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Why (as in yaverbaum)
well have been a mechitza across the road that separated the campuses. (For the uninitiated, a mechitza is a partition in Orthodox synagogues that is intended to separate men and women during services and thereby ensure modesty and attention to the service; if you’ve ever been to an Orthodox service, it is likely that you will have noted that those goals are just that—goals.)
Starlight, at which I spent three summers, was, at least insofar as adolescents or adolescent wannabes were concerned, coed with a vengeance. All evening activities were conducted with boys and girls of the same age group participating together. Campers “dressed up” for dinner! As a consequence, the time before assembly for the lowering of the flag in the evening was spent (at least for the boys and girls of twelve years of age and older) not just showering but preening and, for boys, slicking back the greasy hair that was the fashion. The vast majority of the camp population seemed to hail from Great Neck and the “Five Towns” in Nassau County. Many of the families who sent their children to Starlight were in the garment industry (that is, to get technical here, they produced and purveyed what critics referred to as “schmattes”) and, perhaps for that reason, were rich and had very well-dressed chil- dren (taste aside). Other families followed suit, so to speak.
The dining room served both the boys camp and the girls camp, with the boys’ and the girls’ tables intermixed. A typical meal would feature stylized shrieking, something like the following from the eight voices making up Girls Bunk 12: “Quiet please! Attention, Boys Bunk 13! Attention, Burt Wexler! Yoo-hoo! Sarah wants a kiss!” Or, more original, at least at first, the initial salutation followed by the chanting of “Burt and Sarah sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” Boys Bunk 13 would naturally reply en masse for Burt or, depending upon the perceived depth of the Burt’s relationship with Sarah, Burt might actually get up, walk to the table filled with the giggling members of Girls Bunk 12, and respond appropriately or, depending upon your perspective, inappropriately. I would not be going too far out on the limb to say that this constant conduct and the pairing up that was necessitated by
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