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.

Remember the X-Men arcade game?

There are those who would have you believe that Pacman or Mortal Kombat or NFL Blitz or Ms. Pacman is the greatest arcade game of all-time, but these people are crackheads, liars and fools. The one and only true claimant to that prestigious throne is the legendary X-Men arcade game of 1992.

Those who experienced the magic in their youth know what I'm talkin bout (I'd include you kids with your emulators, but seriously, this was something you needed to do live and in color). The truly fortunate knew the X-Men game as that massive construct over in the corner that spread its action across two full-size screens in such a manner that characters went dark if they ran across the middle too fast. You recall getting to one of the six joystick arrays as fast as you could and being sure to have plenty of quarters in tow, lest you lose your spot or have to leave to refill and then come back with only Dazzler available to play as (crammed up in the corner spot where it was nigh impossible to see the action no less). You remember not caring that Sentinels were the same size as you as you dispatched them by the dozen and not asking why the Juggernaut needed some sort of bazooka.

The X-Men arcade game followed Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Dazzler--provided you had at least five friends--as they battled through the streets of (maybe) New York, the Savage Land, multiple high tech bases and elsewhere trying to save Professor X and Kitty Pryde, who had been kidnapped by Magneto. In addition to being able to punch, slash and kick, each character got a special mutant power that you stored and saved for the bosses (or when you were fighting too many lizard dudes and got frustrated). Of course since Wolverine just being able to pop his claws wouldn't be too visually impressive and you didn't want Colossus to be flesh-toned the bulk of the game, Wolvie got "adamantium laser claws" that shot big ass beams while Pete flexed his metal muscles to release a huge energy spark and yell like a constipated grizzly bear.

It was awesome.

Another thing that was awesome was the graphics. It was 1992 and we had just barely gotten our minds wrapped around Super Nintendo, so even for an arcade game, X-Men had and incredibly slick, vibrant look plus wicked G.I. Joe-quality animation sequences. But as killer as the graphics were, the sound was even better, as the boom of this game echoed through the arcade, which rocked since it was ridiculously quotable, whether the Blob was insisting "Nothing stops...the Blob!" or Wendigo was screeching his name time and again as you beat the white fur off him.

I've got two very vivid memories of the X-Men arcade game. The first occured one summer somewhere in the neighborhood of 1993 when I was like 11 and at Camp Frank A. Day. At the end of every July, we would take a trip to the Riverside amusement park (today Six Flags New England) for a day of rides, games and bad food. However, what I would get most excited about, being averse to heights and shitty at getting rings around milk bottles, would be holing up in the big ass arcade and stretching out the $15 they'd give us for the day at the X-Men arcade game. This particular year, I had to have been at the game for hours, alternating characters as I ran to get quarters, but teaming with the same group of seven or eight kids to get all the way to the end. It took us hours, and we barely noticed that a massive thunderstorm had formed around the park, shutting most everything down (that we were in an open air structure and failed to note the massive quantities of rain and huge lightning crashes I like to think speaks to our dedication and nothing else). I was mindful of the time and that I was going to miss the bus back to camp if we didn't clear Asteroid M pretty soon, but as we were on the precipice, the storm surged and knocked out the power of every machine in the arcade. When it rebooted, there we were, crestfallen and back at the opening screen.

I believe it was the next year that my family took a vacation to Disney World and nestled in the tiny game room of our Polynesian-themed resort hotel I located a more modest version of the X-Men arcade game with only one screen and four players. It was rare that there was anybody else around the game outside of occasionally my little sister, so for the most part, I wound up playing the game myself, which I had never really done before. On the smaller screen and able to select your player as opposed to the characters being married to a particular location, I developed a new appreciation for Cyclops, who I had previously stayed away from by virtue of him being the upper left-hand corner guy. His optic blasts were way easier to control than just about any other mutant power and the guy had a mean jumping spin kick for a lanky white dude. All on my own I never made it to far into the deep levels, but I did rack up killer high scores as Cyclops that got erased each night when the place shut down.

It wasn't until college that I made the miraculous discovery that the X-Men arcade game was actually based on an aborted 1989 animated pilot called Pryde of the X-Men. Neelless to say I hopped right on eBay and made that sucker mine; it has been a prized possession for several years now. A whole other post would be required to expound on the virtues of Australian Wolverine calling Toad a "bloody dingo" and creepy child molester Nightcrawler hitting on Kitty Pryde, but some day soon I will find the strength.

Bottom line: my wedding is coming up in about a month and a half and if you can find one of those coin-op suckers, it would not be an inappropriate gift.

Paragraph (Plus) Movie Reviews: Adventureland

More than a paragraph because I wanna give a standard review and then a slightly more personal-to-me take on this one.

I have definitely seen films that are more technically proficent, funnier, and flat out better than "Adventureland" pretty recently, but I haven't seen a movie that gave me the kinda enjoyment and satisfaction I got with this one in years. It's a very intangible and hard to pinpoint thing, because like I said I know I've seen plenty of good movies lately, but something about this one just caught and connected with me on a level that made me grin. Admittedly, I think a large chunk of that came from the fact that I felt a personal empathy to the main character* as well as a sort of nostalgic link to his situation (I've never worked at an amusement park, but his summer job and the environment he was in definitely took me back to my summer camp days in terms of tone), so your mileage may vary on how much you dig the flick. That aside, I do think it held up well just on its own merits. It was certainly not what I was expecting (and, to be fair, what I feel was advertised in the trailers and commercials), which was another Apatow-style screwball comedy. Instead, it was a far more earnest and heartfelt story about young love that got its laughs from fairly realistic events as opposed to outright absurdity. It felt like a more reined-in "Superbad" (which makes sense, as it was the same director, Greg Mottola, who also wrote it) with a touch of "Almost Famous." The people and situations feel like ones you might actually encounter, which gives the movie more weight than something like "40-Year Old Virgin" or whatever. To wit, Jesse Eisenberg is a big reason I dug this so much, and I believe it's because he is what I want Michael Cera to be; he's able to do the "Oh, I'm such a dork, but I'm really sweet" routine and score with the awkward comedy, but not every line is for laughs and he's credible in his serious scenes; you believe that girls would fall for this guy and you're rooting for him. I was probably most concerned about Kristen Stewart going in, because she looked so wooden in just the commercials I saw for "Twilight" and certainly came off like a ditz promoting that movie, but man, she proved my expectations wrong in this one. She's incredibly natural and pulls off perfectly playing the hot girl who is also totally attainable, not an easy feat. It was also cool seeing Ryan Reynolds being given a chance to stretch, not playing the uber nice guy or the cocky prick for once, but instead a very flawed dude whose behavior doesn't match up with his exterior at all. As for Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, literally all their scenes are in the trailer and I kinda presume they (and Reynolds) were used primarily to get people to buy tickets, which is fine, because I was much more intrigued by Eisenberg, Stewart and the rest of the young cast. Also, great soundtrack. I really just loved this movie. A great balance of humor and heart with a love story I cared enough about that I was on the edge of my seat to see if it all worked out.

*So why did I relate to Jesse Eisenberg's character, James Brennan, so much? Well, even though he was supposed to be 22, he sure reminded me a whole lot of me circa 16-19 (or so). He's a kinda awkward but sorta charming guy who becomes convinced very very quickly that if he makes a connection with a girl, he has found true love. Yeah, that was me in high school for sure. I can't tell you how many times I would just be hanging out with a girl and become convinced she was "the one" just because I was so desperate to fall in love. And much like James, there were a lot of times where I'd find myself turfed because an onstensibly cooler guy who also happened to be kind of a prick came along. It's hard to get into more detail if you haven't seen the movie and/or lived in my headspace for a bit (and that second one is tough), but now that I'm pretty far removed from that guy who I was 10 years ago and have actually found that elusive love I was always searching for, it was really kinda neat to relive those days in a way without having to actually, y'know, go through them again. If you had a similar period in your life (or even if you haven't), I recommend this movie.

X-Clue at Camp Frank A. Day

For better or worse, the X-Men animated series of the 90's played a large role in steering my younger days as a comic book fan. I remember well actually insisiting on coming home early from trick or treating on Halloween night in 1992 because Fox was debuting the series premiere, "Night of the Sentinels part one," in prime time. While I know the show didn't match the technical excellent of Batman: The Animated Series, which also debuted on Fox in the same season, there is plenty to be said of a show that can produce such inspired lunacy as this and this without anybody actually being allowed to punch anybody else and every gun down to what the beat cops were carrying subbed out for lasers.

Oh, also: best theme song ever.

But I digress.

A decade after that fateful Halloween night, I decided what was missing in my life as a 20-year old was X-Men: The Animated Series. Thus, I went online and scoured eBay until I found somebody unloading all 76 episodes on glorious VHS (the way they were meant to be watched). Over the course of that magical summer, I relived every incredible moment from Cable proclaiming himself "the wild man of Borneo" to that weird episode where Cyclops gets stranded in a desert town ruled by Solarr.

The next summer, I was spending my twelfth and final year at Camp Frank A. Day in East Brookfield, Massachusetts. One of the other counselors, Andy Sydney, and I were sitting around one day and somehow got to talking about our mutual love of the X-Men cartoon. When he heard I had the whole series on video, he started nearly salivating, so on my next day off, I grabbed the tapes, and during our free time, we would watch and relive the magic. Various other counselors who also had a nostalgic spot for the show and campers who had no idea what the fuck we were watching would join us off and on and like that X-Men became a Camp Day phenomenon.

At the same time, Andy and I were also working on converting the board game Clue into an evening activity that could be played, y'know, not on a board. This was something that was done every summer, usually by having a bunch of staff members dress up in goofy costumes stationed at various points around the camp and coming up with little challenges the kids needed to do in order to get them to pony up a false suspect, weapon, etc.; the campers ran around figuring out who didn't kill who where with what by process of elimination and then ran back to whoever was running the game to report their findings with the first team who got it right winning something.

I thought it was kinda lame.

However, Andy and my newly rekindled love for the X-Men cartoon and our desire to not plan the same shitty game of Clue we did every year mashed up into a glorious moment on zen in which we determined that it was our destiny and the answer to our problems to create...X-Men Clue (or X-Clue).

Honestly, the rules and basic structure of the game itself weren't all that much different from how we normally did Clue, but we were determined to crank it up to eleven by making everything surrounding the evening as balls crazy as possible and in the process create the greatest tribute to our own golden age of animation possible.

Step one was finding a kid who had one of those hardcover Ultimate Guide to the X-Men encyclopedia things and stealing/borrowing it. Step two was researching the shit out of every character until we could come up with a plausible way to work over two dozen heroes and villains into a murder mystery that pre-teens would understand (and that hopefully not get us fired, but that was a secondary priority). Step three was hitting up the awesome Salvation Army in the next town and grabbing all the funky outfits and materials we could get to create budget X-Men costumes in the middle of the woods. It helped significantly that pretty much every other counselor was as jazzed about this (or at least about doing something other than what we did every year for Clue) as we were and were willing to put the extra time into creating costumes both from the stuff we bought and from their own clothes (when you're a camp counselor, you own some wacky outfits--it's kind of a pre-requisite). They also were down with learning as much about whatever character we asked them to play as possible, and fortunately I was a big enough nerd to type out probably way-too-comprehensive bios to help with that (today I get paid for it!).

But the coup de grace was our plan to do something never attempted before in the annals of Camp Frank A. Day Clue: shoot a mini-movie prequel to set up an hour-long evening activity.

Fortunately, my friend Nelson DeWitt was something of a savant in the then-burgeoning field of digital video and computer editing, so despite being out in the middle of the fucking woods with a budget of $0, I say in all humility that we put together a pretty killer five-ten minute short setting up X-Clue: Who Killed Jean Grey (oh c'mon, you were really expecting somebody else to be the victim? Plus, that way we could explain to the kids that the girl we had playing her wasn't really dead, she just came back as Phoenix).

The gist was that Magneto was organizing his Brotherhood to do something nefarious, Professor X gets wind, contacts the X-Men telepathically, and they spring into action to stop the baddies as the animated theme song is dubbed into the background. Really, it was just an excuse to show all the various folks in their costumes and work in the mind-blowing special effects we conjured up with the aforementioned budget, leading to the climax where Jean Grey is wandering around looking for Cyclops then turns to the camera and goes, "You? What are you doing here?!" before we cut back to Xavier reading a newspaper and then looking up to go, "Jean! She's...gone" (dramatic acting at its finest courtesy of my buddy Josh Lieberman wearing a skullcap and sitting in a wheelchair we snatched from the infirmary). We played the mini-movie for the kids right before dinner (actually dragging a TV into the flagpole area and using a long-ass extension chord), then blasting the theme over the loudspeaker afterwards as we all ran out from various hiding places in costume and then...realized we had no fight scene or anything choreographed, so we just kinda shoved each other a lot.

Some highlights of the movie and subsequent game:

-The movie started with my friend Adam Melnick as Magneto in a ridiculous looking tinfoil helmet with a purple towel as his "cape." We simulated his powers by having him wave at a sliding door and then kicking it shut from off camera (but you could still see my foot if you watched closely) and then having him gesture at a fork, shake it from off camera, then toss it to him (he almost missed catching it).

-Filming a lame fight with my junior conselour Andrew in a flannel and jeans with his hair gelled up and butter knives taped in between his fingers and somebody whose name escapes me wearing a goofy wig we found as Sabretooth that ended up being a zillion times cooler because it was in the rain and Nelson cut it in slow-mo and dubbed in the sound effect of Wolverine's claws popping from the movie.

-Simulating Nightcrawler teleporting by filming the guy dressed as him standing there, having him run off camera, Nelson running in and throwing up a cloud of GoldBond (TM) where he was standing, and then cutting it to look like he just disappeared.

-Andy doing the least inspired Gambit costume in the history of ever by just wearing a white dress shirt and khakis (also, he's got bleach blond hair). He tried to salvage it with a terrible accent and then fucked up throwing a card at the camera, but we left it all intact because we thought it was hilarious.

-Me dressing as Iceman by wearing a silver spraypainted headband and a grey sweatshirt with a silver X painted across the front. My only use of my "powers" was blowing on a soda and us editing in a "jingle" sound effect to indicate that I had frozen it.

-My friend E.J. Lawrence doing the entire awful Halle Berry "Do you know what happens to a Toad when it gets struck by lightning?" speech as Storm for no reason other than it made us laugh.

-This girl Phoebe who was also a fan of the cartoon producing an amazing (and kinda eerie) Jubilee costume like the day after we asked her to.

-My former camper, Aaron, creating an equally incredible Pyro costume. I forget how we did it, but through the magic of the movies, we made it look like he lit a table on fire.

-Nelson climbing a fucking tree so we could film him for three seconds as Beast and then dubbing himself in saying "Fascinating" ala the cartoon.

-My British chum Angela Ford not complaining too much when I gave out character assignments and she was Lilandra (her costume was a tinfoil nightmare).

-Me not getting fired (man I almost got fired a lot) for convincing two girls who couldn't have been more than 17 to dress up as the White and Black Queens (I was only 21 at the time, so I didn't feel nearly as creepy asking).

-Deciding to pony up and paint my face silver for the actual game and then being immediately outdone by my boy Jason Solomon, also a member of the Newton South wrestling team, painting his entire fucking body silver to be Colossus. He was not very happy the next morning.

And really I can't top that last one.

Strangle enough, that summer and that activity went a long way towards me figuring out that maybe I could make a living doing something comic book-related. So it's not only a fond memory, but actually a fairly momentous event in my life. Whodathunkit.

Thanks, X-Men: The Animated Series.

Oh, and the killer was Mystique. Note to aspiring writers: you can cover up just about any continuity hole by using a shapeshifter.

(Also, if you wanna check out a blog dealing with nothing but summer camp, give my boy Jim Gibbons' Nothing More American a look and tell him I sent you)