My wife and I drove our daughter to Stagedoor Manor today, a theater camp located in the Catskills. Some of her friends had been before and now Franny was determined to try her luck on the boards. It turns out that the camp has quite a pedigree — both Natalie Portman and Robert Downey, Jr. are mentioned among the alumni which means she has an equally good chance of playing a stripper or becoming a junkie — and was the inspiration for the movie Camp, which I didn’t see.

As camps go the buildings were nothing special; my wife reasoned that the dank and depressing hallways and mildewed bathrooms were meant to give the aspiring thespians a reality check: Get used to it, kids! For all I know they take them into town on field trips and make them work as waitresses. Given the camps great rep (at the end of each three week session the kids mount several productions, a musical and a drama, that are supposed to be quite professional in appearance) there were quite a few bona fide stage kids in evidence. Voices were raised in song at nearly every corner — not, by and large, songs I wanted to hear but all sounded like current Broadway fare. There was a fair amount of air-kissing and squealing on the part of returning campers and that was just the boys. No actually, boys were in short supply (surprise) but any lucky enough to be straight would do quite well there, I reckon. The hallway in Franny’s dorm was adorned with a “Wall of Hotness” featuring pics of dreamy young barechested lads ripped from the pages of today’s teen mags. And no, the same photos were not on the walls of the boys’s dorm. You’re mean.

Speaking of mean, Franny looked a little freaked out when we left her. She is rooming with a friend who has been there before and she is down the hall from yet another old friend from school — but if you have a daughter in middle-school you know that such alliances are built on sand when you are twelve. I figure they will grow to hate and love each other several times over before we pick her up in three weeks time. Not for nothing did the three of them sing the song “Loathing” from the musical Wicked in her school’s last musicale. And boy, did they nail it. You would have thought they had a dry ice machine backstage.

I heard one girl telling a parent that there was quite a bit of buzz about what musicals were going to be performed but when asked she said no one cared about the drama. The Bad Seed might seem a little dated to these kids. I wonder how they would do with The Pillowman?