I don’t want to be that grumpy writer castigating the new generation.  And in all honesty, I can’t

You know those columns where a grumpy older writer talks about how much better things were when they were growing up? How much simpler, more wholesome the world was when they were young? How their summer experiences in sleepaway camp were so much more rewarding than today’s version? That’s the column I don’t want to write and the writer I don’t want to be.

I loved almost everything about camp, but I definitely came most alive when there was a performance to plan. The main thing I remember from those performances is that we, the teenagers, were entrusted with creating them. There was always a staff member in charge, but the burden was definitely on us. And we loved it.

Sometimes we were given a script; sometimes we created our own. There was a very talented staff member in camp who custom-composed beautiful, meaningful theme songs for the big end-of-summer performance, but she left the rest of the songs to the teenaged choir heads to choose. The dance heads were given a basic theme or scene — Cossacks, schoolchildren, nightmare — and trusted to do the rest. If there was a counselor who’d taken drum lessons that year, a drum set was brought in and she was appointed drummer.

The Nine Days Cantata was a hallowed and solemn institution — rows of fresh-faced girls singing Eichah-based songs with pathos, filling the stage with phrases of Churban and hope. There were complex vocal arrangements to compensate for the lack of music, actresses in improvised costumes acting out dramatic scenes, solemn narration intoned from offstage. Usually the scenes had a Holocaust or KGB setting, but one year the high school-aged directors decided to get creative and chose the Spanish Expulsion as the setting instead. We opened with a Sephardi piyut for that one, and ended with the choir marching offstage into galus.

For every camp production, we used the same “sound guy.” His name was Evan, and he was the stereotypical Catskills hillbilly, down to the boots and plaid shirt. A few hours before the performance, he pulled up in a pickup truck and began setting up microphones and speakers in the gym-turned-auditorium. His assistant was a Bais Yaakov girl in a long Baby’O skirt who crisply and confidently helped him set up the system. Then she put on a headset and ran the show, literally.

Color War meant a night of no sleep, as we valiantly brainstormed for banner ideas and cheer lyrics. Then we gathered around the aging piano and tried to coax out a new tune — something catchy and moving with a soaring chorus that could hold a message and at least one Hebrew pasuk. After the new tune was finally born (it could take until morning), we embellished it with layers of harmonies and kept singing it over and over so it would stay put in our sleep-starved minds, at least until the Grand Sing.

The true test of the winning song wasn’t the fateful announcement at the end of Color War — “and the winner is…” It took days, sometimes even a week or two, to know if the song was a keeper. The songs that made it big that summer became part of the camp soundtrack. At night, when the starry sky arced right down to the damp grass, we’d hear girls humming those new favorites as the crickets chirped along. We knew and appreciated that the repertoire of camp songs was something organic — something that grew as the years passed, something that stretched to accommodate and celebrate our own offerings.

Maybe that’s why I was a little confused when I attended my niece’s school performance last year. I scanned the neat, modern auditorium, but couldn’t spot any piano in that strategic spot under the stage. Instead, prerecorded music filled the sound system every time the choir made its appearance. Listening carefully, I could even detect some harmonies there on the playback, just in case the girls on stage couldn’t produce something rich and layered enough.

At this performance, there were none of the hand-painted canvas “sceneries” that teams of amateur artists had slaved over back in my school and camp days. Instead, a series of professional digital backdrops were beamed onto the stage. There were, of course, a forest, a classroom, and a royal palace, but they’d been ordered from some online catalogue.

When the girls appeared onstage in their coordinated costumes, I remembered the dedicated sewing team of my high school years; those aspiring seamstresses had spent nights hunched over sewing machines and bolts of fabric. Then I discovered that for this performance, the costume committee consisted of one person — which made sense when I learned that all the costumes were rented from a theater company.

I watched and wondered. Did these girls know how thrilling it feels to find the exact right combination of notes after trying out three different harmonies, or had some paid professional been enlisted to deliver a prefab musical package? Had they struggled over rhythm and meter as they attempted to write lyrics that managed to rhyme while also encapsulating their theme — or were the songs bundled along with the ready script their school had bought? Did they suck in their breath as they watched the stage fill with color and texture that they themselves had magicked into reality, or did they nod offhandedly at the rented backdrop and costumes?

Without question, their product was a lot more polished and professional. The digital music and auto-tuned singing was much more precise than our camp performances in the cavernous gym where Evan’s microphones occasionally emitted wild squeaks and the choir sometimes switched keys mid-song. The rented costumes were elaborate and impressive. The castle in that backdrop wasn’t marred by sloppy brickwork or overdone shading. But with all that outsourcing, did the performers feel the same sense of pride and ownership?

I don’t want to be that grumpy writer castigating the new generation. And in all honesty, I can’t. Because at the end of that performance came the moment when all the girls stood on stage, arms around each other, exulting in their achievement. True to the age-old template, they forgot there was an audience, forgot they had to get back home, and huddled together, rocking back and forth, singing their theme song again and again. It was the same finale I remembered from my own years in camp and school: that togetherness that comes after late nights memorizing lines and defusing disasters and perfecting the tricky move in the song-dance while subsisting on instant noodle soup and caffeine and the knowledge that you can only pull this off as a team.

By now those girls have bid goodbye to stages and performances, solos and choreography. Soon they’ll be in the world of work commitments, family obligations, and simchahs. And that outsourcing ethic is likely to stay with them, because it seems so endemic to our society today. Why bake when you can order? Why slice and dice when the party planner has her own suppliers? Why brainstorm when you can hire a “creative”? Why struggle to come up with your own idea or menu or costume or program when you can just grab a ready package?

Life moves on, standards get higher, and no one really wants to go back to those amateur days when you only reached the finish line after sweating through every mile. The cleaner, easier shortcuts are here to stay — and the perfectly polished, super-slick results are expected, almost basic. The DIY show seems to be over.

The good news is that life has a way of acquainting us with our abilities. Almost everyone gets their chance to discover how empowering and enriching it can be to dig down and find solutions, innovations, or grit in their own personal reservoirs. When the day (or show) is done, I’m sure those performers, with their rented costumes and prepackaged soundtracks, will find their inner gifts, too. Just maybe not at 3 a.m. in an almost-empty Catskills gym with a creaky piano, a skunk lurking outside, and a Grand Sing looming.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1071)