so? When our parents or our grandparents (or any other people generally older than we are) got hitched, was it an exorbitant proposition for the bridal parties? Maybe this is not an economic topic as nostalgic as Barbies or as recreational as martinis, but for all the bridesmaids out there, past and present: does that dress cost as much as your forebears paid? And how did you really, really feel about how much you had to pay for those ruffles?
***
Our methodology is different this time around. Instead of relying on old advertisements and oblique historical references, we decided to go out of the realm of archives entirely. We cast a net through word of mouth, social media, targeted emails, and then waited for the responses to pour in, like an avalanche, an avalanche of data, which data would hopefully include some anecdotes, as the colorful antics of bridesmaids and the brides that love them are not only an anchor of the burgeoning low-rent reality TV industry (and immortalized on celluloid in Bridesmaids), but also a recurring feature in the shelf-feet of wedding magazines out there as well as popular tabloids for sale next to the Chiclets at the grocery checkout. So consider this our entry into the cottage industry of Bridesmaid (Horror) Stories, wherein we try to keep at least one eye on the bottom line.
Naturally, anonymity was offered and largely accepted, so if we name someone in quotes, that may well not be their real name'no use in inviting the vengeful brides of the past to hunt down the apostate bridesmaids.
And as we're relying on the sharing nature of our friends, family and acquaintances, it only seems fair to start with the author's mom, Donna Cox. Donna was married in March of 1966 at the Spring Hill Baptist Church in South Charleston, West Virginia, in front of a not-small crowd of 250, with two family members and three friends in the bridal party. They all wore the same design of dress (floor-length, empire waist, straight skirt, 3/4 sleeve, lilac for the maid-of-honor, baby blue for the bridesmaids). They were purchased at JC Penney for $30 a pop (and altered by a seamstress friend of the author's grandmother). If we adjust that price to 2012 levels, we arrive at a cost of $212.79. (The marriage in question is still going strong after 46 years, by the way.)
Staying in roughly the same time period (and sadly, no respondents could recall prior to this time period, so for the purposes of our comparison, this is where we're starting, in the mid 60s), "Shelley," an academic advisor at a technical college, remembers two weddings. One in 1965 in Spanish Harlem, and a 1973 wedding in Connecticut. The first dress was a smash hit: 'Small purple/yellow floral print on light, gauzy cotton cream material with a purple velveteen bodice, long sleeves with velveteen at the cuffs, full skirt, long'I loved it! We wore dyed-to-match purple heels, which I also adored While the light cotton floral print material and the velveteen might sound odd, it sure worked for me, back then. I felt like a princess in this dress.' This dress was reworn by Shelley until worn out.
The second was royal crepe blue with red and white floral neckline piping, with an open square neckline and a fitted waist and straight skirt. Writes Shelly, 'It was ugly!' The dress was disposed of soon after. In the cases of each dress, it was handmade by the bride's family from pattern. Accordingly for our purposes, they had no cost at all.
And the author's Aunt Cathy attended a wedding in 1969 in Charleston, WV, wearing a pink, sleeveless a-line, with dark green wide belt with flat bow in back. It cost $40 at the time ($250.48 now), which Aunt thought was outrageous, but then again, according to Aunt: 'The bride was pregnant and we shopped and put on wedding in about 2 weeks.' We would have considered it remiss to not include at least one shotgun wedding.
***
Interestingly enough, of all the responses we received, exactly zero of them related to weddings that occurred in the '80s. From this we can deduce only one thing: no one got married from 1981 to 1990. So much for the Reagan years, hmm?
The majority of requests for information went out in the form of a questionnaire and came back short on anecdotes, so here is some of the data received:
There are two wedding memories from 'KD,' one in Wisconsin in 1999 and one in Minneapolis in 2002. The former, at $150 ($206.92 adjusted), was mid-calf length with a swirly floral pattern on top and bottom, with some fringe decoration, and the latter, at $120 ($153.30 adjusted) was sleeveless and floor-length, with a sheer overlay. Both were mandated by the bride, and both soon went to the thrift store.
'Kristine' spent $329 ($426.93, adjusted) on a black wide-strapped sleeveless bodice with a navy blue tea-length skirt and an oval cut-out at the small of the back ('Quit laughing, I'm serious.') for a 2001 Wisconsin wedding. It was not reworn. Kristine is also anxious to see if any of her bridesmaids responded to this little questionnaire.
A young Brooklyn professional, 'Vicky,' speaks of a $180 dress worn by the five bridesmaids at her wedding in a Red Bank, New Jersey, wedding in 2002. That dress, strapless and silk with a sash, cut to right below the knee, would now be priced at $229.94. Did they wear the dress again? Vicky is not sure.
In 2004, 'Amy' wore a $131 (or $159.37, now) ballroom-style ankle-length lavender gown with smooth silhouette for a wedding in Richmond, VA. Apparently Amy is no devotee of the ballroom dancing, as this dress was also destined for the Goodwill.
'Ginger,' an actress living in Los Angeles, got married in Memphis in 2007. The bridesmaids, all eight of them, wore strapless long navy satin dresses with a slight fishtail train, in front of 300 people. The cost of the dress was approximately $200, or $221.68 now. According to Ginger, she has photographic evidence of at least two of the bridesmaids rewearing the dresses on multiple occasions.
Another bride giving info on her own wedding, 'Katy,' afforded the bridesmaids choices of cuts of the same fabric pattern (Hawaiian) in Pennsylvania in 2009. Very generous of Katy, and, according to her, these $40 dresses ($42.85 now) have worn the dresses again.
And an anonymous sibling ('Denise') of an Awl contributor, speaking of a wedding in Potsdam, NY, also had a point to raise:
I tried to find a record of what I paid for one back in '96 but I couldn't. I wanted that one for you because it was toward the end of an era in that you had to go to a bridal shop. Internet shopping changed the face of bridesmaid dresses forever' I know it wasn't cheap for back then'I'm guessing $160ish'but the shoes were the kicker. As was the practice back in the day, the shoes were to be dyed to match, so we got to pay $40 a piece for ugly, uncomfortable shoes that were going to bleed all over our feet as soon as it got hot.
The dress does not end up being on the steep side ($236.34, adjusted), but Denise is right. Even as we talk about the costs of these frocks, we're eliding some of the more infuriating expenses associated with these occasions: the shoes, the dying of the shoes, the hair, the make-up, the accessories. This is a brief, imperfect little examination, of course, but the infuriations of your own personal experience, the nickels and dimes, will vary.
A number of responses not used (mostly because they were too recent, or price not provided) were examples of the post(-post?)-modern bride: the bride that, having been a bridesmaid, tries to accommodate the bridesmaids as much as possible and give the bridesmaids as much sway as possible. This is not without its disadvantages, according to Amy:
Having twice bought dresses that I had to pay to alter and that I never wore again, I meant to make things easier on my bridesmaids by letting them choose dresses they liked' but I am pretty sure I made things harder. I put the burden on them by being so general and thus making them shop around so much. It would have been better if I had just said "black, cocktail-length" and left it at that'especially given that I didn't actually care whether or not they looked particularly coordinated. (They were carrying bouquets, everyone knew who they were!)
Even if you've not been near to this process, you've seen Bridesmaids. And while it was a funny movie, it was also shockingly accurate: it's not really a good wedding unless you have a manipulative best friend and some sort of food poisoning and a maid-of-honor that you can't figure out for the life of you what's she's complaining about. This is part of the process. It's not really unavoidable without elopement, or not-marrying. This is also why being tapped to be a bridesmaid is not just an honor and a mild burden, it's also a responsibility.
***
What does a bridesmaid actually do, anyway? For those of you wondering the answer to this (dudes!), the oft-cited origin of the bridesmaid goes back to Medieval Western Europe, as the bridesmaids were recruited to serve as a shield against evil spirits. (This may also be the source of the adage, 'Thrice a bridesmaid, never a bride,' as three doses of evil spirits is enough to taint one into unmarriageability.)
This is not an explanation that you should really repeat unless as a factoid score at a dinner party. For the duties of the modern bridesmaid, the product of a century of transformation of weddings as a social practice to an industry, we defer to Emily Post, who wrote the book on the subject (more than one, actually):
' Attend the bridesmaids' luncheon, if there is one.
' Supervise flower girl(s) and ring bearer(s) if asked.
' Assist the bride at the reception as requested.
' Participate in activities such as a receiving line and a bouquet toss.
' Contribute to the bridesmaids' gift to the bride.
That may seem pretty simple, but the big one is the third, assisting the bride at the reception as requested. That's a proviso to make an attorney blush, as it unbounded by parameter of any kind. Sometimes that assistance is a specific chore the day of, or some gopher work the week before, or some unstated emotional support that you hope you know when you see. And at some point, favors will be made.
Really if you think of it, on the Big Day, the service to the bride the bridesmaids perform is that of decoy, as those that mean harm to the bride'the spurned suitors, evil spirits, process servers'have to figure out which of the ladies in the dresses is the actual bride. Bridesmaids are the Secret Service of the wedding, with dire responsibilities and little reward. Bridesmaids are heroes.
So let's hear some of their stories.
***
While many of the respondents were either satisfied with their bridesmaid dress experience, or very discreet about their dissatisfaction, not all were (thankfully). What follows is their experience in their own words. The first is "LeBrun," the mother of a website managing editor.
The first was my brother's wedding. They married between his sophomore and junior year of college. I was the maid of honor. He picked me up in Boston in his little MG and drove nonstop to Milwaukee, to Donna's house. Other than pit stops there were no stops, and it was obvious that I'd better keep the number of stops down. If I'd had a bladder infection, he probably would have left me behind. I got even by smoking, which he hated.
The year was 1963. Donna's mother, a fine seamstress, made both the bridal gown and the bridesmaids' dresses. [Handmade, therefore current price is N/A.] I don't remember if the bride or groom's family paid for the material and the dyed silk high heels to match.
The five bridesmaid dresses were all sapphire satin, with a fitted bodice and full skirt. The wedding was in the church, with the reception downstairs. My guess, there were about 150 guests. I don't remember seeing the dress or shoes again, and can't even remember how I got back to Boston. I can remember being emotionally overwhelmed during the ceremony and that in the wedding photographs there is a stain on the blue satin from my, thankfully silent, dripping tears.
The next wedding was in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts. The bride requested that the three of us wear a dress that made us feel beautiful. That generous good sense illustrates why she is still a dear friend. The dress I chose was a soft blue-violet silk wrap dress with long sleeves and a deep V neck. I'd found 3 ½-inch designer stilettos that amazingly matched the dress and cost more than the dress, the dress costing $220 [$888.66 now]. And, yes, I did feel beautiful. Wedding parties lasted the weekend. The wedding itself was held in the Eastern Orthodox Church, about 200 guests, and the dancing at the reception went on until the early morning hours. No surprise, I wore that dress until it finally, after dozens of wearings, wore out.
Aww, to all of that. Next up is a confession from 'Mary,' a playwright now living in the greater Boston metropolitan area.
I went to a wedding in 2000, in Rochester, NY. There were about 80 guests, and I was one of two bridesmaids.
The dress? It cost about $200 [$266.92, adjusted], and it was identical to the other bridesmaids', down to the shoes and a generic locket I never wore again. As for a description, peer inside a tub of whipped margarine'the cheap store-brand margarine offering no promises of being trans-fat-free, but costing a third of what butter does. Paint this color onto a vaguely Little Bo Peep-shaped dress, yet made of polyester stretch knit fabric, just like Great Aunt Edna's slacks. Nothing on earth can make stretch knit look fluffy, which I think had been the planned look, so instead it just draped like the bolt of awkward polyester from Jo-Ann Fabrics that it surely was. It had a square neckline and short puff sleeves that gave us upper-arm muffin top. The dressmaker had mistakenly made mine in the same size as the Maid of Honor's, a size 18, while I was a size 12. I was told by the bride to quickly get it altered, which I had no intention of doing, and did not do. I wanted the mistake to be seen and gawked at. I went ahead and wore it 3 sizes too big, bra straps proudly peeping out. You could have fit a scrappy bobcat inside that baggy bust.
As for wearing it again, I would fish clothes from a foetid river before wearing that dress again. I hung in the back of my mother's guest room closet, and refused to even bring it home to Boston. You can't cut up stretch knit for cleaning rags, after all. They don't absorb. Although, against my usual environmental sensibilities, I hope it is in a landfill. I hope that in 300 years or more, it is excavated more or lest intact, causing the people of the future to acknowledge fashion travesties of the past that they must not repeat.
Please don't think I was being a bad friend to the bride. She wasn't my friend'this was a relative's wedding to a woman I absolutely loathed. When pressed by my relative to be a bridesmaid, I kept imploring, "Surely she must have some friends who would be more appropriate for this!" At length he finally hissed, "She doesn't have any friends!" I vowed this would be the last time. They are divorced now, of course.
In 2010 I became a Justice of the Peace for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. One of my reasons for this is because it gives me an easy way out of bridesmaid duty. I can say "Well, as a JP, being any other part of a wedding party now presents a conflict of interest, I'm afraid." The part about the conflict of interest is a lie, of course. I could go skipping down the aisle as a flower girl and the Commonwealth wouldn't care. I always offer to officiate the wedding instead, and they always politely decline, having some dearly beloved family clergy person (whom they haven't seen in 25 years) already lined up. It all works out.
Um, whatever the opposite of 'Aww' is. And the last one is from 'Robin,' a one-time New Yorker.
It was a wedding of a college roommate in 2004 in Chicago, with seven bridesmaids and seven groomsmen, probably around 150 guests.
The dress (and we all wore identical dresses, identical lavender strappy sandals, plus the ritualized thing of gathering at the parents' house beforehand for the application of makeup and jewelry by some professional makeup person) was lavender and strapless with a ribbon tie at the waist and then a skirt with two layers, like tutu fabric or whatever, over the more satiny inside layer. No one bothered to say, "You can wear it again!"
Maybe it was a tea dress? It was kind of J. Crew-wedding-y before J. Crew started selling wedding stuff.
I recall it being about $80 [$97.33 now]. I expected to have to take it to be altered (because that is part of the bridesmaid dress racket), but I ended up with this cool seamstress who took one look at me in the dress and said, "It's fine."
The funny part of the story is that the wedding required travel of almost everybody except for the bride's family, so we were all staying in one hotel. One of the guests was a Dutchman gentleman I had, um, spent some time with when he had visited the couple a year before the wedding. So, wedding night, lots of drinking (remember: Chicago), my strapless lavender dress and I end up heading upstairs with the Dutchman to his room. Tipsy. I think I was barefoot and carrying the strappy lavender sandals around at that point.
The Dutchman sat behind me on the bed and started to unzip the dress. As the zipper is about halfway down I hear him say in his heavily accented English: "Shit." There are some wrestling motions going on at my back and I soon discover that he has broken the zipper, broken it such that he pretty much has to shred the dress in order to get me out of it. (I'm sure someone else who responds to this will go into some detail about how crappily these dresses are made' but a broken zipper was really not that surprising.) We are both laughing a lot and the dress literally ends up in the garbage can in his hotel room.
[Next portion redacted.]
In the morning I have forgotten about the dress and its condition, but soon remember once I wake up enough to know that I need to wear something to get back to my own hotel room. I pull it out of the garbage can, hold it up, and there's no way I am going to be able to get back into it. I end up doing the walk of shame back to my own room barefoot and wearing his clothes from the rehearsal dinner.
Guess who I shared an elevator with en route? Mother of the bride.
Where is dress now? See attached documentation, which you are welcome to use as I suspect it is where most/all bridesmaid dresses should end up.
Thank you, ladies (you know who you are!) (I hope), for sharing.
***
And finally, as a current benchmark, Edith Zimmerman, editor of The Hairpin, is attending a wedding in Philadelphia this summer. It's a floor-length gray chiffon number, with 'wrappy/windy/floaty pieces to make it halter/strappy/strapless. ('Wear it 10 ways!' the site says.)' The cost of this dress is $172, although it's less with a group rate, and the bride contributed money towards the cost. Our topic is the expense born by the bridesmaid, so $172 it is, and nice job (and best of luck) to the bride. Edith's thought on the subject: 'I love weddings!'
So let's run down the figures, listing the price of each of the bridesmaid dresses mentioned, along with the year and location of the wedding and the inflation-adjusted price:
1963: N/A (Milwaukee, WI)
1965: N/A (Spanish Harlem, NY)
1966: $212.79 (S. Charleston, WV)
1969: $250.48 (Charleston, WV)
1973: N/A (CT)
1976: $888.66 (Boston, MA)
1996: $236.34 (Potsdam, NY)
1999: $206.92 (WI)
2000 $266.92 (Rochester, NY)
2001: $426.93 (WI)
2002: $153.20 (Minneapolis, MN)
2002 $229.94 (Red Bank, NJ)
2004: $97.33 (Chicago, IL)
2004: $159.37 (Richmond, VA)
2007: $221.68 (Memphis, TN)
2009: $42.85 (PA)
2012: $172 (Philadelphia, PA)
Now that is an array of figures seemingly without rhyme or reason. There's a pretty good distance between the high of nearly $900 and the lows of what is basically cost of materials (and Grandma labor), and even if you knock of the outliers there's still a wobble up and down that does not constitute a trend over time.
Granted, this has been a less-than-scientific than our usual not entirely scientific examinations, as not only is the data entirely anecdotal (i.e., lies, all lies), but also the weddings referenced are fairly disparate affairs. They are separated by geographical differences (although, weirdly, all took place east of the Mississippi), socioeconomic differences and, simply, the differences in taste. We're not sure if any of the respondents are actually a Rockefeller, but one would assume that the typical Rockefeller bridesmaid dress would be a more elaborate (and expensive) affair than the average, and probably not one of the 'Wear what you want as long as it's mauve' affairs.
If you squint, it seems the mean for a bridesmaid dress, in the past fifty years, hovers around $200, which would take a soul twenty-eight hours to pay for at the minimum wage of $7.25 (pre-tax, of course). Not a scandalously large number, but definitely a commitment, and one to be taken into account should that moment come. (And if you are soon to be a bridesmaid, remember that the dress is just the beginning. The bachelorette in Vegas, with the sky-diving and the casino-crawl, is where you really get got.)
It's a relief to see that this rough mean of $200 is one that has apparently not increased radically as the years passed, as wedding participants in general would fit the profile of a captive market segment that would bear slow but marked price increase. Though, on the other hand, the wisdom of the risk of being the final straw for such a segment may well outweigh the benefit. At least that portion of the segment comprised of bridesmaids, who really do put up with and do a lot.
Previously: How Much More Do Martinis Cost Today? and What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New York
Brent Cox is all over the Internet.