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Thursday April 26th: Let the Games Begin
Carmen, Sharks Counselor/Contributing Editor: Waking up at 4:30 AM meant Katrina and I were extremely excited to get our hands on two things: food and beverage. But upon finding out that the in-terminal restaurant didn’t serve booze before 8 AM (exactly 15 minutes after our flight left), we decided to take our massive breakfasts to go and eat them on the plane in an attempt to fall into a food coma. This worked.
Annika, The Beats Counselor/Writer: Marni had called me on Wednesday night with an urgent request: “Annika, I forgot something really important and you’re the only one still left in San Francisco! Can you stop by my office to pick it up for me?” So Thursday morning I drove to the Canadian Consulate to collect these brightly-colored plastic buzzers for lesbian jeopardy. I kinda felt like a queer secret agent or something! With the mission accomplished, I then drove nine hours to camp.
Lizz, Rubyfruit Counselor/Fashion Editor: My game plan was to leave Boston at 5:55am and arrive at LAX at 9:15am PST to greet campers. At 10am my plane was still sitting on the tarmac at LAX. There was some sort of medical emergency on the airplane so we waited while the paramedics did their thing. I was supposed to meet campers at 9:30am and the first three vans were scheduled to leave at 10. I finally deplaned, checked in with the van drivers and somehow negotiated myself from Terminal 7 across the world to Terminal 3. Luckily, it was easy to spot the A-Campers, based on the fact that they were the only giant group of lesbians. There were approximately a million of us.
Laneia: Riese and I were scheduled to drive two cars down the mountain, drop off snacks for everyone still at LAX, and bring back a 15-passenger van full of happy homos. I had two panic attacks before I could even leave the campsite, so I just took the xanax and cried to myself while we drove down the mountain that I’d eventually develop a solid love/hate relationship with.
Riese: The weather ended up being gorgeous all weekend — but Thursday was way rainy and foggy and dark.
Lizz: We all had to get to camp on vans that fit 10-13 people, and by 10:30 our meticulously laid plan was already starting to crack. At some point in the next twenty minutes, between packing luggage on the vans and meeting Brittani for the first time, I turned into a raging dictator stomping around with my clipboard like I’d just been assigned 4th grade Line Leader.
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Camper Quotes:
“Sara Medd is the best shuttle driver ever. That fearless mother fucker. Through fog and cliffs. I BELIEVE IN SARA MEDD.”Â
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“When Brittani stopped at In-n-Out Burger, all the villagers rejoiced.”
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“I drove with Sarah Croce and I believe I was drooling the entire time. We get in and she says ‘I have some Ani CD’s in here somewhere’ I DIE.”
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Gabby: Lizz and her ‘you can’t touch this’ clipboard loaded me up with 11 campers, bags a-plenty and one solid California chica as a navigator (Hey, Katie, Heyyy). Then it was peace out LAX, hello open highway and omg we’re going to A-Camp feelings! The road stretched out before us like it was made of yellow bricks. 80s music played from the radio including Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.’ It was THAT kind of trip and all my girls were chillen. Somehow the topic of coming out came up and I shared my story with Katie and whoever was close enough to hear me.
Riese: Laneia and I got to LAX with snacks and when I saw all these lesbians standing there for the first time, I felt like:
a) Do you believe in magic?
b) I want to sit & listen to them talk for the rest of my life
c) I have no idea how to talk to all of them at once
d) Do they even know who I am? Probably not.
e) LAURA!!!!!
On the way over I’d imagined myself being, I guess, a totally different person, that I would walk in and be like HI EVERYBODY I’M RIESE WELCOME TO CAMP, but when I got there I realized that I’ve never done that before in my life — addressed an unstructured group with ambiguously defined intentions — not ever, and didn’t know how. Is this real? Is this really happening?
Carmen: Being the snack captain while trillions of lesbos boarded shuttles to a faraway haven known as “A-Camp” translated into a lot of rejection on my part. The thing is, I just couldn’t eat the Cheez-Its alone, so I started doing lame jokes loudly in order to entice people into taking them from me. This did not work. I talked about meeting Brittani a lot at the airport since as time continued passing I became convinced I would never make it to the actual campsite.
Riese: And then Gabby called to say her tire was busted and they were stranded on the side of the highway!
Gabby: The vibes were good and strong until the steering wheel of the 15 passenger van started to shake uncontrollably. I know these types of vans and they don’t do that. We were in the middle lane of East 10 and the van shuddered super hard making it almost impossible to control the wheel. Inside I panicked, outside I took deep breaths looked to my left and saw a mom in a minivan pointing at my tire. Fuck, we immediately started to smell smoke and I had to get us somewhere safe. Where is somewhere safe on a freeway? Without freaking, I slid over into the fire lane in between hard jolts, thunder-clap loud rumbles and stopped the car. I didn’t feel at all comfortable driving the van to the next exit, not with the smoke and not with the tire looking like shredded wheat.
Gabby: Questions popped up immediately from my girls. Co-pilot Katie jumped right on her phone and started making calls to AAA, highway assistance and anyone else she could think of. I also got on the horn with AS head homos and let them know that I was stuck on the side of the LA freeway with a busted tire, 11 beautiful babygirls and life was ok but we needed it to get better.
Riese:Â Clearly I wasn’t leaving the airport ’til we’d assured Gabby & her campers were okay and we’d made a new plan, which involved again spilling all of my folders onto the floor of the airport like a crazy person and ordering people to call people with cars, etc.
Laura, Little Rascals Counselor/Associate Editor: Organizing airport transportation on Thursday was the most fun I’ve had since that time I shut my hand in the trunk of my friend’s car. Mostly I just let Lizz handle it (because she is in charge), but I did have the distinct pleasure of speaking to Mister Van Rental when Gabby’s tire blew out. When I asked him what he thought we should do, he said they should just wait until “some strong man” stopped to help them, which is when I hung up on him.
Gabby: Everyone was on it. Alex Vega was coming to try and rescue me. Lizz was trying to get triple AAA and Riese filled my ear with adorable we loves yous/ I’m so sorrys. At one point, one of my girls started to question my judgment. ‘Well, why can’t we make it to the next exit?’ and ‘I’m sure the tire isn’t that bad. Can you just not change a tire? I can.’ My gut reaction was to say, “Hush your young ass mouth, Gabby’s in charge” but I didn’t. I thoroughly considered her suggestions, double checked the state of the tire and trusted my gut. I wasn’t gonna lay or have any of them lay on the side of on-coming traffic to fix a fucking tire. (It was the left rear tire btw). Also, I refused to risk damaging the 15 passenger by trying to reach an exit or put my girls in any more danger.
So my ladies did what they came here to do. They opened the doors and made friends with each other. They played getting to know you games and chilled on a small green patch of highway Narnia trusting me to do my job. And being the protector type and not wanting anyone to think I was afraid, I still checked out the tire and made attempts to change with the help of my actually quite handy naysayer. We realized quickly that this wasn’t something we could do. Tractor-trailers were whizzing by our head and the rental company was being dicks about helping us find what we needed to change the tire anyway.
So we sat, and sat and sat watching the games being played until C.H.I.PS showed up son! Officer Sean, looking like a Caucasian version of The Rock, showed up and even he was like, “This is too dangerous for me to try and change giving the location of the tire and the severity of the shredding. So we’re going to wait for freeway assistance.”
“Our tire exploded but Gabby handled it like a champ!”
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He waited with us and we waited and waited… and still my girls played their question games and remained very calm. I thanked them over and over for not crying or getting cranky. From their reaction, I knew camp was going to be just perfect because these were the type of young women that know how to adapt to all of the things.
By the time freeway assistance arrived at 3:45pm, we’d been waiting almost three hours. This dude was a machine. He changed that tire in less than five minutes while Officer Sean shut down the right lane with lights and his cop car which I hoped Eric Estrada would be in but he wasn’t. I made sure Freeway dude checked all of our tires and gave us an ok before we headed out. Thank goodness because our other tire was super low on air pressure. By this point, I saw that the high-energy smiles from my A-Campers were turning into bleary delirium face. Executive decision: put air in tire, get gas, make bathroom stop, and FEED MY GIRLS. So we did those things and made it up the mountaintop anyway but goddamn, did it really have to be so extra?? We missed like an entire day of camp and that’s like missing one day of rapture.
Riese: Once I was confident Gabby and her girls were not about to be run over by a monster truck or — worse — be unhappy –Laneia and I loaded up our van with an adorable assortment of fantastic human beings whose last names I’d already memorized – PJ & Mareika, Sugar & Fitzi, Allison, Alissa, Britley, Emma and Keisha. The only problem is that there was no time to get Tinkerbell, but Alex said she’d get it on her way out when she came to LAX later.
Crystal, Troubletones Counselor: My role for the afternoon was part-welcome wagon, part-bell hop. I spent hours standing in the carpark or at the lodge window like a puppy, waiting for cars or vans to pull up so that I could race outside and greet campers. The moment when Gabby pulled into the drive way and hollered at me through the window, when a dozen of cute happy smiling queers piled out of her van – that was the moment when the reality of what we were about to do really hit my somewhat jet-lagged brain, like I suddenly realised just how amazing and magical the next three days were going be. One of the major highlights was hearing a few other Australian accents around the camp site – I was completely in awe of those five or six campers who flew half way around the world just to be at A-Camp.
Stef: I spent most of this day stuck in traffic while Rachel Walker sat behind me talking about a million better ways to transport campers to the camp “WHAT ABOUT PRIVATE HELICOPTERS?!?!?!” and, while the van hissed and sputtered up the mountain, “HAVE YOU SEEN THAT SHOW ABOUT AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS ROADS!??!?!”
Riese: I’d actually been excited to drive a van ’cause I wanted to get some QT with at least nine human beings before planting myself on a folding chair on stage for the rest of the weekend, thus we had a delightful time asking everybody in our car invasive questions about their sexual awakenings.
“Well, it took forever to get to camp, but I got to be in Riese and Laneia’s van, so.”
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Laneia: One of my fondest memories of driving back up the mountain was when we pulled over to place a liquor store order with Alex, who was still in LA. It took four phones — thanks to dead/dying batteries and who had/didn’t have service — but we did eventually get the shopping list sent, which was just the first of many examples of how down and cooperative everyone was. We would’ve had to pull over anyway, though, so we could figure out how to turn on the headlights.
Riese: It’s possible our passengers were dying a slow death inside from transportation fatigue but I was enjoying all the lesbo-bonding-experience. Everyone was so cool and fun and smart!
Laneia: I was torn between wanting to talk to our campers forever and feeling like they probably didn’t want to talk to me because of my lameness and general anxiety, which was stupid, in retrospect. Everyone practically fell into tears when we unloaded in the parking lot of Alpine Meadows. I wanted to kiss the trees.
Next: What’s happening at camp?!