My Dog is Chelsea

Today my student fed me a dish called “Ukraine Food.”

Basically, it was a bunch of cut-up spaghetti topped with two large meatball-type-things, although they in no way resembled the pork/beef hunks that my Italian grandmother can craft—these were lighter, softer and mushier. Sofiya told me that they were made of turkey, beef and sour cream, which is decidedly against my diet, but you know what? It actually tasted quite good.

I think the positive flavor had something to do with the fact that I am getting sick, as I woke up this morning feeling like a heavy brick was resting on my chest and conditions haven’t improved since. So when I arrived at my student’s apartment, I was not only cold and achy, but I was secretly wanting chicken soup and Ukraine Food turned out to be a good stand-in.

Ick. I feel awful. I want to crawl into bed and sleep for the rest of the afternoon. No, actually, I want to pull out my sleeping bag, crawl inside of that, and then get under the covers for added heat. Speaking of sleeping bags, have I told you my dancing sleeping bag story?

I don’t think I have. Here goes:

So rewind to a few summers ago, when I was a sailing counselor at a girls’ sleepaway camp in Vermont. Every Sunday night was the all-camp variety/talent show, during which campers and counselors alike would perform Macarena-esque dances, skits, magic tricks, juggling, songs, etc. One particularly funny group of male counselors (yes, there were male counselors at a girls’ camp) orchestrated a series of random, meaningless skits—for instance, one week they dressed up as Snood-like creatures and ambled around on stage for a while, and the next week they got into their sleeping bags head first, wriggled out onto stage, and all at the same moment in the song playing overhead, they stood up on their knees, waved back and forth, and then continued crawling off stage.

Okay, so fast forward about a month. It is now alumnae camp, a weekend extravaganza for former campers and counselors to relive the incredibly awesome summers of their youth. The sleeping bag guys have decided that they want to reenact their skit for the alumnae talent show, except that a few of them had already headed back to the Real World and they will need some stand-ins to make the deal work. They ask me to participate, and I gladly accept.

But what I didn’t realize is that everyone else who would be on stage with me had a mummy sleeping bag with a two-way zipper. My bag at the time was a cheap fleece-lined rectangle with a single direction zipper, which meant that I would have no peep-hole when I was on stage.

No problem, right? I’d just worm across the stage, stand up and wave when it was time, and then worm right off. Well! Turns out, when your head is at the foot end of a dark sleeping bag it isn’t exactly easy to figure out which way is forward. Or sideways. Or backwards. So while my friends inched across the stage in a very calculated manner, going straight across from one side to the other, I was zig-zagging back and forth, crashing into everyone, trying to figure out where the hell I was.

It had worked smoothly in our dress rehearsal, but this was the real thing. The heat of the stage lights pierced through the fleece of my sleeping bag, and the audience roared at the sight of it all. To add to the hoopla, I got totally confused about the choreography and stood up to wave at entirely the wrong point in the song (more laughs ensued) and then continued inching my way backstage.

Or was I backstage? I was so worked up and freaked out at this point that I had no idea where in the hell I actually was, and the whole pitch-dark-sleeping-bag element was not helping. Now, believe you me, I am not one to get embarrassed in situations like this one. In fact, especially at camp, I live for the glory moments—and there are many—when I get to make a complete ass out of myself in the spotlight. This moment would have been no exception, but for the fact that I was legitimately concerned that I might inch my way off the edge of the stage entirely and that, I knew, would hurt.

Panicked and sweaty, I tried to worm my way out of my blindfolded cacoon. Unfortunately, my frenzied escape efforts were leading nowhere and the result was a kicking, wriggling, flailing giant gray lump in the middle of the stage yelling for help. This, of course, is the point where I figured out that I was definitely NOT backstage. Because the audience was laughing. Uncontrollably. At me. And who could blame them? It must have been quite the sight.

Finally, my friends, who had completed their worm-crawl across the stage and had been watching me publicly struggle for probably a full minute, came to my rescue. They unzipped my bag; I stood up, red-faced, overheated and hysterical—but laughing, of course, because even blindfolded glory moments are funny—and took a bow.

Someone later asked me if it was planned.

Yeah, right. Even cast as a frenzied sleeping bag I don’t have the acting skills to pull of that kind of stunt. It was a genuine mistake.