Wednesday, July 27, 2022 — 3
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The sun has come to serve many 

purposes in our lives. It is a source of 
light and power, a symbol of joy and 
clarity. It heals us of our ailments, both 
physical and mental. After a year of 
isolation and another year of finding 
our way out of it, we need — and even 
deserve — that joy more than ever, 
and there’s no better time to get it 
than in the summer. My memories 
of past summer vacations are filled 
with drive-in movies, family reunions, 
stiff muscles from water skiing and 
listening to “yacht rock radio” on 
every car ride. The writers of this 
B-Side have shared their own summer 
experiences, the good and the not-so-
good, and how the art they associate 
with these memories has stayed with 
them. These pieces are both fun and 
formative — everything a summer 
vacation should be. In the same way 
that the sun gives us life and energy, 
the art and media we consume help 
us discover who we are and make us 
shine. 

Daily 
Arts 
Writer 
Hannah 

Carapellotti 
can 
be 
reached 
at 

hmcarp@umich.edu.

The concert, the sun and the holy 

spirit of Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’ by 

Daily Arts Writer Serena Irani

I still have faint memories of my 

first concert. They’re fragmented 

flashes of feelings more than anything: 
singing along to Bon Jovi while stuck 
in traffic on the way there, excitement 
and adrenaline running through my 
5-year-old veins in anticipation of Aly 
& AJ as the opening act, purchasing 
the overpriced concert book I’d end up 
spending hours poring over religiously 
and wearing my bright pink Hannah 

Read more at michigandaily.com

When I was 8, my parents sent me 

to Girl Scout camp for the first time.

The camp was in middle-of-

nowhere western New York. The 

drive felt endless to an 8-year-old, 
trapped in a cramped car while your 
mom played Phil Collins and Elton 
John CDs. But when the scene in the 
front window changed from never-
ending trees to a wooden camp sign 
and hordes of girls heading in, my 
focus shifted. Maybe this drive was 

MALLORY EDGELL 

Daily Arts Writer

leading me to somewhere new and 
important. I don’t know what my 
parents expected me to find in my 
camp experience, but I’m sure none 
of us were planning on me finding a 
place I never wanted to leave.

Away from the social norms of third 

grade where pre-determined friend 
dynamics rule everything, camp was a 
free for all, a fresh start. From my two-
week session that first year, I made 
friends that I stayed in contact with 
over multiple summers. I’d call their 
parents each summer, back when 
each family just had a landline, so 
we could skim the camp catalogs and 
find sessions to do together. For a few 
years those sessions were horseback 
riding, then they transitioned to 
more adventurous things. I spent two 
weeks learning how to tackle a high 
ropes course, and another two weeks 
backpacking with six other girls in the 
Allegheny Plateau. 

Looking back, I always remember 

those camp years as simply an 
amazingly fun time in my life. I got to 

go kayaking whenever I wanted, eat 
too many s’mores when my counselors 
“raided the kitchen” for us and soak in 
the sun doing arts and crafts outside 
the dining hall. Yes, there were rainy 
days, occasional homesickness and 
lots of complaints about bugs, but 
camp was my happy place. 

It wasn’t until recently that I 

realized camp wasn’t just a positive 
place for me, it was formative. In 
perhaps the silliest ways, I think it 
taught me who I needed to be and 
how to get to that ideal. For me, this 
becomes apparent when I think back 
on one of my favorite parts of the 
camp experience: the songs.

I don’t know why I loved camp 

songs so much, but they were 
constantly stuck in my head. It must 
have been something to do with the 
community you felt a part of when 
50 girls are screaming “Alive Awake 
Alert” (a song similar to “Head, 
Shoulders, Knees and Toes”) at 7 
a.m., trying to be let into the dining 
hall. These counselors were smart, 

Montana T-shirt that would get 
shrunk in the dryer a week later. Miley 
Cyrus’s actual set was pretty much a 
blur, a null and void blind spot in my 
memory, but the feelings surrounding 
it have never quite faded.

Four summer circumstances and 

the media I used to survive them by 
Daily Arts Writer Erin Evans

Summer 
comes 
with 
some 

inevitabilities. Change, for one. Going 
home to your parents, in my case. 
Either embracing the days when the 
outdoors turns into a pressure cooker 
or developing a hatred of the sun that 
may have made me think you were 
cool in high school. I have come to 
love this season, but it still brought 

Design by Abby Schreck

The Sunshine B-Side

This is a repeat after me song

Design by Jennie Vang
Read more at michigandaily.com

HANNAH CARAPELLOTI 

Daily Arts Writer

knowing that a little bit of healthy 
competition to start the day was the 
perfect way to build energy in us 
sleepy-eyed campers.

The songs gave me confidence I 

didn’t normally have. At school I was 
always shy. I still had a lot of energy, 
but didn’t exactly know what to do 
in most situations. Camp songs gave 
me an outlet for my energy that was 
never frowned upon. Instead, it was 
actually considered a good thing. If 
my unit of campers sang songs like 
“Little Birdies” loud enough, we got to 
enter the dining hall first, and I would 
do anything to get those cinnamon 
french toast sticks. I went from quiet 
and on the outskirts to singing “The 
Princess Pat” wherever we went, 
always wanting to learn more songs or 
teach them to other people.

With a lot of Girl Scout songs come 

patience and perseverance. You see, 
songs like “Alive Awake Alert” are 
sung in repetition. 

certain unfortunate situations, and 
getting through them (and summer 
generally) with joy and grace depended 
partly on the media I chose to set my 
mood and the tone of my summer to. 
These are four recommendations — 
vices, if you will — and what they have 
meant to me in the past few months. 
Perhaps they can be useful to you too. 
If not, reading about someone else’s 
slight misfortune is usually enjoyable.

Seven songs that hit different 

in the summer by Daily Arts Writer 
Joshua Medintz

Summer rocks. It’s the season of 

street fairs, park hangs, beach days, 
sausage from a street cart, dope tokes 
and sunburns. And it’s the season 
of music that hits different. This is a 
playlist for those days when you’re 
chilling in that park, toking that dope, 
slurping that sausage. This is a playlist 
that will hit different this summer. 

Baked Buzzed Bored: ‘Super 

Mario Sunshine’ by Daily Arts 
Writers

The writers of The Michigan 

Daily do it all. On top of being college 
students with full course loads, they 
roll up their sleeves to consume media 
and write. For the entertainment of 
our loyal readership, The Daily has 
revitalized and revamped “Baked 
Buzzed Bored.” 

