After a 40-year stint in the East Village, Emily Rubin now lives in Columbia County.
An arts activist at heart and a writer in her dreams, she has published a novel as well as short stories, essays, and poems, work that appeared in places like Poets & Writers magazine and the Red Rock Review.
She founded and produced "Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose," a reading performance series in laundromats across the country and now runs the Write Treatment Workshops for NYC and upstate cancer centers.
A recipient of the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee, she’s been a guest lecturer and taught fiction workshops at Bard College and Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program.
She’s received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts in support of her latest novel, Solo Girl, about urban homesteading, and a series of personal essays, Adventures With a 100-Year-Old Mother.
In her youth in the 1960s, Emily attended sleep-away camp in the Catskills and was a dance instructor for one tortuous summer at a New Hampshire arts camp -- experiences that help inform her summer camp story, “Latrine Days.”
Latrine Days
By Emily Rubin
I was shuffled off to Camp Blueberry Bush to give me a break from the injurious behavior of my older brother Ricky, a depressive fifteen-year-old.
My parents told me it would be good to get away to experience the solidarity of female camaraderie with other Girl Scouts. Embarking on the two-week stay, I considered the rugged Catskill environs a big step toward freedom from the constraints and deceptive perfection of the suburbs.
During the first week, I impulsively instigated a water balloon fight, resulting in the head counselor’s bunk getting soaked. This was frowned upon by the fastidious head counselor who wore her hair in a beehive, never swam, had the patience of a mosquito, along with a penchant for tweezing my bunk mates’ eyebrows, which reminded me of the torturous pokes and stings Ricky inflicted on anyone who crossed his path. The morning, after the water balloon soaking, a jury of counselors and campers meted my punishment without the benefit of counsel.
“Clean the latrine, inside and out, with these,” the counselor remanded, handing me a toothbrush, sponge, and a bucket of soapy water.
I scrubbed and scrubbed until my knuckles and knees were scraped and bloody. I was shunned by the other girls and spent the second week on my own, which I didn’t mind.
“Prudish dummies,” I thought, “with no sense of humor.”
From the distance of my deserted island of self, I watched them succumb to the conventional passions of lipstick, nail polish, blow-dried hair, and Seventeen magazine. I admit to a nascent desire for these frivolities, but kept it to myself, hiding out in the spotless latrine to pore over pages of fresh-faced teens and articles about acne and French kissing.
Afterward, I would deposit the magazine back into the dog-eared pile in the community room while no one was looking and go off to commune with nature. Diving off rocks into the dark lake, hiking through the woods, coming upon stands of milkweed in fields where I observed caterpillars forming cocoons, like me, alone.
I wrote in my journal:
Inside the chrysalis, a blob transforms, leaving behind a squirming cylindrical body. I am a blob, a milkshake. I am fury and furry. Is a butterfly really free? A caterpillar ensconced emerges from the mush, unencumbered but subject to the wrath of a hungry crow or a speeding car’s windshield. What emerges from a latrine but shit and piss. The human-tainted world coats our mess in chintz and perfume.
The camp scheduled a talent night. I signed up and set about choreographing a solo depicting the caterpillar’s wrenching and painful transformation in the tradition of Martha Graham. I wore a flesh-colored, full-body leotard and wrapped my body in a discarded sail from the armada of Sunfish sailboats. My mother had surreptitiously packed two training bras in my camp trunk, which I never wore, but attached to the leotard as wings.
For an accompanying soundtrack, I recorded my pitiable bunk mates’ teeth grinding, epic snoring, and tearful gasps on my portable cassette deck. Homesickness was rampant among the cattiest of the girls. The torturous sounds filled the theater as I writhed on stage, rolling over and over, and finally ripping through the muslin with the puny Girl Scout issued pocketknife.
I took several bows to an utterly silent, dumbfounded audience and backed off the stage, quickly.
When I arrived home from camp, I embraced a life of touch football, baseball cards, and chemistry set explosions, donning a baseball cap and dungarees with rolled-up cuffs. The rest of the summer was relatively safe from Ricky’s rage as he discovered the haze of masturbation and marijuana.
With the new school year looming, I looked back on the penance of cleaning the latrine and the boldness of my cocoon dance as an embryonic trembling in my plans to escape suburbia.