Moon Reflections

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The moon has a spell-binding hold on our collective imagination and never more-so than the summer of 1969.

That summer was my sixth and last summer as a camper at the National Music Camp (now Interlochen Arts Camp) in Interlochen, MI, the granddaddy of fine arts camps, set in a pine forest between two lakes in northern Michigan. All the girls divisions, as well as most of the main performances buildings at the time were set on Lake Wabakanetta, including Kresge, where the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta was performed, and Grunow, where the High School division put on its plays.

I had a good summer, portraying the glamorous actress, Irene Livingston in Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky, a role originated by his wife, Kitty Carlisle, a fact I got to tell her years later.  I was also Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We performed The Sorcerer in Operetta and, though always in the chorus, I was given a small part in the opening pantomime during the overture. In the Featured photo, I and my partner, David Maier, are in costume just before the start of the show. For the third time, I won the Chorus Award for Best Chorus Member; a record, I believe.

There was one moon-drenched night that I will never forget. It was July 20, and anyone alive will always remember where she was when man first walked on the moon.

Camp was quite regimented. We wore uniforms, awoke to Reveille and went to bed by Taps. But this night, High School Girls were allowed to stay up late. A small black and white TV was brought in to the Sun Decker, a three story structure, long-gone, but at the time, a concrete haven for fun. It had indoor space for boat storage, ping pong, fireplaces for cook-outs on rainy nights, and decks outside to sunbathe on, recessed into the side of the hill sloping down to the lake and we, the last of the naïve generation who didn’t know the dangers of skin cancer, would douse ourselves in baby oil and lie out to soak up the rays when we could. It was inside, on the second level where we camped out on this particular night, packed in like sardines as we watched the scratchy image on the old TV.

My heart raced as the door of the space capsule opened and Neil Armstrong stepped out. I climbed over the bodies of the other girls and walked out to the edge of the railing around the concrete deck. I turned my back to the TV and looked out at the moon, reflected perfectly in the quiet lake below, gorgeous twin images of reflected light. Behind me, as in a dream, I heard Neil Armstrong’s voice:  “One small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind,”

He spoke to me from that glowing disk I gazed at in the sky. How marvelous! How unthinkable. In an era of drug-induced hallucinations, my real experience far surpassed anything that could have been imagined. One of my countrymen really had landed on the moon; I had just witnessed it with my own eyes. And there stood 16 year old Betsy, looking out at Wabakanetta, this beautiful lake I had so enjoyed in my many years at camp. There was the reflection of the moon. But on this particular night, an American stood on the very real surface of that moon, which itself can only reflect light; twin reflections, far away, yet only as far as a pebble’s throw.

 

From Chimps to Chips

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Its kind of crazy how far we've come since the first un-manned space flights. It seems like eons ago, but it is burned so deeply into my mind that it also seems like yesterday.
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Brenner’s Bakery

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I’m still in touch with my best friend whom I’ve known since 1954. Every time we talk or get together, even if it’s been after many years, the topic of food in our childhood is brought up, once again. We lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., outside of Alexandria, VA. There was a small shopping center a few miles away, but because my folks only had one car, Saturday had to be their weekly shopping day. I always went with my family, and usually my friend for this outing. We would run off on our own (at ages seven and eight) to the drug store and to the Ben Franklin, with our allowance. This might cover one candy bar, or maybe a comic book. Sometimes we had to save for a few weeks for these treasures. We would eye all the paper dolls while there, too. In the summer, we always stopped in at the bakery. Brenner’s Bakery had not only the usual cakes and cookies, but also a soft ice cream machine, or frozen custard, actually What heaven to get a cone of soft, rich, swirly, chocolate ice cream!

School Day Lunch

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There were three possible lunches on school days: regular lunchbox lunch; rainy day lunch; and lunch at home.

On regular days, I opened my metal lunchbox (blue lid and bottom, silver-gray between) to find a sandwich neatly wrapped in waxed paper, made with stiff, dense, brown whole wheat bread. It might be peanut butter, or pimiento cheese with lettuce, or maybe a ham slice, also with lettuce. There would be an apple or a tangerine or a banana. And there would be a little packet of dessert: candied prunes, dark, sticky, and wrinkled–tasty, but so embarrassing that I’d have to eat them quickly, out of sight. Other kids, whose sandwiches were made with soft, white Wonder Bread and baloney, and whose dessert was chocolate chip cookies from a package, stared at my lunches and were glad not to be me. I am grateful to my mother for insisting on healthful food, but I do wish she had taken the social dimension into account and given me some junk every now and then.

Rainy day lunch was more or less the same but with one wonderful addition: hot soup in the thermos. We got to eat at our desks in the classroom if it was raining. I would unscrew the red plastic top of my thermos bottle and discover inside either tomato soup or cream of mushroom, both Campbell’s, both delicious. The classroom lights glowed in a special way on those dark noons. An unusual quiet prevailed, monitored by the teacher, sitting at her desk, eating her lunch along with us. It was strange and rather thrilling to see that teachers, too, ate lunch.

And sometimes I went home for lunch, a walk or bike ride of five blocks or so. There at the formica table in the kitchen, my sister and I might have creamed chipped beef on toast, or creamed sweetbreads (I knew what they were, though they had that phony name), or melted cheese sandwiches, or an interesting toasted sandwich made with a special implement–I think it might have been called the Toastite. It was a metal clamshell with handles about 18 inches long. You opened the clamshell, put the bread and the filling in there, closed it up, and held it over one of the burners on the stove until the bread got hot and crispy. Whatever happened to the Toastite?

Jello Days

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Growing up in a small mining town in California’s Mojave Desert, we didn’t have access to a lot of variety when it came to grocery shopping.  But my mom, in true post-World-War-2 fashion, was an enthusiastic supporter of every new thing that came on the market.  So despite our little store’s limited potential, we kids sampled the best that America could offer in ingenious new foods.

Was it convenient?  It landed in Mom’s shopping cart.  Was it fast?  She was on board.  If Uncle Ben could make rice cook in half the time, that’s what we were having.  Aunt Jemima offered pancake mix that already had all the stuff included; you just added water.  Were Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben married?  It seemed likely.  Was Mrs. Butterworth a distant relative, or a little something-something on the side?  You had to wonder.

Dad didn’t get involved in the kitchen very often (being the outdoor barbecue expert), but he seemed as pleased by these fantastic new time-saving foods as Mom was. As a Marine accustomed to eating Spam, Dad was more than happy to see the green Jello salad with its suspended bits of fruit cocktail, or the orange jello mixed with cottage cheese.  It was colorful, it was fun, it doubled as a dessert, and despite its rather low-rent image now, there was no meal Jello could not brighten.

The novelty of Jiffy-Pop, the ease of mixing up Tang orange drink, outweighed any lack of taste in those years.  No one expected Tang to taste like fresh-squeezed orange juice.  It was more about saving labor.  Who wanted to squeeze a bunch of oranges?

Many of Mom’s favorite products of the 50’s and 60’s later fell out of favor, to be replaced with new trends in cooking (I was glad to see the most frightening thing in the kitchen – the pressure cooker — go to the garage). No more canned strawberries; no more boiling vegetables till they were soggy.   But Mom retained her love of the newest and latest all her life.  She had no less than six Swiffer products in her pantry at last count.  And she passed along her embrace of American ingenuity to her daughters, who now squirt Crystal Light into their water bottles and are always ready for the next new thing.