This episode contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet behavior.

We also mentioned specific weight and weight loss numbers.

This language could be sensitive for some listeners, so please take care.

Mikey agreed to go to Camp Shane, which is a weight loss camp for young kids, and Mikey is back.

Come on out here, Mikey.

Okay, because good too.

Look we gotta pull that shirt back and see that.

Tell me, look at that.

Look at this, guys, look at this.

This is crazy.

If you didn't recognize that voice, you didn't watch enough America's next top model.

What you just heard was Tyra Banks on her talk show Smiles and All, celebrating a twelve year old boy for his weight loss while fully patting his now much smaller stomach.

In the two thousands, Camp Shane was riding high.

It's message that weight loss was the key to health and happiness had made its way to TVs and magazines around the country.

Enrollment was at its highest ever, and the media was obsessed with capturing it all.

Welcome to Camp Shane.

Camp Shane, Camp Shane.

More than ever, popular culture was buying into the promise of Camp Shane – weight loss at any cost.

The messages surrounding young people at the time were clear.

If you lose weight, society will love you more.

Nicole Ritchie, you are a little fuller, a little bit more thicker, and how do you feel about the fact that maybe the thickness may hinder you from getting certain parts and doing certain things.

Jessica Simpson, people can't stop talking about it, saying she looks back.

The way you dress and stuff.

I don't think you're aware that you're a heavy set woman.

That's what I said.

So I was guessing your weight and I was going to say to you to today, can you please get on the scale and then we'll have an over under that's all.

If you were a family member survived adolescence in the two thousands, you may be eligible for financial compensation.

I remember it well, the era of flip phones, frosted tips, and physics defying low rise genes.

It was also an era of rampant anti fat bias and body shaming.

Somehow society felt more obsessed than ever with body image.

It was just popstars being splash on the covers of magazines and tabloids, literally chronicling how big their bodies were.

It was young women being treated as commodities and not human beings.

That’s Evette Dionne.

Evette is a culture journalist and pop culture critic who examines the world through the lenses of race, gender, and size.

I remember the quest was to be able to wear genes that were so low that you couldn't see the underwear, but you could see fully the abs of that time.

I just remember the two thousands being a time where young people were encouraged to be hard on themselves and hard on each other, and our pop culture reinforcing that, our teachings enforcing that, everything that we were consuming enforcing that, and really taking us to a place where none of us were comfortable in our bodies.

As someone who grew up in a bigger body, Yvette is all too familiar with the scrutiny that people face when their bodies don't meet the ideal, which was an impossible feat.

In the two thousands, the beauty standards were honestly deranged.

We saw it in reality TV makeover shows like The Swan.

Kathy's plan features several procedures starting with her face.

She'll have a brow lift, nose job, lip enhancement, fat injected under her eyes cheek fat removal, a chemical peel, photofacial collagen, laser hair removal and LASIK eye surgery.

For Kathy's body she'll have breast augmentation with nipple lift and liposuction in six different areas.

Then there were shows like The Biggest Loser, which rewarded contestants for losing exorbitant amounts of weight with huge cash prizes.

Ten more, ten more, ten more, ten more, ten more ten I don't know if Greg's proud of vomit or not, but I'm proud that I made him vomit.

Then that's all that matters.

Wait loss programs didn't just exist.

They were now televised, and people weren't turned off by it.

In fact, they couldn't get enough.

And all of this seeped into the minds of young, impressionable Americans.

I'd like to look like britney spears.

I’d like to have the buns of steel and abs of gold <laughter>, I wanna lose 30 lbs or 35 lbs.

No matter where you turned, the media was overtly telling people famous and not that their bodies were wrong and needed to change.

With this being the dominant message, a place like Shane was an attractive alternative to being bullied, judged, or ostra sized for your body size and all of the assumptions that came along with it.

When you are heavy set, people can think you're dumb, right.

That's Carl Evans.

He was a sharer in the two thousands.

As a black teenage boy, Carl was familiar with prejudice and he understood how the world felt and thought about fat people.

But as a kid I sort of had this omnipresent sense of like my competency, um, intellectual competencies attached to it.

And I was a kid who ended up in special ed for reasons that me and my parents and I still couldn't figure out

What Carl's describing--that fatness, race, and intellect are intertwined--is a well-enduring stereotype.

Societies across time and place have always had one type of body or another that they revere and others that you know is less acceptable.

Dr.

Lisa Erlanger, who you heard from last episode, is a weight-inclusive care doctor.

She’s done her fair share of research into what’s contributed to these stereotypes around fatness – and one piece of that is race.

The obsession with body size and the rise of that can really be traced in the United States to the time of chattel enslavement.

And, um, in the United States, that's also when Protestantism characterized the white population and a desire to differentiate the white population from the enslaved population and to justify enslavement.

And so enslaved people were also often described as being, you know, not slaves to their white masters, but rather to their sensuality.

They couldn't stop eating, they couldn't stop having sex, they couldn't stop sleeping.

And that therefore, without white control, they would become fat and lazy and dumb.

And this was differentiated, especially from the, um, abstemious white woman who, controlled her sensuality and therefore achieves her moral superiority and thinness.

These stereotypes were used to oppress enslaved people and justify the need for control by white masters.

But as we all know, there is no link between fatness and intelligence, nor is there a link between race and intelligence.

Unfortunately, stereotypes are persistent, and Carl was no stranger to them.

Compelled by shame, Carl lied to his friends that he was spending the summer with his uncle.

He then flew to New York and boarded a bus bound for Camp Shane.

From the bus ride, I had the dumb privilege of being sitting near someone.

It was right out of Heavyweights, sitting near a lifer at the camp, who immediately, because there weren't a lot of Black kids at the camp, immediately was like, Hey, you're new.

And I'm like, yes.

And he's like, where are you from?

And I'm like, Chicago.

And he is like, oh, great.

And he's from like Miami, but there's not a lot of, most of the kids are from the east coast.

So I stood out in two ways.

He eroed in on me.

And why that's important is 'cause right when I got off the bus, I had my own like, camp lore guide.

Having a camp lure guide at Shane was a privilege.

Lifers knew stuff.

They knew how to smuggle in food, they knew which counselors to go to for what, and they knew the ever so important camp traditions.

That first year at Shane was pivotal for Carl.

I, um, achieved quite a bit as a first year camper.

I set the camp weight loss record that first summer.

I did something that I was told was a first and that I won Camper of the Year as a first year camper, and I had begun to have a very professionally close relationship to Dave Ettenberg as a camper.

And by the end of that first summer, anything Dave Ettenberg would've asked me to do, I would've done.

Carl was completely sold.

He loved camp and his parents loved the results even more.

That summer, he lost eighty seven pounds.

I came back in the fall of 2001 half of who I was and I looked completely different.

And my parents just went up and down the family chain, sending pictures and oh my God, and dah dah dah.

And this place was amazing.

After his time as a camper, Carl became a full time counselor.

He was something of a poster child for Camp Shane.

After all, what was better for business than weight loss results like Carl's.

After my first summers, I was a true convert.

I restructured my whole life around a commitment to camp Shane so that any labor opportunities, college opportunities, any opportunity could not interfere with making sure I was back there in the summer.

And as a counselor, my mission was to try to give kids the experience that I had that what I felt saved my life.

And so those first summers that I was a counselor, I I was like, this is gonna be my life.

And it did become his life.

Whatever David needed to get or keep campers Carl was on it.

As I went on as a counselor, I became a very centralized cheerleader and supporter of the Camp Shane recruitment and promotional strategy.

Carl shared tips and tricks on how to retain campers with fellow staff, and he convinced parents to sign their kids up for next summer before the current summer was even over.

Because of people like Carl proselytize about camp, the gospel of Shane spread far and wide.

Dave would have me, kind of free FreeWheel around the camp and rope parents of target and see if I couldn't softly, passively, actively, close them on, you know, they're offering like half off if you lock in a deposit for next summer 'cause we know a lifer when we see one.

Lifers were the kids that came back year after year and for whom Camp Shane was a part of their core identity.

Carl was a proud lifer.

He saw what he was doing as a mission for other kids to experience what he had.

It’s the most truest piece of advertising that's ever existed is that Camp Shane isn't just a place, it's a feeling.

That bubble helped me discover my sense of identity and craft and become a human being that I'm proud to be to this day.

Being a lifer was a complicated badge of honor because it meant you knew camp’s ins and outs, but it also meant you probably weren’t keeping the weight off.

Despite this, Carl was more than happy to support Camp Shane’s mission even in the off-season.

In the off season I was doing anything Dave asked too, in terms of recruitment and promotion.

We wrote letters and helped support and endorse and make connections to PR people.

What Carl was doing could be called grassroots recruitment and a DIY PR campaign.

And it worked; Camp Shane started to catch the attention of major media outlets and its visibility skyrocketed in the early 2000s.

That helps knowing that I’m not gonna be judged because of the fact I’m massive.

It’s easy to meet the opposite sex here, it's not difficult.

Like you could approach a girl with confidence.

This is a meat market I guess.

Merryl Winter, a staff member at Camp Shane from two thousand three until twenty fourteen, remembers a few others.

And then we had TLC come and do a series where they followed kids around and track their progress throughout the summer,

I’m Lindsey, I’m 17 years old and I’m from Seminole, Florida.

I feel like Camp Shane’ll be the starting point.

Just the push I need to get me started on the weight loss track.

MTV came,

they did made Meet Danielle.

She's always been known as the fat girl.

She's so much, but now she's tired of what she sees.

I'm going to try to lose sixty pounds.

Twenty twenty came.

There was always some media coverage going on.

Popular talk show hosts like Dr.

Oz, Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters also praised the transformative power of Camp Shane.

This was exactly what David needed.

He was constantly on calls trying to secure media coverage.

The attention did wonders for business, but it was spreading a harmful message; the message that if you’re fat, it’s a personal failure and only you are responsible for your excess weight.

Places like fat camps profit tremendously off of this dominant belief.

This is all so deeply baked into our culture that even the medical establishment seems incapable of recognizing how entrenched fatphobia is in our world.

Camp Shane always benefited from this, but with the intensification of the quote "obesity epidemic” in the 2000s, many children were sent to fat camps at the recommendation of their doctors despite their actual health.

Healthcare is almost symbolized by the ritual of stepping on a scale as the first thing we do

Dr.

Lisa Erlanger, again.

So much so that a scale, that tall scale that we see in the doctor's office is even like emblematic of medical care itself.

the visit then becomes a response to that number on the scale.

The weight centric approach means providers can overlook other important health factors, leading to larger bodied patients getting misdiagnosed and potentially worsening their conditions.

There are many, many more providers who see weight as an appropriate measure of health, an appropriate target for intervention, and an appropriate outcome measure for health interventions.

The truly obnoxious part of all of this forced weighing is that weight does a pretty crap job at predicting health–we learned about this in episode 3 when we dove into BMI.

We all know fat people who are healthy: think about all of the body diversity we see in top-performing athletes, like Olympians.

And we all know thin people who are not.

This is why it's so important that healthcare providers listen and believe fat people when they come in with issues not related to their weight.

Simon was the glue of the camp.

The campers understood Dave as the owner of the camp.

But everyone from counselor to camper understood that Simon was the boss.

Simon is always seen as the good guy.

he knew what to do and he ordered everyone else to do it, and you did it and you didn't fuck around or goof off when Simon was around.

You know what I mean?

Simon had a mystique to him because Simon also assembled things like for the big games and the big events.

You always saw Simon leading the charge on building this thing or that thing.

Simon was especially influential for Carl.

After Carl's first summers as a counselor, he said.

I'm going to be doing what Simon Greenwood does one day, like five ten years from now, I'm going to be assistant director or director of this camp.

There was a shift under Simon's leadership because, unlike David, Simon had his hand in everything.

Every facet of the camp, he would be responsible from the kitchen staff to the laundry team to housekeeping, to maintenance, keeping an eye on making sure counselors were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be.

And he was a very respectful but good solid leader about that stuff and enforcing the parameters.

Camp had the potential to be so much better than what it was offering.

If anyone could help turn things around, it was Simon.

He started with the kitchen.

As you know by now, the food at Camp was a disappointment at best.

Food ordering was, uh, substandard quality basic.

not that they promoted that they were giving Michelin star menus, but the food was always the bare, the bare basic.

Simon made things better than they were.

Even if he couldn't always get the money to support his ideas, he made it happen.

He managed to do a lot with the little he was given.

Meryl, who started working with Simon in two thousand and three, had the impression that he was really unhappy with the food quality at camp, but he wasn't working with a big budget.

So he figured out a way to spend the same amount of money yet make the quality better.

he went in and he found if he got the spinach salad and put the cranberries in it and whatever, and then he would sit and make all of us have taste tests to see if it, the quality was better if the kids would like it.

And then he would have the kids rate, um, the food choices to see what they liked the most so he could add it on the menu.

So he basically revamped the kitchen.

Not gonna lie, I still dream of that spanich salad.

Simon seemed to remember that summer camp, fat camp or not was all about fun and unforgettable memories.

He went above and beyond to achieve this, even though he didn't have much to work with.

Here's Carl again.

I don't know the exact origin stories, but somehow he got a bug up his butt to build a water slide.

Simon made something out of nothing by taking a bunch of drainage tubing, running it down a hill, and using water from the nearby water fountain for lubrication.

But before he could send campers down, he needed a test dummy.

In this instance, the best he could come up with was a counselor.

They sent a counselor down.

The counselor came down and was like, oh my, like, this was like a ribbed tubing.

Okay.

And it hurt.

Like, he's like, this hurts a lot.

But, but the water part did work.

It was lubricated enough water to go down, but the ribbing just created a friction.

After much trial and error, Simon and his crew put layers of plastic down to reduce the friction and give more padding, and voila.

He had created a ten to fifteen yard water slide that became a camp staple.

A delightful experience the kids got, because, you know, that's the best parts of Camp Shane were oftentimes these ad hoc things.

Simon also used his craftiness to take one of Camp's most beloved traditions to new heights.

Many summer camps are familiar with the tradition of color War.

It happens the final week of the summer.

The camp is divided into two teams, each represented by a color.

In the case of Camp Shane, there was the Orange team and the Black team.

Colour war had always been a big event at Shane, but Simon and his team brought it to the next level by adding an elaborate opening ceremony.

The ceremony was always after dark.

The entire camp would be sent to the soccer field and would sit with baited breath beneath the starry catskillskies.

The only light came from tiki torches which surrounded the field and flickered in a magical, witchy sort of way.

Then drums.

You would have this thing where people dressed up in indigenous native garb would appear out of the forces like entities, and they'd be torch carrying.

Building up this procession of the arrival of two competing tribes that were indigenous to the lands long ago.

For the PC side, a gross appropriation of Native American, Polynesian and a few other indigenous tribal esthetics and ceremonial themes.

Now, the two thousands weren't known for being politically correct, but I can't deny when I participated in my own Color War a few years later, the spectacle of it all was astounding.

You see the fires pop up in the tree lines, these pitch black tree lines.

And these people who were, once your counselors are dressed in these wild war paints and wearing the most minimal, minimal loin cloths and outfits And when they come out, they are game faced and they're intense.

And you as a camper watch these people who are, once your counselors come out affecting these indigenous warriors carrying princesses and chieftains and, and they do these dances with fire, these fire dances and these beautifully choreographed uh, things to Enya soundtracks.

And it's, it's bombastic and it's absurd.

But man,, it's all practical effects, and it is magic.

Me as a camper.

I was like, this is the coolest thing.

And regardless of what happens afterwards, the opening ceremony when done right, it was just a real piece of magic.

This is what Simon did.

He took the old standard camp traditions and transformed them into magical experiences.

He really amped up the next part of Color War too.

Simon would just come up with these ways of like reappropriating space, the creative things he would do during color wars where we're constructing things in the stadium for part of entertainment and showcasing some sort of narrative to that would be interactive for the campers.

You think of a gym stadium, cut the gym stadium in half, and you have two teams of counselors who build some sort of theme with their half of the gym.

And when I say build, I mean build.

I mean you get to use real lumber, you can run electrical lines.

Counselors would build entire worlds movie sets minus the movie, to perform skits and dances for their color War teams throughout the week.

The theme might be Outer Space, under the Sea, or King Kong.

They'd craft buildings, fountains, and murals.

One year they even brought in live animals as part of their set.

It was like a mini Disney World just for Shane.

He could help facilitate sheer magic into being, he actively engaged in the creative side and, and programming side that helped counselors create experiences that would be life, you know, lifetime memories for campers.

Camp was making good on the promise of a magical summer but behind the scenes it was a nightmare for David Ettenberg.

We were busting at the seams.

At that point.

It was like five hundred and seventy five kids.

We had over three hundred staff.

It was a lot.

It wasn't just the campers that felt these growing pains.

Simon and his wife lived in like an apartment on the side of a building.

He had to move out of those and those had to become bunks.

We added bunk bed into places where they could fit one more.

I think we had to bring in trailers to make bunks, and we couldn't even fit into the cafeteria.

The whole camp was too big.

But there was still an influx of cash and that was a good thing for David’s business.

To be fair, he wasn’t the only one in the weight loss business making millions.

In the society that we live in, diet culture is connected inherently to companies that profit from telling us that things are wrong with our bodies.

And so the dieting industry is a billion dollar industry, meaning that these corporations earn billions of dollars telling us that our bodies are not good enough as they are.

And so if you go to this class, or if you take this pill, or if you wear this waist trainer, you get to have this “ideal”, and I put that in quotation marks, body type.

And we become ensnared in the system that's selling us our insecurities and then telling us they have the solution to fix the insecurity that they're telling us that we have.

David was certainly making money by targeting children’s insecurities, but he was not always forthcoming about that money.

And that got him into trouble.

As a result of the conviction, the American Camp Association, or ACA, removed Camp Shane’s accreditation.

This meant it no longer met the ACA’s guidelines for safety, health, program quality, and management practices.

Shane could still operate, sure, but without that gold star, Camp Shane could lose the confidence of customers and the media that trusted the camp to uphold certain standards of care and safety.

Things would not be repaired for a very very long time, and not because Simon wasn't capable or didn't have it on his docket to do it.

Was the stringency of the way the budget would be.

Day would just stretch it.

He would do without, so there were any number of places instruments on camp that sometimes when they broke, they were done.

Go carts and Doom Buggi's is the most notorious, where they'd be running in fully operational at the start of the summer.

A man, you get to anything that costs more than like twenty five bucks to fix or replace and Simon totally bagshu, but it's not getting replaced.

These refusals to make seemingly small fixes were frustrating for Carl and other counselors, and they were starting to create tension between the staff and David.

All these things that are happening that the answers are, we need more investment in the camp.

You know what I mean, we could win this.

Like we can get Dave to convert and open up the pocketbook he's being stubborn and whatever because it's his job to be conservative on the money and blah, blah, blah, blah.

By 2007, there was what Carl described as a “war behind the scenes” between David and the staff.

He said that David didn’t want to spend money, while the counselors advocated for some reinvestment in the camp.

A complete and critical breakdown in, in the core cultural factors of the camp.

You always had this core returning staff.

What started to happen in the nineties and then fully exploded in my time was you also had the camper-counselor phenomenon where you,could have started as a lifer, as a camper and then became a counselor.

So like by the late nineties and into the early two thousands, you saw people who had already put in six years as a camper became a counselor.

And what that did is it it reinforced what was already a fraternal sororial sort of sense of the camp.

You took ownership of the traditions, you really believed in them.

So as staff investment cheaped out and you started to lose that.

That, the passion that kept those lifers coming back year after year started waning.

As their pay didn't reflect the time, sweat and energy they'd put into Shane, especially for as long as many of them had been there.

Some counselors who were multiple year counselors were given the same static pay.

Well, that's bullshit.

And people are gonna gonna go somewhere, you know.

Longtime staff stopped returning in bigger numbers and the new staff.

Well, they were barely there for the campers, and they're more interested in hitting the bar.

And the counselors who were sticking around and trying to be there for the kids found themselves taking on more and more specialized and haphazard responsibilities.

Merryl Winter —who was still working as a group leader in 2008 —remembers once when the nurse took a day off.

The sub never showed up so it was somehow Merryl’s job to fill in.

I remember we were giving out the meds and they were some heavy duty meds.

All the kids, thank god, got the right meds and everything was great, But it shouldn't have been me that was giving them out.

That was a scary one.

Counselors were also now working with a new demographic of camper who needed even more medical attention.

To Merryl, it seemed like David was willing to let anyone in, just to make a few more dollars.

Even if they were kids who Camp Shane couldn’t properly and responsibly take on.

Kids would come straight from like rehab facilities.

Not a lot, but it happened.

Um, kids would be mentally unstable.

They would come on meds that we couldn't get because they were from another country.

Just certain things like that where, you know, he wouldn't have to deal with it, we would have to deal with it.

And we would have to find a way to make life nice and safe.

But making sure the counselors felt equipped to handle the needs of their campers wasn't David's concern.

He was happy with bodies in camp, whether they'd be kids or counselors.

You know, as long as the counselors were a body that was there and he met the ratio of how many staff to kids, he was happy.

Didn't matter if they were doing things that were unethical or dangerous.

And I don't mean he meant to put the kids at harm.

He was just, you know, if it's let me just slide by the summer and we could start fresh next summer, you know.

In two thousand and eight, Carl didn't feel that Camp Shane was equipped to care for campers with specialized medical needs.

Although they advertised having psychology professionals, the people hired didn't always meet the required qualifications.

They were often in training or in the process of getting their degrees.

So there were kids who were living with mental health challenges and were on the spectrum, who should not come to a place that doesn't have the medical and clinical training to monitor them for 24 hours or 12 hours at a time.

Kids who could not necessarily be legitimately autonomously living individuals.

And that's what that was like, the final pressure breaker on Camp Shane.

Maybe if camp had the qualified medical professionals that it claimed to have, it's possible they could have properly cared for these kids, but that wasn't the case.

2008 was the place where, like, we were still trying to run it as the feelgood happy time, but there were so many kids who had behavioral disorders, counselors didn't give a shit, campers who were super toxic that you were putting out fires every single day as opposed to putting joy into people's hearts.

And so that was the real sort of like degrading of everything.

Carl started to realize that Selma's safe haven, the one for kids growing up in an anti fat society, was beginning to slip away in.

In the least amount of words possible, you had skinny kids coming who shouldn't be there, who you're probably generating you know, disordered thinking and unhealthy relationships to food by sending them to a fat camp.

And they're just the kid with with the biggest waist size in their social group at home.it putrified the social environment because now you had skinny kids back in fields with obese kids and heavyweight kids.

For someone who'd poured his heart and soul into camp, this breakdown really affected Carl.

I had a really sad moment happened where I kind of knew it wasn't going to come back at the closing night of that summer where I was listening to a counselor, a first year counselor excitedly talk about man next year, and I realized, like, I have no excitement for next year.

And that was the first time I never had ever felt that, And it was like feeling a trapdoor open in the bottom of your soul, like you know the way everyone felt when bingbong, like faded away in the middle of Inside Out.

Bing Bong, you made it.

Go, go save Riley.

Take her to the moon for me, okay?

Carl returned one last time but it was more out of obligation than excitement, and he certainly didn't restructure his whole summer around camp like he used to.

Here's how Carl remembers that final summer.

In 2009.

I came to help the camp halfway through the summer I could only do half a summer.

And I came as maintenance and punched in, But I also did a huge amount of work as a counselor, basically as like a defacto like assistant head counselor.

Well, at the end of the summer,I was waiting for my punch in pay when I clocked in and clocked out every day in the hour.

And Dave was like, well, I thought you did this for free.

Classic.

I had watched and tried to advocate for counselors who felt they were underpaid.

Okay.

You know, like, Hey Dave, come on, let's talk about this.

And he'd be, and we get heated privately, right?

Well now I'm in, I had this conversation with Dave about justifying somebody's pay and he's looking at me despite an email thread that we had, me and Simon had, about discussing the rate, my hourly rate and what I’d be coming in at.

And Dave just straight up said, well, um, I guess it's a misunderstanding.

Surely Simon – who always had his staff’s back, who was rumored to “bleed” orange, and whom Carl idolized – would step in and save the day.

and I'm having this argument with him.

Well, Simon's sitting right next to him.

So I looked at Simon, I said, bro, like you have the emails right there on your computer.

And then Simon stops, looks at Dave, then looks back at me, you know, and makes me, you know, I'm trying not to cry.

Like, and he's like, I think we've had a mistake.

And Simon fricking sent me up the river too.

Like he didn't, if Simon had put his foot down, I should have gotten the full pay.

But he just like, oh, I guess it was a misunderstanding.

Carl was on his own.

So then Dave gets to look at me and be like, oh, well that's not my fault because whatever you and Simon talked about.

I think the pay I would've been owed was something above 1100 bucks.

I walked into that room feeling like a prostitute.

'cause he gave me like 300 bucks cash from like a petty, petty envelope, I gotta tell you, I never saw that coming.

So that was, that was brutal.

Here was Carl, former star camper and near celebrity counselor who recruited, marketed, and wholeheartedly believed in the Camp Shane mission, on the receiving end of David's penny pinching tendencies.

Camp had turned into something he no longer recognized.

The politics, all the bullshit, the that we had, some of us had thought it was fiscal conservancy.

It came out as,these are dishonorable decisions, not miserly decisions, but dishonorable ones.

And the curtain was down now.

The bad things that were happening weren't happening because of like the innocence of tough financial decisions.

Bad things were happening because Dave, a lot of us finally were realizing like, this is ethically not a good person.

Next time on Camp Shame...

We just were like, what do we do?

it is our job to promote a camp now that is essentially condoning behavior that we don't agree with that is actually really fucked up behavior.

Like, I just, I can't be here anymore.

I have to go.

We reached out to Simon Greenwood, David Ettenberg and his wife Ziporah Janowski for comment; at the time of this recording, we have not received a reply.