Mix and Mingle

Thinking about tonight’s evening activity, I realized it’s been years since this session has had a chance to experience it. Other sessions have been luckier in the past couple of years, but not our full second session girls. I’m referring to the dance with Camp Carolina. There’s a long history of these camp dances where the boys from CCB and the girls from RBC get together for the evening for dances, but since the 2020 pandemic closures, we’ve been fighting contagious diseases off and on. We’ve scheduled camp dances since then, but things keep popping up that force us to cancel. It might have been pink eye, or strep throat, or some other virus, but it’s been a while when both camps were healthy enough to mix and mingle. For these second session girls, the last camp dance they had was in 2019!

Needless to say, the screams of excitement where deafening when we announced that we’d be having a dance tonight. We surprised everyone with the news at dinner and explained that we’d be loading up the buses in 20 minutes. Waiting until the last minute like this cuts down on the time we might spend getting ready. Still, it was funny to see the Senior girls sprinting across the hill toward their cabins to try and sneak in a quick shower. The counselors did a great job keeping things silly by dressing in costumes instead of “dressing up.” These camp dances are far from being serious. Even so, the girls had their hair brushed and were somehow able to find clean clothes to wear. The boys looked sharp too.

Long ago we realized that splitting the girls and boys into two simultaneous dances, one for the younger and another for the older children, was a good idea. This way only half of each camp needs to be transported. We drove the older girls over to Camp Carolina and they drove their young boys to Rockbrook. Both dances happened in the gyms at each camp.

The music at both dances was a mix of familiar pop songs and well-known group dances. Some of these are so popular you can count on them being played, like the “Cha Cha Slide,” and “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” for example. Also, for some reason the techno song “Sandstorm,” from 2001 seems to always appear. We also heard Taylor Swift and ABBA, which isn’t too surprising, as well as “Party Rock” and “Party in the USA.”

The dancing for the younger kids was impressively varied compared to the older girls who mostly jumped up and down with a hand raised in the air. Clustered together, the whole crowd would jump to match the beat of the music. We saw a long conga line at the Rockbrook dance, and plenty of chatting and laughing as each new song came on.

With coolers of water and cookies available to recharge everyone, both dances kept up an impressive pace for more than hour of excited bopping about. Everyone seemed a little surprised how fast the time flew by when we announced it was time for the girls to head back to RBC and the boys back to CCB. We were all a little sweaty by the end, but I think most agreed that the dance was “really fun.” A classic camp evening out.