by Jill Kargman
When I was nine, my parents decided that I should get out of the Manhattan frying pan and get into the campfire: eight lung-clearing weeks of summer sleepaway camp. I was game. My best friend, Dana, was, too. I know it sounds insane to many, but for East Coast Jewy Jewsteins it was the norm to venture away from the grit and grime of big-city living for that amount of time in rural Shangri-la.
It was also de rigueur to research and find your camp by inviting salespeople to pitch you the merits of their camps in your living room. After narrowing the options down to four, we invited the camp directors to our house for a presentation to both Dana’s and my families.
My mom made a platter of cheese and crackers and dips, set out drinks, and turned out the lights. Over the course of the weekend, the directors hooked up their Kodak Carousels and projected the woods of Maine onto a screen propped in the corner. The pictures and narratives told of blissful, hazy summer days and sailboats, tire swings over water, grinning kids on water skis, horseback riding, green fields, and campfire-roasted marshmallows.
Ultimately, choosing would be somewhat of a leap of faith, since all the camps had the same basic elements. We went with the process of camp-director elimination.
Proving that you can both be bald and have split ends (a receding hairline and a long, curly mullet in the back), one director described everything as “the best in the business.” The best location in the business. The best staff in the business. The best equipment in the business. After his detailed boast of state-of-the-art dance studios, a theater rivaling those on college campuses, and an allegedly haute cuisine dining hall, he closed his colorful pitch by adding with a wink, “Quite frankly, we are the Rolls-Royce of camps.”
He got points for salesmanship and panache; but my father stood up, shook his hand sincerely, and walked him toward the door. “Thank you so much for your time,” he said, “but I think we’re looking for the Chevy of camps.”
Finally, we found our fit in the last of the litter: a mellower, cooler-seeming place with hip-looking counselors (in the slides at least) and less “best in the business” flash. Even with a slide show and home visit, it’s still a shot in the dark and an eight-hour bus ride to Maine. The two-month chapter before you can be daunting for a child. I admit I was nervous.
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My camp had looked somewhat ramshackle in the presentations but once I arrived, I knew it was a perfect, picturesque spot: perched on a lake with a fleet of rainbow Sunfish boats at the edge, and docks creating a swim area where hot campers plunged daily. There wasn’t Instagram then, but the entire spread was very postworthy. There were ceramics, tennis, field sports, archery, rifles, and rocketry—the works. The food was perfectly fine.
I was plenty homesick at first and I wasn’t exactly Miss Popular that year. The girls in my bunk all had photos of their dogs—who were named Pepper or Feffer or Steve—and thought it was superweird I didn’t have one; but I explained that where I lived, one had to pick up the logs with an inside-out Duane Reade bag, which was shocking to them, since they all had yards in Jersey where their mutts could lay cable wherevs. Despite being a city slicker unused to wooded paths, the allergens of cut grass, or the nighttime call of loons, I powered through and found my groove. One of the things that helped me was the camp radio station that we all tuned in to via the tiny and primitive boom boxes we were allowed to have brought from home and could leave on our little cabin shelving unit and turn on quietly at rest hour. The cute older boy deejays introduced us to nonquiet tunes by Quiet Riot, AC/DC, Def Leppard, and we lived for it. I wanted my own show badly.
I chose disc jockey class during free time right away, and by August, I had my very own half-hour slot on the docket. The head deejay/counselor, who worked the switchboard and put me on the hot mic live, was named John. He introduced me to The Cure and The Smiths that summer, music that I still love today. The hut/station was right next to rocketry, so you had a bit of a contrast between the geek-chic, techy, tube-socks next-door set and the Clash T-shirts in the booth. But I loved hanging around in there, perusing vinyl jackets and eavesdropping on the teens about who made out with whom.
And, importantly, I learned to hone my comedic shtick between the songs, making observations about camp and hamming it up on air. Soon campers were coming up to me, letting me know they’d laughed at my silly voices or liked something about my show. In later years, those hours at the mic gave me the confidence to try performing on a stage rather than tucked away in a booth in the woods.
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Camp meant smooching with boyfriends on the wooden benches (I later learned that the counselors were instructed to shine a flashlight and break things up “if the bench starts shakin’ ”), dancing to blaring B-52s at weekly socials, and friendships we would remember forever.
Camp also meant G-rated traditions. We had an annual twenty-four-hour swimathon, an insane two-day color war with a full gauntlet of crazy challenges, field trips to nearby harbor towns, and a carnival with a marriage booth where you could pledge faithfulness with a pipe cleaner ring.
There were also some highly questionable traditions, too. Like the slave auction, the most fucked-up thing ever. Each bunk could earn brownie points by passing inspection or doing chores around camp. A certain level of points won you a golden ticket of some sort—wampum that you could pool with your cabinmates’ resources for the main event: the auctioning of counselors to be the camper’s slaves. Bonkers. Forget that it was harking back to the horrors of human trafficking and replicating the Stanford prison experiment, but also it taught us that we could have people serve us. As children. All you had to do was pay enough.
The summer I was twelve, my entire bunk was in love with Damian, a water-skiing counselor from England, who we all knew was banging Trish, the blond aerobics teacher. Trish had a white BMW—with vanity plates—that she kept under a sheet in the parking lot. Heinous. I was determined to win his lot, which was listed in the slave catalog as, “Tuck in and Kisses Good Night from Damian.” Fuck Trish, he was mine! My cabinmates and I worked hard for our golden tickets and worked hard to curry favor with the ticket-dispensing staff: We got bull’s-eyes in archery, learned to drop a water ski, and kept our cabin squeaky clean.
The night of the slave auction arrived and Damian’s price rose and rose. We knew we had the most, and we won him, crushing our rivals’ Damian dreams. We even had enough tickets left over to also win breakfast in bed from some un-hot counselor. But who cares about that. We’d won Damian! The night of the visit, we all fried our hair with hair dryers at the same time, blowing a fuse so the lights went out. We primped in our pajamas in anticipation. When he arrived, he sat on my bed, clearly understanding that I was the ringleader/stalker in chief. Oddly, he told us all a beautiful fable of how trees came to be, but his voice was, as Linda Richman would say, “like butta.” He then circled the cabin, giving each of us a kiss good night. I practically had to wring out my white elastic-banded Calvins.
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Fast-forward twenty-eight years. All three of my kids go to this same camp; Sadie started at the same age I did. Some things have changed.
Gone is the graffiti. That radio station? A fully equipped studio with an ON-AIR red light outside the glass booth. Slave auction? Fuck, no! Now there is metalsmithing. A spin studio. A ropes course and a climbing wall.
The crowd has morphed a bit, too. The current director is awesome (he was a camper when I was there!), but there has been an explosion of JAPs. Every year at visiting day, the director takes out a bullhorn to welcome the parents at the driveway of the camp as we are all corralled behind a ribbon. After a few details about the day, he snips the ribbon and so begins what is known as the running of the Jews. It is Mel Gibson and John Galliano’s worst nightmare. Aggressive, loud yentas and helicopter dads in finance sprinting Pamplona-style to get to their little messiahs.
I had gotten a glimpse of a few of these pieces of parenting work at the bus stop in New York when the kids boarded for camp: fla
t-ironed JAPs with skinny jeans and huge oversized Jackie O shades at 7 A.M. with leashes on four standard poodles and hapless husbands carrying Zabar’s foil cold bags onto the bus. As the kids pulled away for Maine, the parents ran after the bus screaming, “I love you!” And pointing at their eye, then making a heart over their heart, and pointing at the kids behind the tinted-glass windows, who were busy tearing into their E.A.T. fifteen-dollar smoked salmon panini with the crusts cut off. I heart you, baby! I heart you, you spoiled little creature!
On visiting day I was stunned to see these same parents lined up with Baked by Melissa boxes, Lester’s bags, even Shun Lee, because darling Dakota or Jason or Jonah was missing ethnic food. They took private jets up, they schlepped piles of presents for their offspring—from table-size Rice Krispies treats monogrammed with the bunkmates’ names to rainbow looms to friendship necklaces for the cabin.
I have to admit I was terrified. Would my daughter come back demanding Fekkai shampoo and mani-pedis? Now she had peers whose parents flew sushi to the boonies for these brats! Fuck. Harry and I were stressed.
As soon as we saw Sadie, I launched into an explanation that echoed what my parents had explained to me: If you get everything, you will have nothing to look forward to; there is an emptiness inside inveterate shoppers and incessant consumers; rungs to be climbed, holes to fill, always; when you feed the beast whatever it wants, it’s always hungry.
Maybe we’d taught her well, though. All that bad, pampered, entitled behavior spoke for itself and Sadie seemed to know how not to be after exposure to it.
And not all the kids were like that, by a long shot. She found her posse—from what I can tell a bunch of sweet, strong, kindhearted, unspoiled girls. They have photos of themselves with their arms around each other; they whisper jokes, giggle over silly and private camp memories; their eyes sparkle as they recount details of pranks.
Perhaps now it has become the Rolls-Royce of camps. But it still has the soul of a vintage, well-loved Chevy.
Even our beggars are choosers.
Once I was in line at a Starbucks on Third Avenue and passed a hungry man asking for food. So I went inside and bought him a sandwich. When I came out and handed it to him he said, “Ugh, it’s on wheat? I hate wheat.”
There is a panhandler who parks his wheelchair outside Viand, the old-school diner catty-corner to Barney’s, where people drop tens of thousands on threads every day. For as long as I can remember, my mother has always given him a few dollars every time she sees him, and I have always tried to do the same. One day recently, I changed things up: I asked him if I could buy him lunch at the diner and, if so, what would he like (lesson learned from the Starbuck’s incident). He said yes and proceeded to place his complex order with me: Russian dressing on the side and smoked, not roasted turkey, for starters, and then a whole host of fixings.
My yard kicks your yard’s ass.
When people move to the suburbs, I take it personally. Their exodus is like a slap in the face.
The main reason most cite for their move is “my kids need a yard” but that reasoning only makes me madder, slaps me harder. Hello! Central Park is the lungs of Manhattan! And it’s fucking bigger than any suburban acreage!
My friend Julia diagnosed me with the invented affliction known as SPD: suburban panic disorder. Mostly it’s because I can’t drive, so I feel marooned when I’m out of the city, but also it’s because I live for strolling home after dinner, window-shopping, feeling the electricity of the neighborhood and the lifeblood of my work. I always say I’d rather live in a fifth-floor walk-up studio than a mansion in Greenwich. I’d wither on the vine outside my beloved city. Westchester County makes me ask Siri for a tutorial in hara-kiri. Back in the city, my friends and I ask her for instructions on less lethal things, like how to give great blow jobs.
I also resent moves to the suburbs because I know they mean I will never see those friends again; it feels like a breakup. Sure, they all say the same thing: That’s nonsense! We’ll be in allll the time! It’s only twenty minutes. Bullshit sneeze. In no universe is it twenty minutes to the city from anywhere. I can’t get to the East Village in that time, and you’re telling me you’re coming over a bridge or winding your way through da Bronx? Maybe in a Ferrari at 3 A.M., maybe.
You can feel okay about plastic surgery.
What’s a man to give his wife who has just about everything? Now that we’re in our fourth decade, new tits seem to be the gift of choice. I’m fine with my own low riders but, like my Odd Mom Out character, Jill Weber, I seem to be the designated boob-job chaperone/picker upper. I guess I’ve become the boob feeler, too: One friend asked me to inspect her “new Hidalgos” (named after the doctor who would do the surgery), the actual synthetic gummies, before they were put into her chest forever.
I recently went to pick up another pal at her melon specialist but she was still passed out when I got there, so I was told I’d have to wait an hour for her to come to. There was a blizzard outside at the time and I didn’t want to freeze to death walking around, so I plopped down to read a magazine in the well-appointed waiting room. More interesting than the magazines was a leather-bound tome of the doctor’s best work. Because this was not my first waiting room wait, I knew that other plastic surgeons have these as well—the before-and-after schnoz-to-ski-jump noses and low-rider flapjack boobies into pert perfect ones. But this book was different. It showed before-and-after boob/eye/nose jobs on the one page and then a cleft-palate child in Peru before and Joaquin Phoenix–like scar after! Page after page was boobs, then Operation Smile kids. Streisand-to-Witherspoon nose, then burn victim transformation. This guy was like the Robin Hood of plastic surgery! Park Avenue cans by day, Siamese twin separation by night! Later, I told some friends about this scalpel-clenching superhero, and they used his goodness to convince their husbands to buy them procedures: See, honey? My new tits are altruism! If you buy me a new rack, a kid in Uruguay will get a new face!
We’ve got a joint where everybody knows your name.
Donohue’s is a dark mahogany pub and has been serving food (and my favorite turkey sandwich) and drinks for years, unchanged by the commercial explosion along Lexington Avenue. With its old-school German black letter font signage and small window looking into the wooden interior, Donohue’s is hiding in plain sight among the flashier, in-your-face eating establishments that have cropped up around it.
It doesn’t look like much, but when you go in it’s like Cheers. Only mostly gay. I can’t tell you why, but Donohue’s attracts fabulous old queens in their eighties and nineties and their younger Filipino handlers or husbands. But then there’s also the “regular” and more familiar crowd: There’s Liz Smith the columnist, there’s Matt Lauer at the bar with a sandwich. Vanessa Noel the shoe designer has a cot in the back, I think, because she is always there. She’s basically the Norm of Donohue’s. Everyone is kind and welcoming and there is no scene at all because all the snobbish people are in the fancy restaurants that dot the city and the neighborhood.
My family has been obsessed with Donohue’s—keeping the secret of its existence mostly private (until now) and eating there whenever we can. It’s had some publicity over the years—it once shot to short-lived fame when The New York Times wrote about an old gentlemen without heirs who died and left the Donohue’s waitresses five-figure tips. It’s a cozy sanctuary, and in the winter its toasty interior and welcoming warmth are better than any fireplace at home.
It gives me material like shooting fish in a barrel.
People ask me all the time if I ever get scared I could run out of material for Odd Mom Out, and I have to laugh. Fuck, no! I have ears and eyeballs, remember? The surroundings, the people, the world I inhabit (albeit mostly on the un-chic fringes) can yield twenty seasons of humorous plot lines without trying. Whether it’s the balloon lip injections or conspicuous consumption or banker husbands talking about their $250,000 McLarens (the cars, not to be confused with the differently spelled stroll
ers), it never ends. We’ve got the Israeli movers who will allegedly bang you for an extra fee. And the people who argue earnestly over whether Glamsquad or Vênsette is the better in-home, before-event makeup and hairstyling service. The women who say they’re fat after half a tuna tartare. We’ve got stomach stapling. And elite pet kennels, where you can live-stream spy on your cat’s spa treatments. The wacky OTT hyperbolized petri dish is the gift that keeps on giving.
You know when you and your friends spy someone who just exudes Rock Star? You crane your necks in a crowded restaurant or hopping bar and go, Who is that? Sometimes it’s an actual, aging, weatherworn bassist, but often it’s…a civilian. A nobody who just looks like a somebody. A guy who may be regular but still somehow evokes throttling strings, pounding drums, and grazing groupies. But why exactly? What are those magic telltale pieces that smack of, well, smack, but also the sexy power of a larger-than-life, grinding guitar god?
Part of it is definitely the clothes. The postapocalyptic, hyperstylized, Blade Runner look gives a guy a tough, dark, gritty vibe. Testosterone has something to do with it, too. But thank goodness for Joan Jett and other female badasses. After all, as Joan sang in “Bad Reputation,” “A girl can do what she wants to do.” And what is rock ’n’ roll about but rebellion?
When I turned forty, I decided I was not going to put myself out to fashion pasture. Yes, I’d cut my hair at thirty-five, but not because some beauty magazine told me to. Fact is, there are some looks that women d’un certain âge should not rock. I go nuts when I’m walking behind someone and observe her long teenage ponytail or miniskirt or hooker shoes, only to find at the crosswalk when I am next to her that she is the Crypt Keeper.
