KlezKanada

If you follow directions from KlezKanada, you will find yourself detouring west to head up on Hwy 87 instead, in New York. The drive across the top of New York is, indeed, quite pleasant, but I have found the border crossing most frequently congested where 87 runs into Canadian highway 10. Instead, we take 89 to the end. Usually it takes just a few minutes to follow the small local Canadian road 133 into 35, to 15, and thence across pont Champlain where we merge with 10 and all struggle at tepid speed (if we're lucky—it can be worse) through Montreal, finally emerging north of Montreal ready to dash the last 90 kilometers to the road that leads to St. Donat and CBB, where one arrives two hours later.

This year, traveling alone, I managed to look suspicious at the border and ate up an hour at the crossing. All was eventually well and I arrived in time to get dinner: tonight, hamburgers and hot dogs. The big excitement, of course, was just rolling through the camp gate, picking up my packet, and starting to see friends that I hadn't seen for months or even, in many cases, since camp last year. My main task this year is to do a camp newsletter. Since we have done no planning (other than me shlepping my wife's laptop and an inexpensive home all-in-one printer/scanner), and since I sent Hy the sample newsletter calling for participants only the night before, I am pleasantly surprised to see that the sample was printed out and placed by every place setting.

After dinner we all made our way to the main rec hall where we crowded in for introductions. With staff numbering about 50 people, all of us doing interesting things requiring a few minutes of explanation, this can take a while. This year, with the fans off to accommodate the lack of microphone, Camp co-director Jeff Warschauer encouraged us all to be brief. I was brief and didn't talk about the Hebrew and computers stuff or the lectures, just mentioned that I would be doing a daily camp newsletter starting the next day; first issue available by lunch Tuesday. Volunteers? Participants?

That was enough. Several people came up and offered to write stories, take photos, even to draw caricatures. Roberta Levine, a wonderful drummer, friend, and fellow desktop publisher who lives in Buffalo volunteered to help lay out the actual paper. I was set, and wasn't even sure yet what I was set to do.

In the end, we all wandered down to the Retreat Center where there were refreshments and the first cabaret started up. As at KlezKamp, the Cabaret is where camp participants, singly or in groups, get to perform a song or two. The variety and quality can be amazing. You are just as likely to hear Bob Dylan being transformed into something having nothing to do with klezmer or Yiddish as to hear amazing Yiddish song. Tonight we seem to bounce between the extremes, and it is a pleasure to sit and sip on some coffee. It is about this point that I establish that I have forgotten the sample newsletter, logo and all, back at the house and have not loaded them on the laptop. Further, despite claims that there will be internet access here, it appears to not yet be working—all I know is that camp staff say that something is broken on the supplier side, but that it should be available by late in the evening. If so, tomorrow I'll have Judy, my wife, who is still stateside for a couple of days (she will fly into Montreal on Wednesday, God willing) find the files and e-mail them to me.

In the meantime, I decide to recreate the newsletter logo after breakfast. For now, I do some sample layouts with some materials that I have already been handed. Not only have several campers shown up with laptops, but all seem to have the now-ubiquitous USB drives: the little thumb-sized drives that plug into a computer's USB port. In particular, Renah and Keith Wolzinger have some great material for me to use, including a camp song that I'll post to this weblog shortly.

Photos on this page are from Bob Blacksberg's wonderful archive of KlezKanada photos. You can browse the entire archive starting from rblacksberg.com/page3.html.