The Dynamic Duo of Max Power & A.C. Justice

Many summer camps I've heard of have some form or another of what's called a Color War. No, it's not a race thing, it's a big event where you divide all the campers and staff into two (or some times more) color-themed teams and then set them against each other in various contests of skill, athletic and otherwise. It's essentially Blackest Night but sans rings and with less zombies.

At Camp Frank A. Day, our Color War came twice a summer, once at the end of each one-month session. Some camps will switch up the teams every year, but the more intense Wars come from the places where the same people are on the same teams year after year with the new additions purportedly balancing out the remainder on either side. This made for year-long taunting and a sort of crazy pride due the deep-seeded rivalry that went above and beyond a camp activity.

When Color War came around, you quite literally did not speak to your friends on the other team for over 24 hours, as you were busy writing songs, rallying the troops and dressing up in crazy outfits; if you dropped a bystander in the midst of the 8 AM cheer-off between our Green and Grey factions in the flagpole area of our little piece of paradise in the middle of the woods, I can only imagine they'd be somewhat in awe of and terrified by the military precision and unbridled noise.

I had very much a love/hate relationship with Color War, as I dug the pride and creativity it inspired, but the spirit of competition got a little too intense for me sometimes, not to mention I became less and less of a fan of the early and long hours as I got older (I'll hold off the story about spending the night before a 6 AM wake-up pep talk at a bar in Leicester singing Def Leppard karaoke because you never know who might be reading).

However, I have to say that Color War did in some way help me come into my own as I grew up, as camp was really where I discovered myself as a leader, and this event was where I really gained confidence as de facto head cheerleader and speech-maker of the Green team once I hit 18 or so.

Of course me being me, Color War also brought out the side of me that loved to take a trip down to Salvation Army, grab whatever green crap was on sale, and throw together some ridiculous outfits (that was actually pretty much every side of me). I wore green sports jackets, tracksuits, skirts and whatever else I could get my hands on. Mostly though, I stuck to what I do best: super heroes.

One year I was sitting around with some other counselors and we were planning a lecture for the kids or something about sportsmanship and by accident I said "brad" instead of "bad." Rather than just leave this alone, me and my buddies slowly began developing the character of Brad Sportsmanship, a cheeseball do-gooder who just wanted everybody to get out there, play fair and have fun. Naturally when Color War came around that year, I brought Brad to life, complete with tights, cape, domino mask and a leap off the top of one of the buildings on the rim of the flagpole pavillion.

Another year (the same one as the aforementioned "Pour Some Sugar on Me" incident), me and three other guys got in our heads to go with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a theme. We tracked down some TMNT t-shirts for cheap, went with all green masks instead of multi-colored, approximated the weapons as best we could without injuring anybody, then tore into the first Green team meeting of the War in my (ironically silver) Honda Civic, Turtles theme song blaring.

(I was of course Rafael, as I feel he is the avatar of intelligent but cool people, as opposed to Michaelangelo being for slackers, Donatello being for nerds, and Leonardo being for kiss-ass jerks, but we can expand on that another time)

And then one year me and my amigo Alex Verdaguer did this:

Allow me to relate the origin of how Max Power (him, the one with the big arms) and A.C. Justice (me, the one with the...normal-sized arms) came to be.

I'm gonna say it was the summer of 2001, so by this point I was well and deeply back into comics hardcore. I had my day off every Wednesday, so I'd drive back to Newton, hit up Newbury Comics, and do my best to keep on top of the new books. This usually meant having to bring them back to camp with me if I wanted to read them, where they suffered the ravages of being in the middle of woods and eight 14-year-olds wanting to read them, but so it goes.

Some of my buddies humored my growing obsession by chatting comics with me, and since it was camp (where creativity and complete lack of shame are both in wonderfully high supply) this led to us creating our own costumed alter egos. We created our own little Justice League of East Brookfield (the burg where our camp was) and I even sketched up what I thought we'd look at (sadly those are back in Boston, but I'm going to seek them out over Christmas). We took a humorous bent to the whole thing and had some real fun.

I was A.C. Justice, the Batman figure of the group mostly because I wanted to incorporate my ridiculous Edge & Christian sunglasses into my costume. My pal Alex, also my co-captain on our high school wrestling team, became the Superman with a half-shirt, Max Power. Eli Freedman, the aspiring Rabbi of our crew, took on the role of Jacob Thunder, and began carrying around an untied tetherball with the Star of David painted on that he called his "Thunderball." Steve Sarsons, our very British friend, settled on "The All-American" Mike Smith for his alter ego, patterned a bit on Captain America but with his only super power being the ability to do a half-convincing American accent. Brian Coccaro crafted the Marcus Von Jacqued identity, with the weird hook being that he was a Swedish bodybuilder who liked to wear shades and tight fluorescent tops or something. Our junior-most member Mike (and I can't believe I was blanking on his last name) was legitimately a star runner for his high school, so he was the resident speedster, Bolt Javelin, "able to travel at slightly above the speed of an average person." Finally, I forget Matt Corley's codename, but he was essentially Green Arrow, with the caveat that he wasn't that great with a bow (he and I were the camp's archery instructors, having actually gotten certified to be so, and neither of us could hit the target).

Our superheroic IDs had a little time in the sun, but didn't get much use until Alex and I decided to drag ours out as seen in the pic above. Steve joined us as well, wrapping an American flag around his green gear, but sadly I don't have a photo handy. Eli and Brian, who were on Gray, were totally bummed out that they didn't think of doing something similar, but didn't want to steal our ideas.

Anyways, as you can see, the ladies loved us and we were the height of cool. Just another day at the office.

Y'know, I miss camp frequently once the summer hits (except for the hours...and the work) for many reasons, mostly people, but the freedom to freely dress up like a deranged cross between Ric Flair, Impulse, and an Initiative guy from Buffy is definitely up there.

T.A.P. - The Adventure Project

When I was a camp counselor way back in the late 90's/early 00's, there was nothing I hated more than going on field trips (I had long since conquered mosquitoes by adopting an "if you don't show fear, they won't bite" attitude and refusing to wear bug spray, which totally worked). I hated six hour roundtrip bus rides, I hated having to be out in the sun in one location for hours, I hated having to choose between crappy packed sandwiches or over-priced beach/amusement park food, and I hated having to deal with my campers wanting to know when the fuck we were leaving.

One time we took a trip to Mystic, Connecticut (ironically now the home of Megan's parents and somewhere I go many times a year), which they had taken only the oldest kids to the year before with great success but which was a disaster when you factored in a bunch of 12-13 year-olds who are too old to go to the aquarium but too young to spend the day shopping. Rather than put my boys through the agony of spending half a day in an Army/Navy store where they couldn't afford anything, I ponied up my own cash to take them to the movie theater and kill a few hours; unfortunately, there were only two movies playing, and since none of them were old enough to see an R-rated horror flick, I ended up sitting through Runaways Bride with eight 13-year old boys (and most of the rest of the camp, who had reached a similar impasse).

After I picked up a bit of tenure and became assistant director of my assigned age group, the only time I really threw my administrative weight around was to make sure that if I didn't have a day off when we went on trips, I at least hung around the camp and did busy work rather than go through those weekly nightmares. My buddy Tom Rosoff was of a similar demeanor and would pull the same routine.

One week while the rest of the camp was at Water Country or something, Tom and I were sitting around trying to figure out how to kill time between naps since we had no intention of actually mowing the fields or whatever job was left for us. We were sitting on the deck of the camp's boathouse overlooking Lake Quacumquasit, Tom most likely smoking his 25th cigarette of the day, when we gazed across the water at the ominous green mountain located on the other side and suddenly both came to the same conclusion:

"We should do T.A.P."

"T.A.P." was our acronym for "The Adventure Project," which was a scheme we had been working on all that summer. Basically, both Tom and I had been attending Camp Frank A. Day for nearly a decade at this point, yet neither of us really knew what was on the other side of the lake. Sure, we had driven the road that wound around plenty of times and seen the nice summer homes and random yarn stores, but we both found it intriguing that there was this huge mound of forest nobody we knew had ever explored and became convinced something magical lay at its summit.

We grabbed my trusty DV camera and went about documenting what we knew would be the odyssey of a lifetime (not thinking it would also be video proof we had not been doing our jobs that day). Fueling up on some Subway we had run into town to snag earlier and hopping in Tom's beat-to-shit white Saab, we began our journey to T.A.P. Mountain. Watching the tape later, we enjoyed pointing out to fellow counselors (not campers) that I kept swerving the camera around during our drive over to avoid getting Tom smoking on camera while still allowing him to provide his portion of the narrative flow.

Arriving at the base of the hill (we gave up our "mountain" misconceptions pretty quick), we ditched Tom's car in the least illegal looking place to park, checked the camera batteries (all good) and began our ascent. Right off the bat we saw a "No Trespassing" sign and took turns filming each other chuckling in it's direction, or literally laughing at danger if you will.

It's times like this I wish my friend Nelson hadn't borrowed a cable for my camera and never given it back the next summer as I can't provide documentation of the things we saw on T.A.P., but they were something. Not even twenty paces up and we spotted an abandoned looking house straight out of the Blair Witch Project we took care to avoid because while we weren't afraid of the law, we were terrified of ghosts.

A little ways after the haunted house, we started venturing into unoccupied terrirtory, which meant a shitload of thornbushes and us regretting wearing shorts. Tom had burned himself on his calf a week earlier while playing with some incense or something so we showed the scar close-up on camera and claimed that he had gotten it from one of the thorns and we had to cauterize the wound with his lighter.

We made it through the briar patch, but hit a bit of a dead end not long after as we came up against a fence surrounded with barbed wire. Luckily this was only a minor setback as we had no problem blatantly lying to the people we had told we would climb this mountain all summer. We went back down a little ways to a clearing, filmed Tom saying we had gotten past the barbed wire and that we were headed to the top. We went back down a little more to what looked like it could have easily been the top (we were surrounded by woods, it's not like people were going to know) and filmed a triumphant Tom kissing a tree and us congratulating ourselves.

Our mission unaccomplished but committed to film nonetheless, we drove back to camp proud of our adventures. Once there, Tom dared me to ride on the roof of his car while we slowly pulled in since nobody was there, then proceeded to speed off the road and swerve wildly through the unpaved areas of camp, nearly killing me in the process because he can be a dickhead. In a moment of supreme karma, he ended up hitting a stump and knocking a large portion of the exhaust pipe clean off the bottom of his car. We told our bosses this was what prevented us from mowing the fields.

There is no moral to this story.