When were you at camp?
1985-1991 (camper) and 1995 (staff).

What was your major and what were some of your minors?
At first I was a theater major, but then during my fourth or fifth summer I switched to dance.  When I was a counselor, I taught dance.  My minors changed all the time—off of the top of my head I remember sports, art, dance (when I was a theater major), guitar, creative writing… I’m sure I’m forgetting a few!

What was camp like when you were a camper and what are some (is one) of your favorite memories?
It was amazing—the classes and activities were great, but the people were really what really made it special.  I also remember that the food greatly improved over the years! One of my favorite memories is of the CIT trips to Wildwood.  During my last summer as a camper/CIT, the CITs were an extremely tight knit group, and we had so much fun together there.  (For all you current campers, Louise Schwarz was one of my bunkmates that summer.)

Another favorite memory is of the last night of camp every summer when, after the end-of-summer slide show, the counselors would line the Lake Inferior bridge holding candles while the campers walked past.  That was also one of my favorite memories from when I was a counselor, experiencing it from the other side. 

Another memory that current campers might appreciate is from my summer as a counselor.  It had only been four years since my last summer as a camper/CIT, so during pre-camp week I kept going to the staff pool during my free time, simply because I got such a huge kick out of being able to leave camp and cross Elmer-Shirley Road any time I wanted to!  (ditto for going into the staff trailer)  None of the counselors who hadn’t been campers there could understand why I was so excited about crossing a street…

Where are you located and what are you doing for work and fun?
I’m living in Charlottesville, VA where I’m a grad student (Ph.D. candidate) in Economics at the University of Virginia.  I’ll spare you the gory details of my dissertation... Most of my time is spent on dissertation-related work, but I also work as a Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant.  For fun, I am happy to do pretty much anything that gets me away from my computer for a few hours!  I hang out with friends, and sometimes take dance classes.  During the spring through fall I go hiking a fair amount, since Skyline Drive is only about a half hour away.  I also try to make it back up to NYC (where I lived between college and grad school, and which still feels like home) several times a year.

How do you think you were influenced by your Appel Farm experience?
Obviously, my current path in life has nothing to do with the arts (I spend all day every day doing math and programming).  But I still love the arts, and have a deep respect for those who make it their life’s work. Also, Appel Farm was the first place to really encourage me to challenge (or even drastically change) my ideas about who I am and what I can do.  If not for that, I would certainly not be doing what I’m doing now! 

What advice or suggestions do you have for present day Appel Farm campers?
Enjoy it, and don ’t take it for granted.  It’s over far too soon. 

SEARCHING FOR FUN?

You’ll find lots of fun in this word search because it is filled with Appel Farm activities!  See if you can find all of your favorites!

Word List

Afternoon Art, Architecture, Beach Day, Carnival, Ceramics, CIT Program, Concerts, Crafts, Creative Writing, Dance, Drawing, Fabric Arts, GREEN Core, Group Games, Journalism, Music, Painting, Printmaking, Recording Arts, Sculpture, Swimming, Technical Theater, Tennis, Theater, Video, Voice, Workshops

Wordle

Decode each of the cryptic messages!

Example:

Answer:

Banana Split!

See if you can get the Wordles on the right!

Stuck? Need a clue?

Stuck? Need a clue?

Send your answers to Cori at cnorth@appelfarm.org!

When Genes End and Personality Begins

[A little note: this is something that started in an “Authentic Writing” workshop that I took last weekend. Whenever I need some inspiration for my writing and a kick in the patootie I take one of Fred Poole and Marta Szabo’s “Authentic Writing Workshops”. It’s all memoir. We are all writing about that most important to us—our lives. One of the themes thrown out to follow or not was “Where Genes End and Personality Begins” or, in my case, “Who Am I?” If you don’t know what genes are look it up in Wikipedia or ask someone who does.

My daughter, Hira, has hazel eyes just like Ma. Ma was my adopted mom and, when I was a teenager, many people thought she was my sister. That pleased us both for different reasons.

“Spittin’ image,” the man said when he met me. He was in the Long Island Chorus and Orchestra founded and conducted by my step-father Ralph. Now, Ralph at that time still had most of his blond hair and bright blue eyes and was of slight build. Me? I was never of slight build even when I was little and have always had dark eyes and dark hair. “Spittin’ image.”

“Is it different that you didn’t have me?” I asked Ma when I was really little.

“Yes, it’s different,” said Ma.

“How? How?”

“The difference is that I chose you.”

Ma also said many times that she wished I had been born nine years old. She changed that tune when I reached nine. But that’s another story.

On my father’s side there is Nathan Milstein, my father’s first cousin, who my father once said was one of the five best violinists in the world. My father was never one to exaggerate. On his side was also the concert master of the Rio di Janeiro symphony and Arkady Kougell, a cellist. On my birth mother’s side there is my uncle Jack.

“When he was ten,” my late Aunty Belle of Glasgow said of her long estranged brother Jack, “We would turn off all the lights and he would play the most beautiful Beethoven piano sonatas in total darkness.”

I sang when I was four, picked out tunes on the little upright when I was five. I breathed music. By the time I was a teenager I had found my instrument—the clarinet and was the only high school student in a semi-professional orchestra on Long Island. Sadly, I knew that I would hate music if I pursued the classical clarinet as a career. I hate the feeling of competitiveness. It’s the kind of thing that takes me over.  And the classical clarinet? A dime a dozen in those days even if my tone really was superb. In those days many orchestras had a shadow orchestra with every instrument covered. At the whim of a conductor even the first chair could lose his place in an instant.

The Cornell Big Red Marching band put the coup de grace on my clarinet career. But it did get me out of compulsory R.O.T.C.

“Did he see you walk in?” Ma asked after I went backstage at a concert where Milstein had played.

“Why?”

“All Bluestone men walk the same way,” she said. I had been too shy to penetrate that crowd of sophisticated admirers back stage at Carnegie Hall. Most of them were speaking French or Russian anyway. But his dark haired little daughter looked like she could have been my younger sister.

Most of Milstein’s albums have pictures of him when he was very young. Then one day, when I was in my late fifties, I picked up an album with a picture of him in his early sixties. It was like looking in a mirror.

There is a picture of my daughter Hira and me at her wedding. Our smiles are mirrors—are created out of the same smile fabric—large teeth gleaming at each other and a sparkle behind them. My father’s sister, Essie, had that same smile but she would always make fun of mine. That was Essie.

My aunt Bebe, my father’s oldest sibling, was barely five feet tall. But she was a presence like Hira who is also just five feet tall. And like Hira’s mom who is just five feet tall. These three women, each in her way, were much taller than the measuring tape might indicate. And none were to be toyed with. Bebe had a passionate nature—sometimes bordering on shrill—that I can see in myself.

“You inherited the same ear structure,” the family doctor told me—referring to Ralph. Now that would be a miracle!

Hira was an easy child. Certainly she cried. All babies do. But she was easy. I was not. And neither is her daughter, Lucy. Maybe crazy intensity skips a generation. Lucy’s grandmother is also very intense. She, too, is dramatic. Lucy is very expressive. Sure would love to direct her in a play at Appel Farm. Who knows? Could be?

I have a photograph of Lucy. She was just beginning to crawl. We were playing peekaboo and I caught her just as she peeking around the corner. At that moment I realized that she was playing with me as much as I was playing with her. Where did that connection come from?

It is easy to make Lucy laugh, just as it is easy to make her mother laugh. Just as my brother and I spend half of our time on the phone laughing. Just like we would always know when Ma was on the phone with Siddy because she would be constantly laughing.

Hira has always been good with words. There is such ease in the way she writes and such ease in reading it. For my father writing was his second love and his letters from the War are publishable as they are. My birth mom probably would have been a writer if she hadn’t chosen medicine. I am sure her parents would have exerted great pressure against any choice that made writing her career. I have so many books that she won in literary competition.

Ma was a dedicated poet and her mom, Manna, was addicted to all kinds of word games. But it was I who named her Manna.  Who else but Manna could have dubbed our conversion to the religion of macrobiotics, “macroacrobatics?”

And Lucy? Lucy is a poet. At almost four years old she decided it is time to poop in the toilet. While I was visiting she emerged from the bathroom wide eyed.

“Grandpa,” she exclaimed. “It was so fast. It was like brown lightning just shot out of my butt.” Take that, Henry Miller!

And I have a video of Lucy singing a song from beginning to end. When she was three, she and I began singing songs that my father and I used to sing. In the car together. “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah.” Right after the War, when he had come home from France and Belgium and Germany after four years away. “I’ve Got Sixpence.”

And Lucy’s Dad, Todd is one of the most facilely brilliant computer people I know. One of the originals, started when personal computers were just happening.  Someone who knows what is in things and how they work. Not like me at all in that way. Took me about six trips to the hardware store to figure out how to seal my bathtub.  Nice to have that balance in the family. Nice if Lucy is able to pick that one up. It’s that Norwegian side of the family that gives Lucy her blond hair. There is a distinct shortage of blonds on my side of the family.

Nathan Bluestone, my father, Ma, Anne Werner, my birth mom, Ralph, Hira, Todd, Lucy—it’s all so confusing. Who got what from where? When all is said and done I don’t know where genes end and persona begins. Maybe it’s all just another way to try and figure out who I am. All I do know is that love is without end. And with that I have been blessed.