On Thursday, campers had their first full day “off” — no early morning wakeups, warmups, or rehearsal. Instead, they got to sleep in (or lounge about) until noon, when we herded them all onto a bus and  journeyed out to Sherando Lake.

For the first time (to my knowledge, or at least in my reign as Camp Director) camp no longer follows a M-F schedule. Theatre doesn’t follow a M-F schedule, after all. No, the Monday to Friday thing is definitely a “real world” construct, and camp is anything but the “real world” — so why should we play by those rules? Instead of traditional weekends, then, campers get their full day off mid-week (this week it was Thursday; the next two weeks will be Wednesdays). Saturdays are regular working days, and Sundays are half days. Campers can take Sunday mornings off and enjoy a lazy in-dorm breakfast, or join services of their choosing for religious observances at one of Staunton’s many houses of worship.

All of this is to say that our traditional Sherando trip — usually taken on the first Sunday of camp, when every other person in Virginia also has the day off and might like to partake of the campground’s day activities — took place this year on a Thursday, when only half of the state’s population seemed to join us in our merriment. In my opinion, the difference was palpable. Even if one RDA did get bonked in the head by somebody else’s game of water polo, that’s still better than the normal count of three staff and eight camper headbonks!

Campers were also buzzing with excitement from Tuesday’s text preparation workshops. We introduced new campers to the ASCTC style of finding the scansion and rhetoric in their plays, and actually got the chance to delve in a bit deeper with returning campers on those same topics. We’ll follow up with some more in-depth work this coming Tuesday, but the fruits of that labor are already obvious. I mean, look at these campers! They’re outside, in the sunshine, voluntarily working on scanning and figuring their lines. Bonkers.

Plus, we got to cook out.

All in all, we had a blast.