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[That's me back in 1971 as Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof]

While mindlessly traveling through places of my past on the internets, I thought about a camp I attended in the summers of 1970 and 1971. It was a fine arts camp in Stockbridge, Massachusetts called "Beaupre." There was drama (my "major"), dance (ballet, modern, Hindu, and Spanish), and art, and everyone took classes in everything. It was an intense experience for me, particularly the social part of it. Stationery was "currency," (mine was vanilla-colored and definitely not cool). Most of the campers were from what is now called the "tri-state area," and I was one of only a handful of campers from the state of Massachusetts. Yes, it is odd that I would be at an overnight camp a mere six miles from my family's summer home, but we were kept so busy that I never really thought about that.

Here's some footage of two of the ethnic dance instructors: Carola Goya and Matteo Vittucci (he just went by "Matteo.")

I was thrilled to find a Facebook group filled with alumni of that camp in those years, and decided that it was worth joining Facebook to read what they had to say about it. I recall that it was a group filled with alumni from my junior high school (the non-existant Weeks, for those who may know the lay of the land in Newton, Massachusetts before 1980) that drew me into the
Facebook vortex the first time.

In 2009, after sufficiently exploring pictures and posts from people I remembered from my past, I decided that Facebooking was not a healthy activity for me, so I stopped. I thought I had cancelled my account, but it seems that after three years away, everything had been buzzing along without me, and everything was still pretty much the same as it was. I communicated a bit with a camp friend or two, said hello to a couple of people who welcomed me back, said hello to a couple of people who never responded, and looked at a bunch of pictures.

Today I got a suggestion that I might want to "friend" someone very dear to me who died a few months ago. That gave me a jolt. I don't think I'll be looking at Facebook much in the future. I much prefer bloggery and e-mail as ways of communicating with the world outside my personal circles of local friends and family.