A story about summer camp, Shazam recipes & playlists that are too long to consume
Two episodes of the newsletter in back-to-back weeks, what are the odds?
The lip sync contest streak (at summer camp, because I’m nostalgic…)
So, I didn’t go to summer camp as a kid. (Like, unless you count day camps or the random vacation bible school my parents made me go to around the corner sometimes, where they’d serve us cold chicken. I was kind of ungrateful about that, until a lady reminded me that “some kids don’t get to eat anything at all…” and maybe I should be more grateful about living around the corner and having a full fridge.) But I did work at summer camp for a good part of my 20s and even for two years in my early 30s.
Camp kinda changed my life like it does for the kids, but for different reasons. I used to run the tennis programs most of the places I worked, and I pride myself on developing creative setups that keep kids at all levels engaged. It worked everywhere I went and we’d adapt it. But as a cabin counselor in my early 20s, my favorite camp story is the time we kept the senior cabin’s lip sync contest streak intact.
I took a year between summers in 2002 and 04 to work an internship at The Boston Globe, but the 2003 senior cabin won the lip sync contest. I was resolved to keep whatever our streak was at the time alive, but the forces that be tried to do everything to ensure we didn’t win. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was just to give the other cabins a chance; finding the senior dominance of the event frustrating.
I did not care. I don’t mind losing, but what I made more than anything is being underestimated. To ensure the senior cabin couldn’t keep our streak alive, the head counselor set the contest for the same time as several sleep-away trips that ensured almost all of the senior cabin were gone. When we realized this — and there wasn’t much we could do about it — we were initially resigned to the fate that we’d lose the contest.
Except, there was a small window. We had two kids who didn’t go on the senior trip and no one else was available. Did I mention these two kids were some of the quietest in the cabin? How could we manage to prepare for the lip sync contest in two days, much less win it? Then I had an epiphany.
I’m not sure why a Tenacious D song appeared in my head like a vision, but it did. And after (re)watching the video, it occurred to me that with an assistant in the form of a former senior cabin member playing a character, we could perform this song at the lip sync contest.
We had about 48 hours to prep them. Another former cabin mate turned staffer took it upon himself to train them up on the song, arts & crafts got us props and painted. On performance night, I wasn’t really worried about whether we’d win or not. I just wanted to prove to everybody that even with just two people we’d still perform and represent our cabin.
Of course, the two guys absolutely brought the house down. Those two kids who had been in their shell before, broke out of their cocoons for this one, because they saw how much it meant to me that we represent the senior cabin — kind of a big deal at cabin, for the record — and they beamed with pride knowing they not only represented us but kept up our streak of lip sync contest wins with just the two of them.
Not sure why this story came to mind tonight besides summer nostalgia, but it’s music-related, so you get to read it.
My Epic (Shazam) Playlist
For years, I’ve been saving songs from Shazam to a Spotify playlist. How? An IFTTT script that connects to both and automatically does it for me. How long is the playlist? 89 hours and counting. Needless to say, it’s an eclectic mix and you have to play it on shuffle. The first song was added in 2015 and the most recent one was just a day ago.
Album of the Week
Christine and the Queens are a French synth-pop outfit that is hard to pin down. Over the years, they’ve used different monikers/characters and release entire records under these invented characters, but this latest release is the closest thing to a synth r&b record they’ve ever put out. It’s more electronic pop than anything and I haven’t played through the entire thing, but everything I’ve heard so far has been so good that I have to share it.
That’s ALOT of Discovery, man
Speaking of long playlists, I also have an IFTTT recipe for a Discovery Weekly archive that saves my Discovery Weekly tracks from Spotify and puts them into a playlist. This one is actually a combination of two playlists, because the original one started in 2017 and stopped in 2021, then I made a new one that has been collecting songs ever since. This thing is even longer, clocking in at a cool 433 hrs and 59 minutes, meaning you’d need a nice 18 day vacation to listen to every song.
I have no idea why you’d want to do that. But there’s no doubt you’ll find some new favorite songs if you decide to randomize this and play it in the background like a radio station.
That’s all the music for this week. No promises on another episode next week, but I know it won’t be a 3-year wait, at least. That I can probably assure you.