Generally, the more money you have, the less time you're forced to spend with your adolescent children: there's boarding school throughout the academic year with ski instructors lightening your load during winter holidays. Students at independent day or strong suburban schools have a battery of athletic coaches, psychotherapists, SAT tutors, and private college counselors to keep them out of your hair. For some of you, however, the recent economic downturn has put a crimp in your plans to offload the kids this summer. Meet Camp Bad Ass.
You've all had the experience of chastising your child for low grades or shoplifting only to see him or her press the remote and channel surf in the midst of your lecture. And you've watched your offspring lose six retainers in four months and lie on the bed with their finger up their nose for hours at a time. Treat yourself this summer: let Camp Bad Ass do the heavy lifting.
For a fraction of the cost of traditional camps, we at Bad Ass entertain your teenagers from the minute school lets out until it begins again in the fall. We're far and away the most popular camp on the East Coast and are oversubscribed each summer.
Our counselors don't have years of classroom experience, lifesaving badges, CPR training, rock climbing certification, or Outward Bound qualifications. But they, unlike you, love hanging with teens. And they also realize your daughter's going to get a tattoo on her lower back, smoke dope, and date people from lower socioeconomic groups and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
We don't bake bread, press olives, or savor our homemade bread in hand-pressed oil. We don't lead nature walks, visit animals in their natural habitat, or identify moose droppings. Nor do we pick up litter on stretches of Maine highway as some sort of penance for living in Tribeca. We don't take kids out on a three-masted schooner, construct wigwams, or explore acquatic life in tidepools. The word "service" (eco-, community, or otherwise) is absent from our mission statement. We don't foster, share, or nurture anything. And above all, we never, ever try to "teach" your child, having conceded long ago the futility of such an endeavor. What is our ethos? Fun.
We have no dormitories, playing fields, or facilities whatsoever. We group kids by musical tastes, then pile them into brightly-colored buses tricked out with water beds, laptops, HDTVs, and killer stereo systems. We drive around for eleven weeks goofing off and getting to know each other. Think Partridge Family without shared chromosomes. And better tunes.
We have longstanding relationships with all major theme parks which allow us to enter the grounds an hour prior to other groups. Before the sun begins baking and just as others are starting to queue for their first ride on Ragin' Cajun, we've already been twice, exhausted Superman Tower of Power, and are on our fourth jaunt down the Xcelerator. In a given week, we'll visit Six Flags three times (twice at night), view four first-run movies (60% of which star Will Smith), and squeeze in a couple of Acqua Parks.
A typical day might be music, a breakfast Grand Slamwich at Denny's, a three-hour nap, a leisurely lunch at KFC, a flick, and maybe some late-night bowling followed by pizza. If we drive by a lake and people feel like a dip, fine, we'll stop, but there are no icy early morning swims, no archery, relay races, ghost stories, or other lame stuff.
We don't piously collect all cellphones the first day and keep them in a painted wicker hamper until "call home day." If our kids want to phone home, they phone home. (Don't worry, they won't: they'll be having too much fun.) Our campers are online, on Twitter, on their cells, or planted in front of some sort of screen most of the summer. We distribute BlackBerries to whoever needs one.
As for food, most of what we eat is fried. New England is fried clams. We're an all-steak camp, heavy on the breakfast meats, and all our meals are consumed in restaurants. We don't gather wood, build fires, cook together cooperatively as a unit, or do dishes.
In our 28 years' experience, we've learned one thing: hog the good times while you're young because they slip away real fast. No one wants to spend his or her summer "learning." That's why there's school.
