Oh Yes They Call Him the Streak -- Kerry

Max went to summer camp with a padded foam sword and a new name - "Lightening". He joined his teacher, Rain, the teacher's sidekick "Slice" and a few other boys at the swordsmanship and medieval combat summer camp for kids, aptly titled "Wee Warriors," at Briscoe school last week.

This camp follows on the heels of circus school camp, dodge ball camp and god knows what other kind of camp that I can't remember anymore.

What delineates these camps from the summer camps of my youth is simple: they bear little or no resemblance to them except for maybe the brown bag lunch and the tube socks.

I once went to a "summer school" program at the grade school down the street in 1974. We made macrame bracelets and drank school-ration orange drink which in no way had a particle of orange juice in it. This we considered a good time; at least we were not hanging out with our parents and the gym was air-conditioned. I think it was here that I became a fledgling writer out of necessity. It gave me something to do in between the crafts and lunch hour. I wrote long, rambling letters proclaiming my love to the boy I had a crush on, Chuck, and then threw them in the garbage can before anyone could see them.

If we were really looking for rippin' it up a little bit more, we rode to the library on our banana bike seats with plastic streamers coming out of the purple glitter-flecked handlebars and listened to the Walt Disney record "The Streak" and "Eensie weensie teenie weeanie yellow polka dot bikini." We rolled around and chortled in our bean bag chairs each of the twenty times we played it in the "media room."

Or course we did go to real honest-to-god summer camps, but they didn't have exotic themes or involve trapezes. They involved more good old fashioned 1970's fun, like carpooling in our neighbors disco van that sported swivel captain seats, bubble windows shaped like a moon and mag wheels with gold hubcabs to the high school gymnasium.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with hazy summer memories of the 1970's. What color was your banana seat bike?