America, you must be exhausted! When you weren’t eating yourself into illness, you were busy protesting like a fine citizen. Here’s the top five events protested over Memorial Day weekend.

The war(s).

The British and/or British Petroleum. (Are the British going to be the new French, because of BP??? But then this time we’ll have to give up eating… oh, right. Phew, no problem.)

That gas station on the corner.

Gaza!

That imperialist fort/tourist trap in Minnesota, for sure.

Ronnie James Dio’s funeral!

Also people protested the people protesting Ronnie James Dio’s funeral.

All photos property of their creators, from Flickr, used under Creative Commons licensing.

To: Staff
From: Alex Balk
Re: Seasonal Demises

The passings this weekend of former child star Gary Coleman and actor/director/Ameriprise pitchman Dennis Hopper have resulted in pressure from both internal and external sources for this organization to reassert its hold on the phrase “Summer of Death,” an appellation first bestowed by the site early last July. There are obvious arguments for why we should insist upon our claim over the expression, not least of which being the fact that those sonsofbitches in the rest of the media will happily steal it from us without giving it a second thought. Also, two famous people died.

However, after serious reflection we have decided, particularly given the earliness of the season and the not exactly shocking identities of the two deceased in question-Hopper was dying for months-that it would be prudent at this juncture to refrain from making such an assertion. It is barely June yet, and while our actuaries have forecast a fairly robust summer of celebrity expiration, they advise that we remain in a “hold” position until at least three more C-listers under the age of 70, or two more B-listers no older than 65, or one A-lister of any vintage, make the final journey into the unknown.

Also, we’re still looking for a snappy title. I’m partial to “Summer of Death 2” (tagline: “Death never takes a vacation”), “Again With The Summer Of Death,” or “Summer of Death: Deathsummer 2010,” but am open to suggestions. More on this subject as appropriate.

Oh, btw, happy summer, gang! Let’s make the most of it.

Best, etc.,

Happy Memorial Day from Nancy Pelosi and Joint Chiefs of Staff honcho Mike Mullen! How will you observe this day? By getting crunk and sunburned in the back yard with your homies? Or by gazing terrified into the yawning horrible future that we have made for ourselves? Choose wisely-and do let us know. Also? As great as that is, there is by far a stronger competitor for best picture of the weekend.

(That photo is by by Matthew Hinton, for The Times-Picayune; see the rest of his BP protest photo gallery here.)

by Evelyn Everlady

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard one of Evelyn Everlady’s horrifying true stories about The Worst Boyfriend in the World. So before we leave you for the long weekend, and to wrap up our welcome to summer series, she’s baaaaack. Why? Because now it is Negroni Season. Think of this as a reminder to drink and date responsibly this weekend.

It was the spring of 2005 and I was living with the man that I, a bit stubbornly perhaps, had decided was the love of my life. The thing about choosing to live with a rapidly-approaching-bottom alcoholic is that there are just so many ways to distort reality and find seemingly logical explanations to make your slowly spiraling out of control life look and feel somewhat reasonable (just ask Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse!). This is true even though you aren’t the one who is drunk all the time.

So, anyway, when I wasn’t Googling “codependent” and “enabler,” I was busy coming up with increasingly bizarre ideas to set the train back on the tracks. Like when I tried to institute a thing called ‘Sober Sundays.’ That’s right, Sober Sundays. It was exactly what it sounds like. And was, awesomely, a giant failure once I figured out that the Gatorade bottle the Boyfriend always had with him was, in fact, mostly vodka with perhaps a splash of Lemon-Lime. By the time May rolled around, I had given up trying for anything as simple as Sober Breakfasts.

I also decided around this time that I was no longer interested in drinking. Just trust me on the grossness of sleeping next to someone whose overnight sweat was probably 80 proof. (That said? The 2010 version of me looks back on this non-drinking era of mine and laaaaaaughs). We were at an impasse: I had stopped drinking and didn’t want to be around him when he was drunk, and he wanted to be drunk all the time.

And then Kimberly started showing up.

But let me back up: a year earlier there was a stretch of time when I was sleeping quite regularly with the Boyfriend, however he was not yet officially my boyfriend. I can’t really remember if I was aware of this fact because it was all swept up in that dangerous first flush-of apple picking and singing songs in the car and holding hands and chasing lobsters and oh-my-god-you-think-so-too conversations that went inanely on till dawn. You know. So I didn’t know that the not-yet-my-boyfriend-but-sure-as-hell-seemed-to-be was also sleeping with another New York City-based lady-let’s call her Kimberly-on alternate weekends. I unfortunately discovered this after he moved to town and into my apartment.

I first sensed something was amiss when she came over for chili and to watch the Superbowl (both she and the Boyfriend were rooting for the New England Patriots, which I now recognize as very dire foreshadowing). I was rather taken aback when she burst into tears at the end of the night.

Now here’s what I knew about Kimberly: she and the Boyfriend had worked together for a few summers, and one of those summers involved some sex and maybe something more, but as far as I knew this was all ancient history. Her being in my apartment and eating my chili was as a friend-plus conventional wisdom is that super cool girlfriends don’t get jealous. So there we were eating chili, and complimenting each other’s shoes and hair and stuff. But then she started to cry and the Boyfriend helped her collect her things and escorted her to the subway. When he came home, he hung up his coat and started to do the dishes without saying a word, and then feigned surprise that I was so curious about it all.

After some prodding I learned about the still-sleeping-together business and how when Kimberly learned he was moving to New York, she was under the impression that they were going to be together and was slightly put out to hear he was moving in with some other woman that she had no idea existed. During the many (many) hours I would replay this conversation, turning it over and over again looking for its silver lining, I admitted I felt a little badly for Kimberly.

“You won,” the Boyfriend said.

Let the record show that I was so far gone at this point that I was actually-and yes, kind of smugly-comforted by this. But I didn’t exactly follow the boyfriend’s logic that he should continue to hang out with Kimberly, as friends of course, since it was the least he could do. When I started to raise some objections, he took the position of new-to-New-York-can’t-deny-him-friends-stop-being-so-insecure-and-controlling, and guess what? He convinced me.

We all have parts of our personality that we’d like to lead behind the barn and beat senseless with a shovel, right? Well here’s one I’d really like to bash in-the part of me that decided the best course of action would be to befriend Kimberly. If we became friends, I believe the thinking went, then maybe we’d all start hanging out and I wouldn’t feel so left out or threatened. Because those two sure did love to drink together. And then, drink some more.

“We’re just drinking buddies,” the Boyfriend was fond of saying.

As for my relationship with Kimberly, we developed a fairly cordial and passive aggressive email relationship. I helped her write a cover letter for a job she applied for, she recommended a good hair stylist. We touched base about what to do for the Boyfriend’s approaching birthday. We were very, very careful with one other.

So Memorial Day weekend rolled around, and all the telltale signs added up to mean that an epic bender was underway. I hoped that the Boyfriend wasn’t about to be fired (again). He had gotten work tending bar at a fancy SoHo restaurant; before his shift he showed up outside my office building smelling like a homeless person and inexplicably wearing a Superman t-shirt. We argued-who knows about what-and he went off to work.

Usually he got home around 2 a.m. That night I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the phone, and the Boyfriend slurring nonsense. Something something about meeting up with friends, be home soon. He sounded more terrible than usual, and trailed off, hanging up in mid-sentence. I was now awake enough to be worried as it rolled past 4, and then 5 a.m. Would he get punched in the face when he inevitably was an asshole to the wrong person? That had happened. Would he get arrested? That had happened, too. But what if he was killed? What if he passed out in the gutter somewhere? And were there even gutters in New York City to pass out in? And so on. I tried calling and it all went straight to voicemail. I gave up on going back to sleep and smoked all the cigarettes in the apartment till it was morning. Still no sign of him. I called his best friend who was kind, gentle. “He’ll be o.k.,” he said. “He always is. How are you?”

Two hours later I was back at work. His cell still went straight to voice mail. I emailed Kimberly a short note asking if by chance The Boyfriend had happened to be out with her last night. Maybe he had passed out on her couch? It wasn’t easy-okay, it actually physically hurt to have to write her-but, you know, desperate times. I hit send before seeing that I had just then received an email from Kimberly. It was super chatty, picking up the threads of one of our previous conversations. It didn’t mention anything to do with the Boyfriend or the night before. Super embarrassing! I quickly emailed her back, apologizing for the previously sent message, explaining that I shouldn’t be so worried and ha ha ha, he always landed on his feet, didn’t he?

Fifteen minutes later she wrote me back. “Actually, he is asleep on my couch. It’s Negroni season, and you know he makes the absolute best Negronis ever, so we may have had a few too many and he slept here. Sorry you were worried.”

I’m not proud about how any of the rest of this went down. I broke one of my own cardinal rules and snooped through the Boyfriend’s email. I learned that Kimberly had already forwarded my original email to him with a note that read, ‘I’m sorry, I had to tell her.’ My mind rebelled past the idea of the Boyfriend cheating on me, and kept returning to this Negroni Season business. I wasn’t even sure if I knew what a Negroni was — how could it have a whole season? I sat in my boss’s office, who was a real grown-up, who wore blue blazers and aftershave, and told him everything. Did he know anything about a Negroni Season? He looked down his glasses at me. “Only a total boozehound whore would even dream up such a thing as Negroni Season,” he said.

Not. Helpful.

When I returned home, the Boyfriend was there, tail between his legs, awaiting punishment. He had emailed and called a few times that afternoon saying how sorry he was, and I had ignored them all. I asked if he had sex with Kimberly and he said no. I didn’t really believe him. But I was so tired! And so fed up. Oh, and I had drank a bottle of wine with a friend after work, on an empty stomach, no sleep, zero tolerance mixed with high emotional turmoil.

“Hey,” I said. “I know. Let’s go drink Negronis.” The Boyfriend looked at me, in that hey-crazy-lady, no-sudden-movements kind of way.

“I’m really really sorry I put you through so much worry,” he said.

“I HEAR IT’S NEGRONI SEASON,” I said. “Let’s go drink some fucking Negronis!”

He cleared his throat. He fidgeted and blinked a few times. “Um….so…I think you might be really mad at me?” he said. “Maybe we should just stay here and talk this out.”

“FUUUUCK THAT,” I said. “I just want to drink some motherfucking Negronis! Whoo-hooo! It’s NEGRONI SEASON! I LOVE Negroni Season! It’s the BEST season of all! FUCK FALL!”

The Boyfriend now looked sort of panicky.

“Neg-ron-i Season! Neg-ron-i Season! Whoooooo!”

“O.K. I get it,” he said. “You’re totally right to be mad. But what can I do besides apologize?”

“HEY, we’re wasting time talking when it’s NEGRONI SEASON! We should be drinking Negronis during Negroni Season! NEGRONIS! NEGRONI SEASON! YAY! I’m FUN, I can go out and drink NEGRONIS. Especially when it’s NEGRONI SEASON!!!! NEEEGRONI!”

This went on for quite a while. I became louder and more adamant about how a) it was motherfucking Negroni season and b) I was super “fun” and could drink Negronis till dawn. Blah, blah, drunken blah, you don’t know shit about me, buddy, I love Negroni Season. I wait all year for the Negroni.

He finally gave up-I’m sure he needed a drink. We stumbled across the street and he ordered me a Negroni. It was disgusting. I drank it fast. I drank another. And maybe one more? I think I might have tried to pull him into a bathroom to make out with me. It was all terribly messy.

“SEE?” I slurred. “I’m SUPER fun. I’m, like, all UP in the Negroni.”

And then we came home, and I went straight to the bathroom and threw up for about an hour-nasty, Campari-vermouth-gin smelly poison. And then I cried. Big, heaving, pukey tears.

“I can’t do anything right,” I said. “I can’t even drink Negronis. And it’s Negroni Season.”

Perhaps the most amazing part about all of this is that we did not break up that night, or anytime soon after. We were together for another three years! But anyway, for those who are interested in such things, Negroni Season is upon us. Enjoy!

Evelyn Everlady is the pen name of a young professional woman in New York City who has moved waayyyy on and can laugh about all of this now. A Negroni, typically, is one part gin, one part Campari, one part sweet vermouth and pretty much all disgusting. Photo by mariobonifacio.

by Luke Mazur

Summer is creeping ever closer. In fact, here it comes! But first, a look back.

Back when crispy M&Ms; were still in stores I used to lifeguard at the pool down the block from us. Most summer days the pool would get packed, and the only catch to swimming in it was that beforehand you’d have to flash your Town of Cheektowaga resident ID card to the attendants working at the front entrance. Cheektowaga is a blue-collar town just to Buffalo’s east, comprised of people whose families lived on Buffalo’s Eastside before black people moved there.

As far as I know, the rule was you had to live in Cheektowaga to swim in our pool. Think “Arizona immigration law,” although has anyone besides whoever writes Sarah Palin’s Twitter read that thing? Think “public university residency requirements,” except everyone isn’t from Long Island anyhow. Residents encouraged. Non-residents pay money to use.

A corollary to the pool’s residency requirement was that you had to wear proper swimming attire, which meant suits with liners. This restriction only ever affected the boys though. That is, we couldn’t necessarily decipher whether they were wearing sanctioned swim trunks or just regular shorts and drawers. Girls were easy.

The rule itself didn’t make a ton of sense. Mr. Hansen, the pool director, explained to us at the beginning of every summer that the dye from regular shorts-those without liners-would run, inking up the water for all the other swimmers. A pen explosion that ruins summer for everyone. The dye would mess with the pool’s chemicals and the chemicals would mess with the pool’s other chemicals. That’s what he said, at least.

Mr. Hansen used to pay the people who lived across the street from the pool to spy on us and to call him whenever they spotted us goofing off, or dozing off. We joked that Mr. Hansen was addicted to cocaine because, to a sixteen year old, he contorted his jaw the way a person who uses cocaine does. He also had prematurely white hair, and wore shorts-the kinds without liners-with big white gym sneakers. He drove a Chevy Impala like he meant it. Taken together, it was all probably very tragic. At the time though, we just didn’t like him.

The liner requirement tended to fall disproportionately on black boys. I don’t exactly remember why this was. It could have been that black kids disproportionately did not wear the bathing suits the pool required. It could have also been that the rule was enforced disproportionately against this particular demographic. Because we were socialized by people whose families lived on Buffalo’s Eastside before black people moved there, I tend to think we profiled.

If we didn’t kick out little black kids it wasn’t because we knew it would be fucked up to do so. It was because we didn’t like Mr. Hansen. If we caught some kid slip down the waterslide wearing cutoffs but turned the other way, it wasn’t because we agreed with Thurgood Marshall that the Constitution was defective. It was because Hansen was not a consensus builder. He was our asshole boss, and not enforcing one of the pool’s rules was an act of rebellion against him.

In fact, the ink explosions didn’t much pollute anything. They didn’t ever happen, even when swimmers wore really inky clothing like dark indigo jean shorts. Still, at the end of the day, most of us complied with Mr. Hansen’s directive. We whistled kids to the edge of the pool, told them they weren’t wearing the right kind of shorts, and then walked them over to the head lifeguard. We were working our first job and we were nervous. We didn’t evaluate rules; we just followed them.

Fortunately, not everyone that summer was a passive-aggressive wuss. Our co-worker Stonecold had a good attitude about the kids swimming in the pool. “It’s their summer,” she’d explain as she shrugged off three eight-year-olds body-slamming each other in the wading pool. “It’s their summer,” she’d yell to us if we’d try to bring her attention to some tweens back-flipping into the deep end.

Stonecold wasn’t her real name. We called her that because wrestling was popular then and it was fun to reference Stonecold Steve Austin. The nickname had another layer too: we used to think Jen wasn’t very smart and “Stonecold” alluded to what was going on in that head of hers.

Sometimes, if the other lifeguards made eye contact with each other, we’d imitate Stonecold. For whatever reason our impersonation entailed making our limbs limp, so it looked, I think, like we had passed out in our lifeguard chairs. We perceived her nonchalance regarding Mr. Hansen’s rules as being stupid, as not getting it. We thought that when she wasn’t watching the pool, she wasn’t doing her job. In retrospect, it was most likely that we were the dumb ones.

Mr. Hansen died a few years ago. When he did the Town dedicated our pool guardhouse to his memory, and today the outside of the yellow building reads: The Brian Hansen Poolhouse. I missed the memorial, but I can see his plaque from the street whenever I drive by. I get reflective when I see his illuminated name, interpreting decades of race relations through the lens of his management style.

Impala aside, he wasn’t a total dick. I wish we said something about the bathing suit rule though. I wish we ignored Mr. Hansen because his rule was weird, and not because he was weird. But we were just kids too, I guess. It was our summer.

Luke Mazur is trying hard not to work as a lifeguard this summer.

by Logan Sachon

You did what you could during the Virginia summer days to either sit by a pool or on a beach or avoid being outside altogether, and at night you reclined on the porch or in the yard and let whatever small breezes the night could strum up wash over you, cooling your sweat. Otherwise, you were inside all day and all night, cooled and even frozen by the artificial cold air that pumped through every building in town. The South is inhabitable because of air conditioning, so thanks be to it, but that doesn’t mean I liked it. It made the divide between inside space and outside space stark, and rendered traveling between the two spaces painful.

Yes, the bulk of my summertime hours were spent playing inside, watching movies with my brothers, playing videogames, reading books. But that isn’t very romantic. And summer should be romantic! It should be beaches and treehouses and walks in the woods. And it was, sometimes. For a week here and weekend there, the air cooled down, I was forced outside, and an idyllic childhood summer unfolded.

Summer technically started on the last day of school, but it really started the first day of vacation. A few days after we cleaned out our lockers, my brother and I would dump the contents of our bulging backpacks and refill them with novels and sketchpads, journals and drawing pencils, Walkmen and favorite CDs. Seven days in a condo on the Outer Banks of North Carolina marked the beginning of our freedom. We’d swim in the pool, sneak into the hot tub, watch premium cable, roast on the beach and dive into waves. My brother, lucky inheritor of my mother’s olive skin, would darken throughout our time in the sand; I was a child of my father’s Soviet-bloc kin, pale and fair, and would come back to the condo red and begging for aloe. In the mornings my father and I would walk down the highway a bit to a small bakery and get cherry turnovers and tiny key lime tarts. The couple who owned the bakery were tickled to see us each year, and always said they couldn’t believe how much taller I had gotten. My success in growing warranted a cookie; sometimes they gave me two.

On days that we didn’t spend in the waves, we went on drives up and down the island. I’d stare out the window and fantasize about owning a saltwater clapboard cottage on the beach. The destination was Hatteras, the end of the island where there was a tall and iconic lighthouse that we’d climb. We’d walk on the beach near the nature preserve and stare at the surf, the scariest on the island. The currents there were rough and ripe with riptides; plenty of people had died trying to prove their swimming strength on these beaches, and we knew even wading a little bit in would be just about the dumbest thing we could do. But my brother would still threaten to run in, and I’d threaten to tackle him, and then we’d fight until our parents said it was time to get in the car.

When the week at the beach ended, we’d come back to Virginia and fall into a routine of playing inside until the heat broke each evening, then rushing outside for a few hours of fun before it got dark. On summer nights in high school my friends and I would get ice cream cones and blended sugary confections and walk around the one street in town that felt like the center of something; the indie movie theater, video store, and most of the restaurants worth going to were there, plus it bordered the neighborhoods where anyone remotely hip would live. We’d wander around, ice cream melting quickly, and then we’d perch ourselves on the old church steps, or on the benches in the playground, or on the curb if our normal haunts were taken. We’d call the boys we hung out with sometimes and try to get them to come out, and we’d gossip, obviously, but mostly we’d just wait for our government teacher to walk by with his dog. He was the youngest male teacher at our school, and the only one we could harbor any type of crush on. When he walked by he’d slow, but not stop, and say, hi, ladies, how are you this evening, embarrassed to encounter us in the world. We treated him like a cross between someone we might pin-up on our walls and someone we might easily seduce if we had only five more years — and some sexual experience — under our belts. As he walked away we’d giggle and go back to licking our ice cream cones.

M. had a tree house in her backyard and a trampoline, and the temperature in her backyard was marginally cooler than the rest of ours because her house was on the river. One night, high on the heat, we jumped and danced on her trampoline until we were dizzy, then retired to the tree house where we stayed up late eating junk food and speculating about all the fun we’d have when we were older. We passed out in a big pile of tangled blankets, sleeping bags and limbs. We woke in the morning soon after the sun rose and rendered the tree house uninhabitable, and then we retired to our respective houses to sleep away the morning and wile away the day until the sun started to set again and we could reconvene.

The heat almost always subsided when night fell, but sometimes it would break earlier. There were days when it would get so hot and humid that it felt like it couldn’t possibly get worse. And then: the sky would open up in a clap of thunder and water would rush down to the earth, pounding the pavement and the trees and cooling everything down. I would sit on the porch with my mom and try to guess where the lightning would streak across the sky, and, spotting it, count the seconds until the boom. When the time between the light and the sound got too small, and the storm itself too near, my mom would declare it time to take things inside. I’d sneak upstairs and open the window in my bedroom just enough to hear the rain pound the tin roof outside. If we’d already eaten, I’d try to fall asleep to the sound of the rain — not a difficult feat — but if it was early, I’d just lay there in bliss until the storm passed, and then I’d run outside to walk around in my bare feet in the puddles, careful not to step on the worms who had appeared on the pavement.

Everyone left for a few weeks each summer; you had to, or you’d forget how to run and play and be outside during the day without getting dizzy. A few times a summer my family would leave early and make the eight-hour drive up the eastern shore and over to the mountains of central Pennsylvania, arriving at my grandparents’ house in time for dinner: stuffed cabbage and pierogi purchased from a Polish lady down the street. A glider on the porch was covered in old quilts; I lounged there and read Nancy Drew and murder mysteries until my father or my brother or my grandfather forced me to put on some shoes and go for a walk in the woods. My grandfather had a big stick he’d use for hiking and, my dad claimed, warding off bears. My brother and I would jump over tiny creeks, drunk on oxygen and the possibility of adventure. We’d go left to the trail that led to the old mine shaft, right to the highway, straight up to the summit. The best walks, of course, were the ones that found us lost with dinner time closing in. This only happened when grandpa stayed home. He knew the trails, but dad liked to get lost as much as we did. Later we’d get lost on our own, or with older cousins leading the way. Finding our way out of the woods on our own was a great accomplishment, the details of which were shared — and exaggerated — excitedly over dinner.

My grandparents’ backyard was study in aesthetic perfection: a white picket fence enclosed the kind of colorful and sweet garden that bumblebees and songbirds loved. The yard, like the house, was long and narrow, and in the back was a gingerbread-cottage of a garage filled with forgotten boxes and whatsits; we’d sneak in, our stomachs nervous to find a treasure, or a mouse. The side yard housed a pergola woven with vines bearing raspberries and concord grapes. My grandmother worked hard to harvest the fruit, and the freezer was full of huge plastic bags of raspberries. My grandfather liked them on vanilla ice cream, but I liked to stand in front of the freezer and pop them one at a time into my mouth, keeping them there until they melted, or my mother shooed me out of the kitchen because I was wasting energy, and kids should be outside in weather this nice anyway.

Down the alley and across a few streets, a woman named Mary had a hunchback and a candy store. When we got older, we were allowed to go alone, a great privilege for a couple of city kids who weren’t allowed off our block. We’d come back from our expedition with small paper bags filled with loot: swedish fish, mini cones with marshmallow ice cream scoops, wax bottles filled with sugary syrup, long sheets of paper affixed with multicolored colored candy dots. The stock never changed, and the dark, musty shop smelled and looked the same year after year. For a child, there is little difference between old and very old, so Mary never looked that different to me, either.

I don’t remember our drives back home, but they happened. I’d usually wake up just as we were crossing the bridge over the bay. I’d stare at the water, black in the night, and be happy I lived by the river, by the bay, by the ocean. Once home I’d get out of the car and stretch, and breathe in the sticky sweet air of Virginia before heading inside to greet the dog. I’d always sleep so well after a trip, back in my own room, in my own bed. In the morning, if it was nice, I’d call my friends and we’d go to the beach and talk about all I’d missed. It was nothing, really, but sweet nothings.

Logan Sachon might go outside right now even though she’s a grown-up.

Photo by Vironevaeh, from Flickr.

“Summering. Drinking. Summering and drinking. For the prep, the two words are synonymous from Memorial Day to Labor Day.” –Tipsy in Madras

Summer drinking is a fantastically elaborate endeavor among the set that uses “summer” as a verb-there are drinks you drink at the club (Southsides), drinks you drink while getting ready for Saturday evening charity balls (known as “dressers,” they can be whatever you fancy, usually a beer for men and for ladies something made with soda water), drinks you drink in the wee hours after the black tie is over, when the bar you went to afterwards has played “God Bless America” to signal last call, and you’ve all congregated at the home of whoever volunteered to host late-night (Jack & Ginger, and then later, when you’ve run out of ginger ale, Jack rocks). And then there’s the drink you drink on a boat.

This is the cocktail that screams summer more loudly than any other, howling through its lockjaw, “Jolie! Summertime is upon us! Throw on a Lilly and grab your Boat and Tote, we’re going out on the Seas the Day!”

I speak, of course, of the Dark and Stormy.

Or, as it’s more fondly known, the Stark and Dormy.

Have one or two and then try to ask for a third coherently. Go on, I’ll wait.

Right, so! Stark and Dormy it is: this incredibly delicious and for whatever reason incredibly intoxicating mix of dark rum, ginger beer and lime.

Purists will tell you that you must use Gosling’s rum. And actually, the sort who gets tetchy about the specific type of rum one must use in any given drink will more than tell you-they’ll insist in a horribly superior way, sniffing in your general direction, “Everyone knows the only rum that’s acceptable in a Dark and Stormy is Gosling’s. Only a rube would use a lesser brand.”

Purists have no particular place in our world, now do they?

I say go on and use that Meyers! Get wild with some Whaler’s! But whatever you do you must promise me-PROMISE ME. I WANT TO HEAR YOU SAY IT.-that you will NOT use Captain Morgan’s in your Stark and Dormy.

Look, we all love a jaunty captain. Particularly one with those fresh buckled boots and swishy cape. Still: his product is abhorrent. Ick, spiced rum *makes face* And also? We’re not making Stark and Spormies.

As for the ginger beer, those insufferable purists have an opinion about that too! And just to annoy them I’m not going to tell you what it is! I will, however, tell you that Trader Joe’s carries Reed’s ginger beer and if it’s good enough for Trader Joe it’s good enough for me. (I do need to take a moment to speak directly to the fine folks at the Reed’s: Your recipe for Dark and Stormies calls for light rum. Light rum. LIGHT rum. Ah yes, we’re clear on the problem now? Can we get that fixed?)

Now that we’ve discussed our primary ingredients, let’s turn our attention to most important topic: Ice.

I have a conflicted heart on the subject of ice and summertime cocktail assemblage. I’m predisposed to prefer a crushed ice to a cubed ice for mixed drinks (and can we pause here to engage in a bit of collective EXCITED CLAPPING!!! in celebration of the glory that is crushed ice? Good God damn, I do love crushed ice.) but crushed ice, with its delicate constitution, suffers terribly in the hotter months. After giving the matter more thought than I care to admit, I’ve decided to prescribe two approaches and let you decide which is best for you, based on the speed at which you drink and your relative level of alcoholism:

1. Use crushed ice and serve in a lowball glass
2. Use cubed ice and serve in a highball glass

Speaking of glassware: If you’re enjoying this cocktail on a boat (and my God, you really, really should be) please remember that safety comes first-use plastic glassware. Hush up, yes, I call it plastic glassware. Oh goodness and?! You should know that you can get personalized plastic glassware (and my God, you really, really should) which will allay concerns about those terribly common red SOLO cups clashing with your pastels.

With our safety warning out of the way, let’s make some drinks, shall we!?! Gather ‘round and listen closely, because you’ll be tested on this: Put some ice in a glass. Pour rum over ice. Top with ginger beer. Squeeze a lime wedge and drop it into the glass.

(Officially, the drink should be 1 part rum to 4 parts ginger beer but I can’t even type that with a straight face.)

To help you get into the spirit of preppy drinking, and to heighten your enjoyment of the summeriest drink in summertown, I’ve made you a playlist of sweet songs to slur along to.

A Stark and Dormy Summer Playlist: Songs for Drunken Boating

“Southern Cross,” Crosby, Stills & Nash
“Your Love,” The Outfield
“Stir It Up,” Bob Marley & The Wailers
“Sugar Magnolia,” Grateful Dead
“Glad Tidings,” Van Morrison
“Bad Moon Rising,” Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Caught Up In You,” .38 Special
“Take It on the Run,” REO Speedwagon
“Second Hand News,” Fleetwood Mac
“Don’t Do Me Like That,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
“I’m Goin’ Down,” Bruce Springsteen
“Since You’re Gone,” The Cars
“So Far Away,” Dire Straits
“St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” John Parr
“Already Gone,” The Eagles
“Burning for You,” Blue Oyster Cult
“Abracadabra,” The Steve Miller Band
“I Can Dream About You,” Dan Hartman
“Sussudio,” Phil Collins
“Friends in Low Places,” Garth Brooks

Jolie Kerr is very pro-”summer”-as-a-verb.

Photo by Camilla Bradley.

“They abuse power as much as bankers do, and they make the average person feel insecure about themselves: ‘Why am I not Sarah Jessica Parker?’ It gets very existential, because you first got into it because you were interested in these artists, but these folks are not artists, they’re just famous.”
–Joanna Molloy understands gossip folk.

by Julie Klausner

“God gives each of us only what we can handle” was advice a lesbian bike messenger and Brussels Griffon owner gave me when I expressed guilt about our relative suffering. She had just shared with me a harrowing story about growing up poor in the South with a father who sexually abused her, following my own disclosure that I had a terrible time at sleep-away camp when I was ten.

I know it’s not much when you set it against some kind of real life banjo-scored horror show that could’ve been written by Dorothy Allison, but I swear to God, my first summer away from home was packed with more crying than I remember doing in my life until that point — a short period, I know, but one which included the experiences of both being born and watching Dumbo.

Jews like myself are supposed to love camp. To this day, I know Rothmans and Strausses in their mid-40’s who still keep in touch with their camp friends. My mom loved her summers away from Flatbush, Brooklyn. She got to play the lead in her camp play after singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at a campfire, and went on to become a counselor at the same spot, where she led a hike with her campers to a flat, grassy expanse to set up their tent, only to awaken hours later to a chorus of approaching cowbells and moos. At the time, a summer upstate was a Jewish rite of passage, whether it was at Dirty Dancing-era Grossinger’s or at Camp Hillel, where you’d trade the relentless attention of your overbearing relatives for the sloppy, tongue-based advances of an adolescent with braces. It was a way for Jewish Americans to reap the benefits of the outdoors, without the moneyed, WASPish advantage of having New England summer homes.

Meanwhile, I hated the trappings of camp: lakes, bugs, meeting at the flagpole in the morning in hooded sweatshirts — all of it. The great outdoors was hugely distasteful to me, as was the philosophy of bunk pride, or teamwork, or whatever it’s called when groups of young people thrive on camaraderie and go without television.

I was a nerdy child, way too close to my parents and not fluent in the language of social skills. My friendships, until then, had been very soul mate-fueled; all “you and me against the world” stuff, running up against the occasional love triangle whenever a new Israeli girl moved to town and my BFF Aliza would decide to bump up our twosome into a clique. I couldn’t handle the politics of the schoolyard — not even Solomon Schechter’s. My idea of heaven was a day at the zoo with my dad, or a trip to the Clinique counter at Neiman with my mom, where I’d get to keep the freebie make-up bag and Dramatically Different mini-moisturizer she’d get with her purchase. See? I’m still a stereotype.

I was ten when my parents dropped me off in late June at a bus stop in White Plains, and as soon as my Walkman-scored “looking out the window” activity wound down, I arrived at Camp Scatico unqualified to do anything but fail at my mission to make friends and be a big girl. As soon I got off the bus, it was all pain.

I thrashed with angst on a cot my first night alone, and cried from homesickness every day, taking breaks to write pleading, desperate letters to my parents, begging them to pick me up. They didn’t do it, and to this day, I think they wonder if they should have. “We thought it was the right thing to do,” my mom will say in a hushed version of her regular voice, when I ask why she left me at a place I colorfully referred to as “Camp Hellhole” when writing my daily postcards home. She was probably right, but the folly of explaining tough love — with a hefty price tag attached — to a chubby, tear-streaked cream puff intent on fleeing a pine-studded section of the Upper Hudson Valley is up there with other idiocy, like trying to bathe a cat when you’re wearing short sleeves.

But for a short time that summer, everything terrible receded into white noise.

On an early evening in mid-July, I assembled in the main cabin with the whole camp. Upper Hill and Lower Hill campers sat cross-legged beside their counselors as the Camp Director, Nancy, took the stage to announce she had a big-deal surprise. We had no idea what was going on. The rumor was that Tribes was starting early. Tribes was like Color War, only campers were divided into four groups instead of two, the names of which — Flying Eagle, Racing Wind, Thunderbolt and Blazing Arrow — were decidedly more queer than “Grey Team” and “Green Team.” I still hate imitation Native American schmaltz unless it comes in the form of a Cher song or something you can buy in the “Gift Ideas” section of Shirley MacLaine’s website.

But what Nancy had to share was way more extraordinary than the kick-off to the latest relay race-strewn time-killer. “MTV is coming to Camp Scatico!” She practically shrieked into the microphone. There was more screaming, and even more, and I think some counselors did a “skit” to drive the point home. As a side note, my aversion to the term “skit” to describe something from “SNL” may be as much due to my sketch comedy snobbery as it is a product of my experience at camp, where there are as many skits as mosquitoes. If somebody wasn’t rowing a canoe or eating a fish stick, they were grabbing a wig and “doing a voice.”

The reason our camp was chosen for the gig, it turns out, has to do with Doug Herzog, the then-VP of Programming for MTV, who was an alum of Scatico. Apparently Herzog remembered his camp days fondly, and it was his idea to shoot on-site interstitial segments for what was then the MTV of “Remote Control,” the phrase “Wubba-wubba-wubba” and Richard Marx’s “Satisfied” video in heavy rotation. The 6-hour special would feature MTV-lebrities and stars of the soon-to-be-released movie UHF in summer camp-themed segments that would run between videos under the umbrella moniker of “Camp MTV.” It would air on a Sunday in late July of 1989, and was to be shot on Scatico grounds two days after Nancy’s announcement.

The excitement of the counselors and the other campers — the same kids I couldn’t connect with over jacks — was infectious. The VJ’s are coming! We’re going to be on TV! MTV is still relevant! That kind of thing. But by the next day, the elation had worn off and I remembered how much I didn’t want to be there. When I complained to Nancy, a perimenopausal matron who wore a whistle like a necklace, she told me, somewhat conspiratorially, that after her announcement at lunch, I would feel much better. My heaving wheezes turned into long pulls of nostril-filtered air: she knew something I didn’t.

After we’d finished our chicken patties and stacked our plastic tumblers atop one another, Nancy got on the mess hall microphone and said she had another surprise. Some lucky campers would get to be on-camera as extras when MTV came to town. My heart leaped out of my white Gap pocket-T, because this was probably what Nancy was talking about when she told me I’d miss my parents less after lunch. I thought at the time she’d been hinting at my being allowed to leave early. It turned out instead that I was one of fifteen campers whose names had been drawn from a hat. I was going to be on “Camp MTV.” That night, I didn’t cry. My bunk-mates were jealous, but still excited for me; we all couldn’t wait, and suddenly, there was a “we.” The transformative and redemptive powers of television!

The next day, they arrived. The MTV talent got The Beatles Welcome from Scatico campers, even though we had no idea who some of them were. Still — -OMG, it was Ken Ober! Kevin Seal! Mario Joyner! Julie Brown-the black one, not the redhead! Colin Quinn! Dr. Dre and Ed Lover! Adam Curry! The “Club MTV” dancers, which were a bunch of hot 20 year-olds who wore their gray “Camp MTV” t-shirts over-sized and cut off at the midriff (!!!) And also, because of the “UHF” tie-in, Michael Richards! Victoria Jackson! “Weird” Al! And the motherfucking Beastie Boys.

I remember chasing after the late Ken Ober like a manic harpie, along with another freckled husky girl who bunked a cabin over. Ober rode in the backseat of a silver sedan, which pulled up in front of the infirmary at dusk. When he got out to greet his two fans, he smirked and asked us what the kitchen was serving for dinner. I saw Colin Quinn the next morning sitting on a bench by the lake, flanked by giggling female counselors and cracking wise beneath not-retro-yet Ray Bans. I didn’t know why he was funny or cool at the time, but I remember taking both things as a given.

“Weird” Al was the crown jewel of “Camp MTV” sightings, and, likely still, the most exciting famous person of all time to a geeky 10-year old like me. When I finally met him, he was hugely professional — not as friendly as the VJ’s, but also, completely willing to sign an autograph for me and pose for Polaroids by the lake. His curls were stunning in the upstate summer sun.

And then, it came time for my scene. Well, if you want to be technical about it, it was Kevin Seal’s scene. Do you remember Kevin Seal? Of “Kevin Seal: Sporting Fool” and sundry other late 80’s-era MTV hosting bits written around his broad chops from the “Steve Martin acting like an idiot” school of comedy? He wore pleated chino shorts and had those cleft chin/black Irish goofball kind of good looks. In the scene we filmed together (ahem), Seal stood on the same stage as Nancy when she first announced that MTV was coming to camp, and I sat cross-legged at his feet, next to a thin girl from my bunk named Lisa and a spate of other camper extras. The premise of the scene was that Seal was a theater counselor who took his job too seriously, and directed us like we were grown-ups doing Mamet.

I remember the director telling me and Thin Lisa to “do some business with our hands” at the top of the scene before Kevin began his monologue, and she initiated that game where one person puts her hands over the others’ palms, and pulls them away before her partner can slap them. Lisa only teased me about running to Nancy whenever I was homesick before that day, but she took her job as a background actress very seriously; when I put my hands in my lap for one of the takes, she made a point of telling me, curtly, to do what the director said. The only other thing I remember from that day was how funny Kevin Seal was. I thought he was the center of the universe, and I was so happy to be in his background.

The next day, everyone was gone. Just as quickly as the cast and crew broke out into our piney space, it was all over. The famous people disappeared, the crew packed up, and Camp MTV was Camp Scatico again. All was as still as the lake we swam laps in until Visitor’s Day, when I ducked into the air-conditioned bliss of my father’s Camry for a short moment, praying the thing would start moving and I would be home soon, away from camp — which was now “Weird” Al-free. There would only be Color War after this as the next special thing. Even the play I got to be in was over, and my parents didn’t even get to see me in it. When they left that day, I remember crying so hard, it was like I was coughing salt water onto my dark green Scatico-issued shorts. I loved my parents, and my first experience away from them felt like they weren’t just gone, they were dead.

I got a letter from my mom a few weeks later, after “Camp MTV” aired. She told me in her handwriting how exciting it was to see me on television, and how much I would love it when I got back and watched the VHS tape my brother Phil made with our Mitsubishi TV/ VCR combo in the living room — the one that sat pridefully atop our beige carpeted console, like the Lion King on a cliff. My mom said she didn’t like the skit featuring Randee of the Redwoods in a hockey mask with an axe, and mentioned that Phil wanted to know if I got to meet the Beastie Boys (I didn’t). She expressed sympathy for my having a hard time at Scatico, reassuring me that I’d be home before I knew it, and, before signing off next to my dad and his smiley face doodle, cooed over my TV debut once more — as though I were the one destined for greatness, and not just the chubbo brushing with it.

In reality, the time I was on screen in relation to the bigness of the event’s meaning to me is laughable. I was a blip, an extra. Nobody who wasn’t looking for one particular red-headed camper would ever notice I had been in the mix of all the other kids whose names were picked out of a hat that day. But there’s nothing like the warped perspective of an emotional little girl to recast a scene in her head, with her in the leading role.

The events at Scatico from late July to the end of August were fewer and more far-between — an engrossing arts & crafts project here, a first kiss there, a surprise allergic reaction to pesto. (Nuts in noodles?!? I never thought to ask.) But it took the manpower of a cultural institution with all its trimmings — I’m looking at you, Chris Connelly! — to shake me out of the grief-stained separation anxiety that woke me up every morning that summer, sure as reveille. And while it didn’t make me feel much better about myself admitting it to my friend a few years ago — the one who regaled me with lurid descriptions of her shitty childhood before giving me permission to share my own meager memories — it took the illusion of being famous to shock me out of missing my parents — like David Bowie said — just for one day.

Julie Klausner would like to give special thanks to her brother, Phil Klausner.

“I risk the President taking my comments personally, but they’re not intended to be personal; my comments reflect what many others feel, and we just want to help him tackle this enormous spill problem.”
-You think Sarah Palin chuckles when she signs her name to a line like this, or do you think it’s a full-throated guffaw? I bet it’s a big, bellowing laugh that they can hear in Russia.