I really ought to thank Fat Camp because, without it, I wouldn't have the flair for dramatic writing that I have now. My parents still laugh recalling the letters I sent them begging to come home. I'm sure they didn't keep them. My mother still has her taxes from 1979 but the letters that her little fat daughter sent from camp? Gone.
My mother gets particularly hilarious when she quotes the last, painful line of many of my heartfelt notes:
"I am crying as I write this."
My mother is a small woman, with tiny alligator arms and short, short legs. When she thinks something is really funny, she'll sometimes kick her legs up in the air and roll backwards, balling her fists and scrunching her abnormally stumpy arms against her chest as she howls with delight. Even now, at 34, I'll pout, watching her revel in my tween anguish. I'll fold my arms across my chest and stomp away, at which point my minuscule, ghostly white mother will say, "Oh DRESDEN. It was HILARIOUS."
This is the same woman who still cries laughing at the memory of me slipping on ice and sliding under the car when I was in kindergarten. What a HORRIBLE mother.
(Relax, my Mom is awesome and can totally kick your Mom's ass. Remember what I said about being dramatic? Right. But yes, she is a short pale white woman. With alligator arms.)
I digress.
The first thing Fat Camp taught me: NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS.
When the Fat Camp menu says "Danish", what it really means is whole wheat toast with cottage cheese and blueberries on it. I'm no sous chef but that ain't danish. When the Fat Camp lunch lady handed me that shit, I inquired (with some alarm), "That's danish?"
If you think about it, whoever made that ballsy move was really putting their life at risk. Who wants to put themselves in a situation where 200 fat kids are growing more and more agitated by the second, saying, "I was told there'd be DANISH." The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there was an interrogation-style room where the Fat Camp Puppet Masters could watch our pudgy devastation and piss themselves laughing.
It was my first breakfast at Fat Camp and the whole danish thing really got to me. And FYI, blueberries don't stay on toast well, even with a 1/4 cup of fat free cottage cheese attempting to cradle them. Most of my blueberries rolled off my toast and on to the floor, where they were squashed and splattered. Much like my dreams.
Also: "camp" implies actual camping, which, as an adult, I know to be horrible (even when there's beer)but as a child, I was curious enough about to actually go to camp. There was no camping. There was an old military barracks with bunk beds. Bunk beds are the most horrible invention ever in the whole wide world. ESPECIALLY AT FAT CAMP. Unfortunately, my roommate (we'll get to her later....) had arrived first and claimed the coveted lower bunk. Which meant I had to climb my unathletic fat ass up a ladder and dream about falling and crashing to my death every night. I was also worried that I was so enormously fat that I might crash the whole structure down on my roommate. For about 5 minutes. Later, I kind of wanted that to happen.
When you're actually camping, you have to worry about bears and shit, which is scary. But in the abandoned military barracks where I'm pretty sure they filmed the opening sequence to the original Prom Night, there are horrible, horrible centipedes that crawl on your face and eat your eyeballs out of your sockets. No one should have to deal with this. No one.
So many lessons learned at Fat Camp...so little sympathy.
No comments:
Post a Comment