Page 195 - WhyAsInY

We’ll err (But) Be true
friends whom I continued to see through the third year of law school. (One of them had a home in Lawrence that came equipped with a full- scale bomb shelter, apparently built during the early Cold War, which, I’m delighted to report, was never used for its intended purpose.) My finest move, which showed how well I had learned to work the machin- ery of camp, occurred after the annual precamp counselors’ meeting in a hotel in downtown Brooklyn (where, naturally, Kotimsky & Tuchman had the catering business). At that 1967 meeting, I noticed a very attrac- tive new counselor, whose name was Sari Kaminksy, and I found out which group she would be working in. I then called Sari’s group leader, a friend of mine, right before the beginning of the summer, and I arranged, without Sari’s knowledge, for Tuesday to be Sari’s day off. Naturally, Tuesday just happened to have been the day that I had cho- sen for my own day off. Sari and I didn’t break up until sometime in the middle of her first year in medical school.
The final event of note at Brookwood came during the summer of 1967. A counselor with whom I had become friendly—we’ll call her Sue (that was her name)—was a bit of an artsy type. The Beatles had released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June, and its sound was widely considered to be revolutionary. Sue just happened to have a copy of the album and access to a record player. Moreover, she also just happened to have access to a substance that is now lawful for recreational use in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Wash- ington, as well as lawful in some other states for medicinal purposes only. But it wasn’t lawful then. We shared it all. This was the sixties, after all, only two years before Woodstock, and it was in the summer of 1967 that I gave the Friday night sermon that dealt with, among other things, the quasi-religious significance of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—some- thing that I had learned during my revolutionary evening with Sue.
And with that, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve graduated from camp, albeit not emotionally. We now turn the clock back six years and turn our attention to the place where the most important part of my formal (and informal) education took place.
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