That B*tch Broke My Glasses

Summer camp, shame, and spectacles.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.

This is the jukebox at Rosella, a new restaurant where they will know me as a regular very, very soon.

Have we talked about summer camp? Have I made you suffer that yet? The shortest story is from age 10 to age 20 I attended and worked at Camp Ramah in California, aka Jewish Disneyland, every summer. You can’t send every ten-year-old on an airplane alone across the country to a place she’s never been, knowing not a soul. I was such a child, however. A summer away from my brother and a diet consisting mostly of gummy worms? I’d have bartered a kidney to attend.

The summer I was 12, a tall skinny bitch named Michelle stepped on my glasses and broke them. Twice. Baby: I said twice. You know what’s not embarrassing enough? Being 12. Let’s shatter Shani’s pancake-thick glasses just to make sure these memories still exist in their full potency when she’s 41, mkay?