For your summer weekend reading pleasure… we highly recommend this remembrance of awkward summer camp experiences past by Naomi Fry in this week's @newyorkermag — reproduced from 'Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet's Summer Camp 1977,' the new photobook from @letter16press⠀ ⠀ Fry begins the essay: "When I was a kid growing up in Israel, in the nineteen-eighties, my father’s job as a research scientist sometimes took us to the United States for the summer months. It was there that I first encountered the alien, forbidding rites and rituals of sleepaway camp, though not through personal experience. I was a reticent and bookish child, easily spooked and prone to homesickness, and the idea of leaving the familiar and comforting world of my family to jostle among a bunch of tough-skinned strangers filled me with dread. What if I were excluded, or ignored, or laughed at? In the country where I came from, you stuck close to home until you were made to leave it, at eighteen, for the Army, and, even then, Israel’s almost comical smallness made it impossible to stay away for too long, even if you wanted to. As far as I was concerned, even day camp, the relatively tame waters of which I dipped my toe into for a couple summers, felt like a social and psychological stretch, with its lip-synching talent shows and Madonna-look-alike contests, its aggressively noisy bus trips and brash talk of lip-gloss brands and crushes and training bras. I preferred to experience shiny, scary, titillating American culture from the safe distance of the living-room couch, watching “General Hospital” and 'Family Feud' and eating Lays potato chips. I might have been bored, but at least I was unscathed…" ⠀ ⠀ Read more via linkinbio.⠀ ⠀ @frynaomifry #andysweet #hellomuddahhellofaddah #hellomuddah #summercamp #70ssummercamp #70sstyle⠀ ⠀ https://www.instagram.com/p/CDpGHMSJM7n/?igshid=i80tbr2k1g29
