This summer freshly unemployed I went back to being a Music and Drama Director at a day camp I adore. I do believe in my bones I was created to do freeze dance and improv games with children. My best friends run the day camp and after quitting my job they conveniently had an opening for music and drama I could fill for four weeks. Everyone should have friends that give you jobs when you’re unemployed, it would fix a lot of issues. We hadn’t worked together in two years since I first abandoned them for my career in television. When I came back with my tail between my legs they gave me a popsicle and told me to get my ass to the church basement next-door and teach some kids. Minus the sinus infection from the mold I was back in my element. Ali and Michael are both teachers and far smarter than me, if you aren’t friends with teachers I suggest you get some. They are far more scathing than any television producer I have ever met. One afternoon at lunch my friend was stalking other camps on Instagram and gossiping about them, he came upon the super strange and cult like day camp where I had my first job. After telling him that I worked there the noise that came out of him was akin to an excited pterodactyl. Unbeknownst to me, they had been obsessed with this camp, calling it the most privileged camp in America. Trying to find a child of color was like a game of where’s waldo you would never win. Ali and Michael’s eyes lit up when they realized I worked there and they had a double agent working for them. Thinking about how strange my first job was, I started to reflect on all the strange jobs I’ve had and how I will quite literally do anything. 

When I was fourteen I got a job as a camp counselor at this very strange and cult like day camp. This would begin my very long and illustrious career as camp counselor. I wasn’t a camp kind of kid, I also wasn’t a sports kind of kid. I actually didn’t really dig other kids. I had a good pack of friends and I didn’t see any use in making more. My brother and I were best friends so I didn’t really have any yearning to be around other children all day. We weren’t kids that acted out or needed supervision. My Mom had summers off and didn’t feel the need to get rid of us for eight hours, so there was no reason for us to go to camp. I went to a day camp for three days and hated it so much my mom never made me go back. As I learned later it was because there was zero supervision and I basically walked around a field with my brother all day, we could do that for free at home. But when I was fourteen I needed a job because I was poor and my friends were rich.

My rich friends loved expensive laser tag and never swimming in their beautiful heated salt water pools. I will never understand why rich kids didn’t care about all the cool stuff they owned and how they acted as gatekeepers. I had one friend with a waterslide and a go-kart she used sparingly, I now realized she probably had low grade depression and that’s why she hated anything remotely fun. Anytime I went over to her house I tried to convince her to take out all of her cool toys and instead we had to watch her alcoholic brother talk shit with his friends. I mean if I could have done it from the pool it would be fine but, that wasn’t the case. Anyway, back to camp. My best friend at the time was applying to be a camp counselor, she was also a rich kid but her parents were English so they weren’t dicks about money. They told her if she wanted spending money she had to work. We weren’t as close as high school went on but she did come to me for weed and I to her for Vyvanse, we still keep in touch to this day and I went to her father’s funeral a few years ago. She always let us use her pool. After hearing there was a place that employed fourteen-year olds I was all over it. My friend told me she went to camp there and it was awesome. I trusted her because her twin sister had a British accent and she didn’t, in my adolescent mind that meant she was so mature she lost her accent. She was also the first to get fingered in eighth grade, so she knew what she was talking about. I applied and got an interview.

A job interview at fourteen is a ridiculous thing. No, I don’t have any felonies…yet. My prior experience, not dying. It was all for show. My mother came with me and we pulled into what looked like a private amusement park. As I walked into the small log cabin for my interview I saw a mini golf course. Not just a small green with a flag, a nine-hole mini golf course with a windmill and all. I knew then I was not going to be on the brochure. I walked in with my mom and saw a smallish old man with a large white handle bar mustache who extended his hand and introduced himself as, “Uncle Gary.” I knew one thing for sure, this man was not my uncle. After telling my mother she could wait outside she pulled up a chair and said, “I think I’ll sit in.” My mother knew better than to leave me with a man proudly proclaiming himself as an uncle to a stranger. I can’t remember the interview or questions that were asked. Yes, I can swim. No, I have never strangled a child. Probably something to the tune of that. I got the job and would start in a few weeks.

When I arrived my first day I knew something was up. All of the older counselors who seemed years ahead of me in age and puberty hugged and squealed. Again, this was day camp not an evangelical church. There were three different pools and I remember one lifeguard always made me get into the pool to swim with the special needs kids. Even then I remember thinking the best person to teach special needs children how to swim would be a lifeguard and not a fourteen-year-old in a reversible speedo. One older woman who was the aide to these children would say she had her period so she couldn’t get in the pool. Either this woman was losing mass amounts of blood every day for two months or she was a big fat liar. I had just learned how to use tampons and learned that like a strange animal I would stop menstruating in water, I was onto her. One of the worst weeks was when a third-grade boy kept taking dumps in the pool as a joke and his friends began doing the same. I didn’t understand this, as far as I knew it was pretty uncool to shit your pants, but again this place was a freak show. That week all the counselors had to go through the bathing suits of their group to see if there was poop in the bottom of their suits. I was not a fan of poop patrol, I was only making a stipend of $250 at the end of each month and even then, I knew that wasn’t enough to go sniffing for poo.  

There was also a gymnastics station. Only rich people would think that gymnastics is a must have for a day camp. With top of the line tumbling mats, balance beams, and a zip line I for sure thought I had been robbed of a childhood. What pissed me off was that the kids didn’t even care, didn’t even bat an eye at the zipline. I had dreamed of a zip line my entire life, I had settled with a hammock. Meanwhile these kids complained about the wedgie the harness would give them. I began to hate my kids with their made-up names with strange spellings. At archery they would refuse to shoot their arrows, this didn’t stop me. I became a good shot that summer. I decided if these kids weren’t going to enjoy camp I was. I worked on my short game on the golf course and washed my hands with the expensive soap in the girl’s room. I ate as much pizza my little body could take on Fridays and as many hotdogs from the food truck that came on Wednesdays. I was content with using the piss out of this camp. Overall, the part I hated the most was being called, “Aunt Mary Grace.” I was fourteen, I was no one’s aunt. I was seven years older than most of the kids and I did not ever want them to be part of my family. I found the whole idea incestuous and confusing. If someone told me at five years old I was suddenly related to sixty people who were trying to indoctrinate me into their commune, I do believe I would have had an identity crisis. Again, it felt like I was the only person who felt like they were in the twilight zone. 

By the end of the summer I was tan and well fed. I found a small tribe of normal teenagers who also thought this little community was weird. The girl from arts and crafts with the lip ring, my co-counselor who also smoked pot at fourteen, the facilities guy who was dating the arts and crafts girl with the lip ring. We would meet in the breakroom and trade dirt about the preppy girl counselors who would put on performances at the afternoon singalong. Yes, after lunch every day we had a camp wide singalong, it was like working with the family from Seventh Heaven. I remember my friends telling me it’s all worth it on the last day of camp when we get tips from the families. In my mind I thought maybe we would get twenty bucks or a Starbucks gift card. On the last day of camp, parents came up to me with folded checks whispering thank yous in my ear like I had trained a feral animal to eat with a fork and knife. I snuck into the girl’s locker room to assess my earnings. In one day, I had made $700. I had never seen that much money before, I didn’t even have a checking account. The memo on the checks read, “Thank you!” or just a smiley face. The parents didn’t even think twice about handing a brace faced fourteen-year-old a check for $250 dollars. When asked if I would come back next summer I said, “Absolutely Uncle Gary.”

After my stint at cult camp I went onto other jobs including being a cashier at the posh grocery store where my family could not afford to shop. I bagged the groceries of Gene Wilder and rang up Brian Williams yogurt while I went to high school in the afternoons. I went to night school which meant I fucked up so bad that I now had to work a job in the morning for extra credit to graduate and go to school from 2:30 to 6 PM. Not to mention I was broke because there was still no inheritance to speak of. My favorite co-worker was an older Peruvian woman named Christina. She had her eyebrows tattooed on when she was younger and now they were purple, she made me promise I would never do it. She told me stories about growing up in Peru. When she was little she worked on her uncle’s farm, she had always seen him licking stuff off the leaves they were growing. When she was about eight years old she decided to try licking the leaf, she told me that her whole face went numb and when she ran to her uncle he laughed. That was when she realized she was helping harvest coca leaves. Her favorite movie was Rio and she called me her puppy. I did this for about a year and half until the manager who didn’t like girls took me off the schedule after my dog died and I had missed a shift. C’est la vie. After high school graduation with no college accepting my less than average grades I got a job working fulltime at a frozen yogurt shop. In a month I would become the manager of the store. I had a staff of all high school girls and it was probably the cutest thing on the planet and I am completely biased. In our visors and aprons we laughed and swiped left on the hot new app Tinder. We became friends with the guys in the kitchen next door to us who would bring us bread and flowers. When I would forget a lighter they would let me light my cigarettes on their big gas stoves in the kitchen. They looked out for us and we brought them yogurt. On one occasion when the health department came my friend left a lit cigarette in our trash outside. While the inspector inspected I ran in and out trying to put out the fire. After extinguishing it the woman from the health department told me it smelled lovely in our store, almost like incense. One woman’s burning trash is another one’s incense, go figure. On my eighteenth birthday the girls I worked with threw me a surprise party in the store. To get me out of the store so they could bring out the cake they told me Christopher Meloni, “Our new town resident,” was walking by. So, you bet your sweet ass I went to gawk at my SVU husband, Elliot Stabler. When I came back in my staff of ten high school girls sang happy birthday to me. My boss came up to me later that day expressing that he didn’t realize I was just turning eighteen, I told him he couldn’t demote me now that he just realized a seventeen-year-old was running his store for the last two months, he agreed. We had a great run until a new owner took over and his business manager drunkenly came in one night and touched my boob, which resulted in him getting arrested and my dad fighting him in the back of the store. I took some time off and started attending community college so I could try to get out of my hometown. A new frozen yogurt shop opened up down the street from my house, so naturally I became the assistant manager. I loved that job and the teenagers I worked with. They treated me like Yoda with all the knowledge to answer their long burning questions. I gave them the advice I had, like that the Gulf station would sell underage kids blunt wraps and if you went to the bar across the street when it was crowded you wouldn’t get carded.  While working there I got into big girl college. I knew I was a broke bitch and even working forty hours a week I wouldn’t be able to get the cash I needed to live on for school. My best friend, Maddie was a horse trainer at a farm down the street from her house, when she asked if I’d help her run a horseback riding day camp of course I said yes. I hadn’t been on or near a horse since I was six, but that didn’t stop me from eagerly accepting the job. I began to work nights and weekends at the frozen yogurt shop and my days were spent at the farm.

I was forced to wear a sweatband over my tattoos.

My best friend and I were big drinkers and cheap drinkers at that. We would wake up in the morning hungover from a night of pounding Dr. Pepper and the cheapest vodka they could possibly sell. After a cup of black coffee, we would make our way to the farm. I would suck down a cigarette in the five-minute car ride and eat approximately six Advil. I’m not sure if you’ve ever smelled horse shit after a night of drinking, but it’s safe to assume that it’s exactly how you think it would be. I treated the horses like they were giant dogs, I gave them names that made no sense and created fictional histories about them to tell the young girls we had at camp. My job was arts and crafts and really it meant whatever the hell I wanted. My best friend was my boss and as long as they went home the way I found them, anything was on the table. I learned from her that if you watered down chalk you could color on the horses and it wouldn’t bother them. Game changer. I had the girls put on elaborate and longwinded plays with the horses. My favorite was a production of Frozen. Our Olaf was a white male horse with stick limbs drawn on him, he was a fantastic lead until he had to be excused from the production when an erection interrupted the play due to our Elsa and Anna being in heat. One afternoon my friend and I hosted an, “I Love New York,” themed chain ceremony where the girls won paper plate chains with superlatives for the session. I should note that no one was spit on during this ceremony. I learned a lot about horses and became comfortable around the giant animals. I shoved them and maneuvered around them like they were toddlers in the way. My brother came to visit one afternoon and almost refused to come look at the baby horses with me. I couldn’t believe this man who towers over six feet was scared of a baby horse. I took him over to the pen and made him pet a few, when one of them leaned over and started chewing my shirt and I shoved him away my brother looked startled. I’ve never seen my brother look at me like I was a superhero until right then. I was becoming a horse girl. 

A grown woman in jeans on a horse.

 I learned a lot of weird and new stuff that summer. I learned that if a horse was being put down they would tell the kids the horse was going into retirement. This led to some confusion years later when Maddie actually sent a horse to a retirement farm and had to assure me she did not kill her horse Shirley. But, when it came to be Lady Bug’s time to, “Retire,” I decided it was only fair we give her a meal she would never forget. Lady Bug was old, like old old. She was so old you could see her bones, which led to her loving nickname, “Bones.” She was so sad looking you had to take pity on her. The only person that could ride her was a five-year-old who was probably thirty pounds wet. Even then you could tell Bones wasn’t having it. I told the girls Bones was going into retirement and we had to give her one last amazing lunch. The girls created a menu of Gatorade, apples, sugar cubes, and carrots. We all sat down and had one last lunch with Lady bug. Later that day after the kids had left a woman came and shot Bones while she stood in a deep grave. Maddie would come home that afternoon with a zip lock bag full of Lady Bug’s hair from her tail. When I looked at her like she was a serial killer, she told me this was something you did when a horse passed away. Okay, horse girl. 

After my first year of college I realized once again I was broke. I don’t know why this always surprises me, I don’t play the lotto and I have yet to slip and fall in a grocery store – there was no income coming in. My Mom had bought a house a few years earlier in a new town and she had heard about a day camp at the town’s community center. If there is a day camp within a fifteen-mile radius I will find it and work there. I applied late and was offered a substitute position by the elderly woman who ran the camp. The best way to describe her is Muriel from Courage the Cowardly Dog, if you know, you know. I accepted the offer and waited for a counselor to quit or have a severe mental breakdown. I wouldn’t have to wait long. About a week after I got a call from Muriel telling me she needed a substitute for the rest of the summer for a group of third and fourth grade girls. Camp called and I answered. When I arrived the tannest woman I had ever seen greeted me. This woman that resembled a bottle of tanning oil would go onto become one of my best friends. Ali introduced herself as the assistant camp director, she was a few years older than me and a teacher. As we discussed my schedule she had the sarcasm only teachers can possess. She gave me the rundown on all of my kids, who was an asshole and who I would love. I knew one thing, I loved Ali and she would be my friend whether she liked it or not. I asked what happened to the counselor before me, without missing a beat, Ali told me he lost his shit. The counselor’s name was Henry and was basically fired because he was getting in fights with his campers. Yes, what passed for a grown man was fighting and arguing with third and fourth grade girls. When asked to leave he ripped his camp shirt off his body and stormed out. I knew this was the camp for me. In my highlighter yellow shirt, I became the girls’ new counselor. When asked where Henry was I told them it didn’t matter because I was cuter than him, they agreed and the matter was dropped. If you are feeling some way about your body and looks you should really find a way to hang out with little girls. They will braid your hair and tell you you’re the prettiest girl they know, it may be a lie to get attention, but everyone comes out a winner. After camp ended that summer Ali and Muriel asked if I would be interested in being the Music and Drama Director the next summer. As a broke person that enjoys freeze dance, I didn’t even blink before I said yes. 

The following summer I took up my new position. We spent the summer dancing and singing. Ali and I grew closer as friends, I would end up attending her wedding very stoned the following spring. We put on talent shows and I made friends with the older woman who ran arts and crafts. We would collaborate on projects and talk about art. Margarita was a painter and I loved when she’d show me her work, she knew I was a writer and always asked what I was working on, usually giving me the kick in the ass I needed. I made eighth grade boys make boats out of cardboard and select a tribute to try to float in the boat across the pool. I had a third-grade boy who would proudly show me his, “no hands dancing.” I laughed harder the summers I worked there than I had anywhere else. Thinking this would be my last summer at camp I took the opportunity to get as drunk as possible at the staff dinner. I would then make my fellow counselors go to the motorcycle dive bar in town to watch a fellow counselor’s brother’s Kiss cover band perform. After taking pictures with the Kiss cover band, some girl I didn’t know kindly drove me home. Following my college graduation with no television job to be had, I returned to camp one last time, or so I thought. 

In the summer of 2018 a new person came into the camp mix. Michael who ran the gym portion of camp flew into Ali and I’s lives and I will never let him go. A whip smart college student studying special education, Michael brought a new level of petty sarcasm to our duo that was much needed. Locked in as a trio, we held court over camp. 

The community center was in a large old Victorian house that was definitely haunted. We ate our lunch in the library that was decorated with scary oil portraits and furniture you can be sure someone died in. The room had a large window seat perfect to people-watch at. We spent our lunches gossiping and talking about the budding romances between counselors. Placing bets on who would sleep together or date. At the time Ali’s gym rat cousin was a counselor and sleeping with at least two of the counselors there. This led to many fights between the girls in the parking lot that I watched eagerly from my car. At lunch I used the time to blow off steam from the day and see if the other staff would be willing to gossip. I was always very vocal about what kids I disliked at camp and would make the support staff play the game I loved, “Which camper would you fight?” With little debate we would all agree which kids were worth fighting and which ones we would leave in a wooded forest at night. 

One afternoon a camper who was high on my list to fight came off the bus and flipped us off, I had never seen Ali move so fast. Before I could turn my head, she was already outside yelling at him for flipping us off. He was the camper we all agreed we would fight, he was the type of kid who almost enjoyed being in trouble. I liked to watch him and Ali argue, Ali holding up a dirty slice of pizza that we just saw him throw across the parking lot while he vehemently denied ever throwing it. He was our greatest antagonist and without him our days would have been quieter and less entertaining. We had another child who was autistic and whom I loved dearly. He would tell me odd facts and rap to me. He banned Michael from using his whistle which Michael obliged. This particular child had the kind of voice that resembled nails on a chalk board and when singing this was amplified. Obviously, I asked him to sing as much as possible. We also had an intern who I found fascinating. The fact that there was an intern in this haunted house was funny enough on its own. To this day none of us are sure what exactly he did there or if he was real. He would come to work in heart shaped sunglasses and sit in the Adirondack chairs in the front lawn reading, “The Art of War,” a classic summer beach read. The three of us found him captivating, he spoke like he was from southern California and dressed like someone who was on LSD. I tried to spend as much time as possible with him.  

The best memory I have from that summer was when a baby deer had fallen off the highway which stretched above the woods the camp was built around. The deer was clearly injured unable to move and became a camp wide spectacle by lunch time.  After calling animal control repeatedly they told us they would send someone. It was just after lunch when a police officer arrived at camp and told the three of us that he was going to shoot the deer. Without even assessing the deer he had come ready to murder it. Moving into action Ali told Michael to move all of the kids into the gym and turn the music on high. This seemed like the best plan of action and although what was about to happen was terrible I couldn’t help but nervous giggle with how mad this plan was. After gathering what we thought was the whole camp into the gym, I was left on the field with Ali and our intern. The cop went down to the deer and I couldn’t look away. Ali buried her face into our office administrator Donna’s bosom, a visual I recall often to Ali. I stood next to our intern who took off his heart shaped sunglasses as a sign of respect. After the cop fired once and missed he shot again finally ending the baby deer’s misery. I didn’t understand the situation at all but what I really couldn’t wrap my head around was that he missed the first time. The deer had two broken hind legs, did he close his eyes when he shot? He was the one who was so gung-ho about shooting Bambi. It was only after the second shot that we realized all of the eighth-grade boys had watched this from the pool deck. Their inept counselor had missed the call to bring them into the gym and instead created a watch party. You had to laugh. That wouldn’t be our last foray with wildlife that summer. A few weeks later a girl with special needs found a very newly born baby bird on her way into camp that morning. When asked what she was holding she opened her palm to show a translucent baby bird the size of a pig in a blanket. Muriel told us she would take care of it, we believed she would call animal control. I don’t know why we trusted her with this, she was also the same woman who fell asleep in CPR training and still played Farmville on her phone. That was our mistake for putting her in charge. It was only later that afternoon we learned she walked outside and threw it in the dumpster. Classic Muriel. 

My senior year I had interned at a very prominent morning show where I would get the host her morning coffee and secretly smelled her Oscar dresses in the elevator when I brought them to her dressing room to try on. I loved television and desperately wanted to be back in a studio. While at camp I applied to anything and everything that would take me back into that world. At the end of that summer I accepted a job on another television show and left camp early. Ali and Michael sent me off like I was leaving Oz. They weren’t wrong, I was leaving the place that I loved and had found my people at. I would have to wear pants with buttons again and retire my Patagonia shorts for good. I was starting my career and I was scared. My friends kept me up to date with everything I was missing while I worked eighty-hour work weeks as a production assistant. 

I navigated the intense days with the help of five other production assistants, we were all women fresh out of college and became some sort of dysfunctional sorority. We spent our days running around our office and studio and our nights on the phone with traveling guests. I drank enough wine that year to give the Grecians a run for their money. There was a sort of safety in numbers that came with the job. Working long nights and days takes a toll on your psyche and there was always at least one of us to go sit in an empty greenroom with you while you had a good ten-minute stress cry. We spent the nights together in bars and in each other’s bedrooms. Nights before a show day we all spent the night either in my hotel room or in our coworkers’ bed who lived ten minutes from work. I would make deals with my boss to get a hotel room the night before a show. I lived far away and had to take the train to work, I would ask him if I was murdered at the train station late at night who would PA the show in the morning? He usually took the bait. In my hotel room we would fit three to a bed and on at least one occasion I watched as Caity fell asleep with a taco bell quesadilla in her hand. At Siobhan’s house her parents would wake us up for work with coffee and see us off like we were little girls on our way to school. We would set alarms for each other so we would wake up in time to make it to the studio. One morning after a long night of stress drinking, I watched my friend try to find her car in the parking garage so she could get donuts for our host before he got to the studio. After coming to terms with the fact that she would not find her car in the labyrinth she hopped in an Uber. She tried to negotiate with the Uber, offering to pay him cash to stay outside with the car running so she could make it back to the studio in time. I watched her run into the studio sweaty and dazed, the Uber had left her and without time or another option she ran back to the studio in heels. She described the activity as what she thought being on mushrooms would be like, sweaty, disorienting, and a little nauseous. I told her she wasn’t far off but usually it was more fun. Still drunk from the night before she answered all my boss’s questions yelling, “Yas Queen.” This is what it was like being a production assistant, it was hard and trying, but then someone made you laugh and it wasn’t so bad. A few months into my new job I tripped on the street putting in my contact while I was running late for my train. I showed up to work with what my friend lovingly called a, “monster ankle.” My producer forced me to go to the doctor where I was put in a boot for the next two months. I walked around the office and studio in my boot which happened to sound like I had cigarette cellophane stuck to the bottom of it. This made it hard for me to hide from whichever producer I was working with. My girlfriends/co-workers would make sure I was icing it throughout the day at my desk and would do my accounting runs for me. That’s a real friend, someone who would willingly go to accounting for someone else. I loved these women with my whole heart, we stuck up for each other, we had each other’s backs. When one of us was having a, “I swear to God I’m never coming back here,” days, we would come back to our computer to see all of our greenroom lists filled out and accounting packets put together. We were in this together, and no one got left behind. I don’t know if I’ll ever find anything else like it. 

After six months together, we lost one of our own. I had spoken to her the night before and by the next morning she was gone. The night before the funeral the five of us that remained stayed in a hotel room together. We laughed, we drank… a lot, and cried. We were a little family of misfit toys. I can now say, had we never met each other at work we would never have ended up in the same room together. On paper we had nothing in common, but together we were a group of women that loved and cared about each other deeply. For at least three months after, we all slept at Siobhan’s house together. We were bonded by a big bad grief that we couldn’t shake. We would go to work together and go home together. We wouldn’t let another one of us slip through the cracks. Work was never the same and neither was our group. Someone new took over her cubicle and it never felt right. We would go to our favorite diner and the owner would ask where the other blonde was. I knew it was over, the magic of our job was gone. What made us whole was that we took care of each other, we kept each other safe, and we lost an integral part of the equation. One by one each got a new job, every few months I said goodbye to a member of our made-up sorority. It was sad but I knew it was what had to happen. We could never be a unit again without her. We would of course always stay friends, but the job couldn’t be done without our group intact. I got promoted and stayed on for another year. As new production assistants came in, it was like a new class of freshman coming in. I watched them with curiosity, but I never saw the pack mentality that we had. I was lucky to have that experience, I was never on a team or a group that demanded my love and loyalty, but I gave my all to this group so easily and willingly. I hope I get to be a part of something like that again, but if I don’t I’m content that I had it then.

I find myself now unemployed for the first time since I was fourteen. In March of this year before a run-of-the-mill pandemic hit our world I was planning on leaving my job. I was ready to go. I felt like I had gotten everything that I needed from it, my people were gone, I was ready to take the leap. I stayed on working from home which if I have to be honest, I killed. I spent my days working remotely and writing regularly for the first time in two years. It only took a global pandemic to make a writer write. At the end of the summer my higher ups told me I was to go back into the office. It was risky for me to go back to work, with the nature of the show I would be around a lot of people traveling from all over the country.  For the health and safety of my family whom I live with and my future in-laws, I resigned. I’ve never really quit a job. If I left a job, it was because I was starting a new one. I’ve never quit anything with no game plan. Until now. I returned to Oz for a few weeks. I spent the last weeks of camp with Ali and Michael reliving our summers past. It was the best gift they could give me, a consolation prize for my unemployment. Four weeks of camp, four weeks of Patagonia shorts and asking new co-workers which kid they would fight. But alas, all good things must come to an end. Michael packed up his whistle and went back to Rhode Island to teach sixth grade Special Ed, Ali put her tanning oil away and went back to teaching kindergarten in a pandemic. As for me, I’m home in my parent’s basement. I write in the mornings, I picked up my first screenwriting gig for a pretty prominent producer which lasted a few days. I hope she calls back. In the meantime, I apply to jobs every day, each asking how many years of experience I have. Well, I guess it depends on what kind of experience you’re asking about. In my brief history of employment, I have worked any job that has come my way. I’ve learned that ketamine IS for horses and sometimes you just have to shoot a deer in front of children. I’m still very poor and will need to work for many years to come. At twenty-six I have a wealth of experiences and knowledge I’m not sure what to do with. I don’t feel alone because I know there are a great many like me in this position. Waiting for an email or call to put an end to the anxieties and the big question that haunts me at night, “Will I ever get another job again?” As I wait and continue submitting application after application, I’ll take solace in knowing when presented with an opportunity my first instinct is to say yes and run with it. So, if you know anyone hiring, let me know.

Camp counselors in a pandemic.