Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read Online Free Page B

instead of snickers, there was an almost universal “Aaaaawwwww” throughout the Barn as assorted mothers gushed: “Oh, that’s little Susie and Edwid! Aren’t they cute!”
    Before I could drink in this wave of admiration, however, the camera cut away again to a playground in Brewster, filled not with children, but with more hippies from the colony. The heading “Ode to Innocence” filled the screen for a moment, graffitied on a piece of fluorescent poster board, and then the camera zoomed back to the playground, where it showed a montage of grown-ups running into a sprinkler one by one, then piling onto a carousel loaded down with an assortment of pinwheels, umbrellas, flowers, balloons, and peace signs. Clearly, this was more the spirit of innocence that Alice had been looking to capture: the rest of
Camp
followed the hippies playing on seesaws and pushing each other on the swings for what seemed like a good fifteen minutes.
    The final shot, however, did feature two children again—Daisy Loupes’s twins, Sasha and Eli, aged three, walking naked, hand-in-hand, down one of the colony’s dirt roads. On Sasha’s tush was painted the word “THE” and on Eli’s the word “END.” Upon seeing this, the entire Barn went nuts—clearly, the colonists found this supremely cuter than anything else—and I was suddenly indignant that such a plum role hadn’t been awarded to me instead.
Why hadn’t I been filmed with the movie’s closing credits painted across my ass?
    For one frantic moment, I tried to edit the scenes in my head, refilming myself so that my dancing was more memorable, so that I didn’t look nearly as silly as I had, so that I’d switched places with Sasha. I even considered telling people that it was
really
me and Edwid,
not
the Loupeses, in the final scene.
    But the lights came on, and as the adults all went about congratulating each other on their performances, some kids in the balcony began chanting “Nudie Boy! Nudie Girl!” and throwing balled-up paper cups over the railing. Whether they meant to hit me and Edwid or Sasha and Eli really didn’t matter. Because only then did I remember where I was: I was in a barn full of Socialists. A freak among freaks.
    For years after the dubious premier of
Camp,
I practically got a migraine just thinking about it. It was an independent film that I could only hope would remain forever independent of such things as an audience and a projector. Ironically, I later became incensed not by the fact that my parents had been hippies, but that they had not been hippies
enough:
“You put me in some nudie Granola-head home movie, but didn’t take me to Woodstock?” I once shouted at my mother. “It was 1969. Silver Lake was only an hour away from Yasgur’s farm. What were you thinking?” It seemed galling to me that if I was going to have to be preserved for all time dancing naked on a beach while a state assemblyman played “Greensleeves” on a flute, at least I could’ve also gotten to say,
Well guess what, man? I saw Pete Townsend bash his foot through an amplifier.
    Sometimes, I wondered why I cooperated. Okay, I was four—generally not an age noted for its impulse control or savvy business sense. But I could have lain down on the sand and shrieked my head off like I did at my nursery school. Little kids think nothing of throwing a fit at the foot of an escalator, or ruining an entire day at the zoo over a forbidden hot dog, or whining loudly, “I’m bored. Can we go home?” during a funeral. They’re experts at defiance. Why hadn’t I exercised this age-given gift?
    For a time, I even wondered if Alice cast me and Edward in
Camp
because I was a pudgy girlie-girl and, for all intents and purposes, so was Edwid. Could she have sensed that we wouldn’t be the type of kids to object—we were already at a disadvantage—that we’d be hungrier, more vulnerable, more eager to please?
    Only years later, I’d meet a girl named Dyanne, whose Tennessee