DRAMA REPORT 1975—Lynne Bigelow and Karen Selby

The drama department offered drama games, creative drama plays and skits and the “Loon”. The drama games class was offered with no size limit and never exceeded five people. Lynne felt it was sometimes difficult to interest both older and younger campers with the same games, except for charades, which she found to be popular.

She started with charades, on to mirroring, pantomime, storytelling and other games. Plays and skits were neglected due to class size and what she considered to be suitable written plays. There were only two drama nights and they performed skits, which were held on the drama porch.

Her aim was “to get the girls to be able to assume another character or role without embarrassment and just have plain old fun”, but she felt that some of the students looked at drama as a “fill in class”, which she felt hurt the motives of the class and in turned rubbed off onto the rest of the class and herself.

The first session of plays and skits did a skit around tricks that campers play on counselors, which they created themselves. Monologues and audience participation skits were also enacted. The third session creative drama class put on a series of short skits on the archery field, which had been taken from a book in the drama department. She felt creative original skits were better.

They rarely used costumes, but occasionally a dress or hat was taken from the box of costumes, but they felt the clothes were in very bad shape.

“I feel that the Drama Department could have been better if I had been better prepared,” wrote Lynne. “All in all I found it lots of fun and I hope the campers did too.”

Karen wrote about the creative drama and she utilized very few costumes, but used benches, chairs and a lot of imagination. They performed “Little Red Riding Hood” at the end of the first session. She felt her campers grasped pantomime and improvisation well, but were hesitant. Her personal recommendation to the following year’s director was to “hang loose” and “don’t be afraid to use your imagination”.

“I was very artistic and was into theatre and dance before coming to camp. I used to put on shows and dance recitals in my back yard as a young girl. The craft hut was always my favorite place,” said Karen Selby, admitting that the arts and crafts had always been attractive to her. “I was artsy-fartsy, but I never liked to read.”

“”What I used to do as a child was hang out in a closet in my old house and tell myself stories. There was a notion that I should not talk to myself and I was teased until someone told me it was a sign of intelligence,” she laughed. “Then I felt free to weave my tales.”

Karen then returned as a counselor and spent the last three years (1976-1978) as an arts counselor with some huge changes taking place at the camp. Unbeknownst to her, she spent the last year of her camping days in a camp that would close that last summer, as she donned her pale blue shirt to distinguish herself from the campers.

“I spent my time before going back as a camp counselor writing a play. I was hired to work in the drama department and I was pretty politically radical. The play was “Sunbrella”. It was not about the usual beauty. It appeared we worshipped the skin tones of African Americans and I was African-American. I watched white women bathing on the dock to get darker, but ostracizing redheads. My mother was on the board of the “Y” at the time and was a “big wig” and she was contacted about the play. They cancelled my play and that was the only time I felt prejudice at camp. I did not mope or fall to pieces. I took it as information and moved on.”

Were you in the drama classes with Karen or Lynne? What do you remember?