What's billionaires' camp got that Brownie and Fly-up day camp didn't?

I don't have a lot of experience with summer camp.

The summer I was 9.5, I spent a week at a Brownie-Fly Up day camp. (A fly up is someone who's graduated from Brownies but hasn't yet joined a Girl Scout troupe.) This was shortly after my new baby sister was born, and I think my parents wanted to give me and my sister Kath (who is older, so got to go to Girl Scout day camp) a break from housework drudgery and childcare. Kath's camp, I believe, had one overnight. 

My camp was nothing much.

Along with my school friends Carol and Mary A, and a couple of younger girls - true Brownies - from my school, I took a bus each morning up Main Street to Leicester Junior College, where camp was held.

We did crafts, played games, walked down to Stiles Lake for a swim, hung around, and got back on the bus in late afternoon. The one skill I learned was how to weave a sit-upon out of newspapers. Which, of course, got all damp from sitting on the ground, leaving newsprint on the rear of our shorts. 

I made friends with a fellow Maureen, who was fun to hang out with. (Post-camp, we had a year or so of correspondence. Even though we lived a couple of miles from each other - she was next parish over - I don't think I ever saw her again.)

As camp experiences go, mine was pretty low key. Nothing like the camps I read about in the cheesy books I read, or the cheesy shows I watched on TV. Those were camps where handsome, wholesome WASP girls learned archery and sailing, told spooky stories around the campfire, and developed crushes on the lifeguard. Or even like the camp Allan Sherman famously satirized in his song "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah."

My camp was also nothing like the so-called "summer camp for billionaires" held each summer in Sun Valley, Idaho. Where, at a conference run by Allen & Company (an investment bank), movers meet shakers, shakers meet movers, and they all have a rollicking good time moving and shaking.

Last year, camp was called on account of covid, so I'm sure the campers were all happy to get back to hanging out with each other, wining, whining (about regulations and taxes, no doubt), and generally who's who-ing with the tech, finserv, media and other elite in-crowders.

Who was there?

Well, Mark Zuckerberg was. I believe he surfed into Idaho directly from his widely viewed (widely meme'd, widely ratio'd) July 4th flag-waving ride on his $12K hydrofoil board.

Families have taken part in the past, but this year, summer camp for billionaires was for the billionaires themselves (and maybe an SO, but no kiddos).

So Zuck had to settle for being there with his professional sidekick, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO. 

Jeff Bezos came to get a bit of camping in before he takes off in his rocket ship for parts unknown. 

Media mogul Barry Diller was there to tell us that movies are dead, and what streaming services stream "ain't movies." Pffft to the Dill. I call sour grapes. I call old fogey. Diller's wife, Diane Von Furstenberg was there, too. (Note to self: buy a DVF wrap dress this fall. I had a couple of them when they first became a thing in the mid-1970's and they were ultra comfy. I can say I wish I'd hung on to the two that I had, but that was 30 pounds ago, so...) 

Warren Buffet jetted in, as did Bill Gates, who spent some time mea-culpa-ing about his divorce. Apple's Tim Cook was there, but I don't think he had any mea-culpa-ing to do for himself. 

New England Patriots' owner Bob Kraft was in attendance, sporting his trademark sneakers. As was NFL head man Roger Goodell. (Gag me with that meet up, but at least he wasn't in a massage parlor getting a handy.)

I'm sure camp was all fine and dandy, a good time had by all, etc. 

And, no, I'm not jealous. In truth, the only camp that would interest me was one where I could curl up in a hammock, drinking Arnold Palmer's and eating BLT's, and reading junk novels. Dealmaking with a bunch of billionaires? Even if I were a billionaire, I wouldn't be interested. Good thing, because I'm pretty sure that the event planners at Allen & Company don't know how to get a hold of me with an invite. They're probably not even aware that I exist. (The nerve.)

But I hope they had fun schmoozing and boozing.

I'm pretty sure that, unlike 1959 Brownie and Fly-up camp, they didn't put on a show on the last day.

Everyone had to do something or other, and somehow I was picked to dance a can-can with a Protestant girl named Nancy. I think we were paired because we were the same height. Nancy was a blonde, too, which may have factored in. But she was one of those fancy, WASPY, Protestant blondes I imagined went to "real" sleepover camp to learn archery. What was she doing with a bunch of parochial school Brownies and Fly-ups?

I volunteered to supply the costumes: striped cotton skirts, one blue (mine), one red (my sister Kath's), that had stagecoaches depicted on them. Not exactly oo-la-la can-can skirts, but they had voluminous enough material that you could swish them around and do high kicks. 

When performance time came, I. Just. Couldn't.

I pretended I was sick and lay down under a fir tree. I have no idea whether the show went on, with Nancy doing the dance solo. I did get the skirt I lent her back. 

The other thing I remember from the last day of Brownie and Fly-up camp was the counsellors and the cutie blond lifeguard heading off to a secret place to make S'mores for themselves. They were found out, and my school mate Kathy cried. I remember the cutie blond lifeguard comforting her, as she wept, face down in the pine needles, under the same droopy pine where I'd taken shelter. I was pissed. Not at Kathy, of course. But at those counsellors, at that cutie blond lifeguard. What were they thinking? Couldn't have waited to push us all onto the buses before they made S'mores for themselves?

Bet that never happened at billionaire summer camp.