As the sun went down over Kent, Conn., one camper did 26 cartwheels. Another rode a unicycle. Others read poems or sang. All of them lost the talent show to a drag queen lip-syncing a mashup of the 1980s hit Juicy Fruit and a monologue from the 2017 movie Girls Trip. This was Camp John Waters, the Journal’s Jacob Passy reports: for nearly a decade the director of Hairspray and Cry-Baby has hosted hundreds of fans each September at Club Getaway, a campground in rural Connecticut. This year was the wrap party. “You don’t wait until it isn’t working,” Waters, 80, told the paper.
The camp started in 2017, the idea of event promoters David Parnes and Toffer Christensen, and not everyone bought in — Mink Stole, who has appeared in every Waters feature, thought it was a stupid idea, was proved wrong and hasn’t missed a year. It grew from two days to three once the organizers saw how far people were traveling — Scotland, Hungary and Japan this year. For roughly $700 to $1,500, campers get cabins hung with handmade posters, lake swims, dance parties, karaoke and meet-and-greets with Matthew Lillard, a Waters film alum and guest counselor, and Ricki Lake, who got her break in Hairspray. Lawyers and bankers eat beside burlesque performers and filmmakers.
Corned beef, costume contests and a chosen family
Then there’s the part that’s pure Waters. Three costume contests come with stage blood and deep-cut references: one night’s winners arrived as characters from Desperate Living, and the champions of the gore round recreated an impaled organ from Serial Mom out of leftover corned beef. Gia Clark-Grillo, 40, of New Jersey, never got to go to sleep-away camp as a kid; she calls this the psychedelic version. The alumni Facebook group, Filthiest Campers Alive, has hundreds of members; its moderator, Lou Knaub, is a bank district manager in New Jersey. Campers have married one another; between Septembers they meet in Waters’s hometown of Baltimore and at Mosswood Meltdown, his festival in Oakland, Calif. On Monday they raised one last toast — Kool-Aid, naturally — and went home.
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Two planning ideas hide in the corned beef. First, the campers didn’t buy a weekend; they bought a community, and community is one of the strongest predictors of well-being later in life. Behavioral: most retirement budgets are built around housing, health care and travel, and few carry a line for what actually keeps people well: people who expect you to show up. Put a number on it — the festival tickets, the trip to Baltimore, the standing dinner — the way you’d put a number on the roof. It isn’t a luxury. It’s maintenance.
The second is Waters’s, and it applies to anyone with a business or a career they love: he stopped while it worked, on a date he chose, with a wrap party instead of a slow fade. That’s the hardest exit there is, because nothing is forcing it. Owners who wait for a signal often get one — a health scare, a bad year, a buyer who can tell they’re tired — and by then someone else sets the price and terms. Picking your own last September is a planning decision. It goes on the calendar years ahead, and it ends with a toast instead of a shrug.