SUMMER "CAMP"

I won’t make excuses about my lackluster posting performance this week except to say that if I ever write an essay or a book about the neverending challenges of co-parenting, which is the culturally correct term for raising a child under the aegis of what used to be known as joint custody, the title can only be, “Out of Joint.”

That’s a circumscriptive way to telegraph that my son’s father and I are going through one of our rough spots. It's distracting. No, that's understating things. It's a major timesuck. It comes atop a spate of bad luck. I went into all sorts of details with my therapist this week. When I got to the part about my cockroach problem, which I thought the exterminator had solved several weeks ago, she laughed at the too muchness of it all. "Oh, it's like Job." Yes, my therapist laughed at my plight. Sadly, it kind of is like Job. And that was before my car konked out on me. And I never told her that my next-door neighbor, a woman with whom I share a critical wall, my home office on my side and her living room on hers, is having a baby any day now. Her boyfriend doesn't live with her, and when he's there they fight. She shouts. I mean, she can be a raving lunatic. (Not that I am always cool, calm and collected.) I never hear him. With my luck, the baby will have colic.

Of course, that's why I enter these sweeps. To try to improve the odds.

Despite all this, I'm actually feeling pretty upbeat these days. I just got some work, two big projects, and Isaac's in a good place right now. We had the funniest time of our lives last night. He did these routines about wrestling nuns and Santa's list of naughty boys and these adventures on a camel that involved going to a black market. I could not stop laughing.

Here’s the post I started writing earlier this week.

Susan Sontag codified the cult of “camp” in her 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp.” “To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a sympathy modified by revulsion,” she wrote in the introduction. To explicate this sensibility, Sontag compiled a list of observations or, as she modestly called them, “jottings,” rather than rely on the standard, linear essay form. Here’s her tenth “jotting:” “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

I do believe I’ve found a sweeps that meets Sontag’s criteria of Camp. A trip for two to Las Vegas that includes a weekend at the Hilton Las Vegas, tickets to the show -- are you sitting down? – MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL, tickets to a performance of – don’t get up yet – BARRY MANILOW in Manilow – Music and Passion … plus $1,000 IN CASH. I’m actually slightly more fixated on the idea of a musical about the change as “Camp” than I am about Barry Manilow as “Camp”, though he and his music certainly approach “Camp” on some levels. I never hear one of his songs without experiencing a heightened theatricality, an exaggeration of sentiments over the lyrics. As for the play, well, that should be self-evident. Of course, this is a superficial response, and now that I’m researching the musical a bit, I’m thinking the concept, four women at a Bloomingdale’s lingerie sale yammering away about hot flashes and sex and chocolate binges and sex and memory loss and sex and belting out “25 relyricized classic Baby Boomer hits” such as “I Heard It Thru The Grapevine; You No Longer See 39” and “Stayin’ Awake, Stayin’ Awake,” I’m thinking, cute, corny and ultimately “Camp." I am processing the requisite sympathy alright, though I can’t relate to the memory loss part: To the despair of certain individuals, i.e., my son’s father, my memory seems to be improving with age. In fact, I’m experiencing memory gain, not loss. As for the musical, the revulsion's there, too.

This sweeps closes June 30. To enter, click HERE.