When I was in high school, I took it upon myself to write a two-hundred page dramatic memoir about my summers in theater camp. My parents, bless their hearts, read it (or pretended to read it) and tried their hardest not to laugh (I understand my work is now intended to provoke laughter, but back then, I was dead serious. If anything, I wanted them to cry as if they had just finished reading Angela’s Ashes.)
Although I had not used these words (it was 2004 and therefore, decidedly, “too soon”), I had framed theater camp as my metaphorical tour in Afghanistan, a gritty experience rife with trauma that molded me into the seasoned, serious fifteen-year-old I had become. Funny enough, I actually did have material if I wanted to write about trauma and scandal. My theater camp employed a few notorious perverts, including a high-school-aged counselor who was known for hitting on eleven-year-olds (to the point that he was referenced in a campwide improv skit when someone was, for some reason, allowed to use “pedophile” as a prompt).
For some reason, I did not use that material in my memoir. Instead, I focused on the truly shocking stuff, like the fact that I was constipated for two weeks, the fact that I had a scab slough off in the waterfront because I was on an inner tube that went too fast, and the fact that I got pantsed one time (I maintain the pantsing was slightly traumatic, as I was exposed as having a particularly voluminous bush and my crush ran from me in response, screaming, “My eyes, they burn.”)
But there was only one experience from the book that I truly believe still warrants coverage—not because it was traumatic or horrible but because it was very, very ridiculous: the fact that I almost got expelled.
