June 21, 2005
At the end of the rainbow...
Hey Folks, Nica here.
HFT just returned from a solid week of fun at Rainbow Christian Camp in Converse, Indiana. There are a number of highlights from the week, so, please buckle up.
One of the first highlights, of course, is the foyer. It was filled with many, many stuffed animals (I'm not sure I know the politically correct term for a dead animal heads hanging on a wall....).
It was truly impressive. More deer/elk/moose/yak type creatures than you could have imagined existed. I'm pretty sure that a couple of the animals hanging in that main room exist only in Narnia.
One of the main things we did at this camp was a wake-up show every morning. 75% of the members of HappyFunTime are not morning people, but all of the campers were so great that we really looked forward to every morning. We got everyone involved in doing some improv, and we received some crazy suggestions for scenes we should do...
I'm pretty sure my favorite thing, though, was the pilot episode of "Starkey and Hank."
During one of the games HFT played, Starkey and Hank happened to volunteer together and Wes said, “Starkey and Hank… my favorite cop show.” Of course, the adult Youth Coaches were the only ones who laughed at this, because Wes is old and remembers TV shows from before the time that most of us were even born.
However, Starkey and Hank are both really funny, and willing to make fools of themselves( or willing to let us make fools of ourselves… hm), so they performed (with HFT in all supporting roles), the pilot episode of Starkey and Hank.
And If I may say so myself, it was pretty darn funny. There were no scripts, and there was no pre-planning (unless you count the fact that every Starsky and Hutch episode is mind-numbingly predictable). I don’t have any transcripts available online, but suffice to say that it all started when some doughnuts turned up missing….
Wes was the commissioner, and boy was he about to pop a blood vessel in his neck! Starkey and Hank were thrown off the police squad because they were “loose canons”! Starkey didn’t care about that, he just wanted to eat doughnuts. Hank (let’s give him some credit) was really trying to find the missing doughnuts. I played a secretary who was pretty much falling for Hank or Starkey (its not clear which one…) and I was very, very intelligent (its not clear how intelligent). Nate and Mike were the Columbians who stole the doghnuts in the first place. They had a long conversation that I don’t remember because their accents were so amazing. Wes also played a squirrelly informant, there was some attempted car stunts, and we eventually all ended up at the Pier in a stand off. Wes showed up as the commissioner, confident, angry, and eating a banana. He carelessly threw the peel down on the ground, which Nate slipped on as he was trying to escape, Hank took that opportunity to handcuff him. Mike would have gotten away, but Starkey doesn’t play by the rules, and picked Mike up about six feet off the ground. Phew! What an action-packed ten minutes.
Ok, back to the weekend:
A lot of bright red hair dye was used over the course of the week.
On Thursday some people played paintball. I did not personally participate, but I did try to photograph some good "before" pictures. I didn’t get any "after" pictures because I was making a Wall-Mart run with some other non-paint-ball-participants. I did, however, hear a number of stories about how it went…I guess it was exciting.
I was very excited about relearning Eucher: my new favorite card game. Wes thinks there isn't enough "drama" in the game but it seems to bel plenty of fun for the Hoosiers...and for me.
The speaker Jim Bergin was really amazing. Every session was packed with a ton of great stuff. Mark, a missionary to Africa spoke every night as well; his stories were incredible. The band, Station 316 also sounded really, really great.
We had such a great time at Rainbow Christian Camp this year. We hope to see everyone again at some point in the future. ...And thanks for getting the HFT Dudes hooked on paintball. I see an intervention in our future.
p.s. Here are some Nica renditions of some of the animals.
