Penultimate camp week

It’s the boys’ second to last week of camp, and already I’m feeling a strange nostalgia for it. All of the kids at the camp are so little - they follow giant Bobby around like little ducklings - and my kids are so big. I don’t know if they’ll both want to try to be CITs there next year; it’s impossible to know what they’ll be like by next spring. I do think they enjoy having somewhere to go and getting to play with other kids, even little ones. But the day is coming when these sweet little no-frills summer camps are in the rear window, and I’m sad about that.

This also means school is coming up fast. I ordered Bobby a new backpack, Theo gets a haircut tomorrow, and I need to go through his pants to get rid of the ones that are too small that he insists on still wearing. Gone are the days of big expensive school supply lists, thank god, but I do still need to make sure I at least send them to school with some basics like pens and pencils and notebooks. Theo has an orientation two weeks from today and then they start Wednesday the 12th. I still have zero plan for how to pick them up, now that they get out together; I want them to walk somewhere away from the school so I’m not stuck in crazy school pickup traffic with nowhere to pull over, but I don’t know where that is yet. We’ll figure it out in those first weeks I’m sure. I also still want to explore them taking the bus home, but that can wait. 

This is an important and stressful week for my event. My price increase is Friday night, which means I should be getting a decent bump of people; also the refund cut off is the same day which means I’ll be getting lots of refund requests, too. I’ve already had three today and it’s not even noon. I’m simultaneously trying to re-sell canceled hotel rooms so I’m not on the hook to pay for them, and I have no idea how that’s going to go. 

Although it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen in the next month, I do know that it’s too late to try to change what is going to happen. My numbers are dismal - I’m thinking I’m going to lose more than another 100 people, maybe even up to 200 this year, which puts me into “barely break even/lose a little money” territory, which is horrifying. It’s always possible it won’t be that dire, but if I do get a big bump of people at the end, that would be really surprising since that hasn’t happened in many years, not since before the pandemic. I’ll be ok this year only because I had a small surplus going into this year and a big tax return (although all of that will be taken up by this garage wall repair, which is currently inexplicably stalled), but by this time next year I’ll really be feeling it, especially if this trend continues. This is why I have to get a HELOC and use it for living expenses just to survive whatever this is, until or unless I can scale the event down to save money (which contractually I can’t do next year). 

The thought that always haunts me, though, is what if this whole idea is just played out? What if people are just not interested in what I have to offer, this particular brand? I can think of a million reasons why my attendance is plummeting, and I still think it’s almost entirely financial, but I also worry that it’s something else, something I can’t fix, which is that people just don’t care about this anymore and they’ve moved on, either to other newer events or away from dancing entirely. I went through a similar valley back in the early 2000s, when my numbers hovered around 550-600 for a couple of years and I was close to quitting and went into a massive depression over it. But then for no apparent reason my numbers started ticking up by 2005, 2006, and things started to look up. Will that happen again? Is this really all just Trump, and once he’s gone (or lame ducked) people will feel like spending money again? Who knows. I just know I’m in a pit right now and there’s nothing I can do to save myself and it’s really, really scary. 

Despite all this, though, I’ve mostly been able to maintain a positive attitude - I still have to put on the best damned show I can for those lovely people who are showing up, and I intend to do that, and just hope for a better future. My friends assure me that my brand is solid and this is just a blip we’re all experiencing - and they could be right, although they’re biased and just trying to cheer me up. Over the weekend I told myself to just try to be in denial - there’s nothing I can do to fix it, so why not just pretend I’m independently wealthy and running this for fun, so any dips in attendance don’t affect me personally but are just something to be observed? Sometimes this works. Denial can be powerful at times.