The Show Must Go On

Part of my game training at camp (yes, they train us to run games - there's really a lot to it) was to ignore people who individually ask you questions during the game. The concept is that you're managing 300 people, almost as a performance, and if you focus on one you'll lose control of the rest. It's true, I've had people ask me the most bizarre things while I've been running games and I've just had to ignore them. One time, however, something happened that was a little harder to blow by.

Deep Freeze, night, Gymnasium, 300 campers and leaders, over 500 foam finger rockets - picture the scene with me. I am working the headset mic (back in the day we had a big one we called The Brittany Spears mic) taking the campers with me on the adventure of the game, a two team massive dodgeball style showdown. One of the tricks we use to control a crowd that size is to give bonus points for quietness; at the end of a round when the whistle is blown, the first team to sit down on the Gym floor and be totally silent gets 5,000 points. It works like magic.

The round had just ended and the teams were silent as I began to wave my hands around in description of the next level of the game (we like to add elements every few rounds to keep it fresh). Just as I came to the climax of the information, I turned dramatically - and got a finger rocket right to the eye. 300 previously silent people gasped in unison as all eyes on me witnessed the shot. It had come from the speaker, whose name I won't mention (ehem, cough cough Sam). He was messing around on the sidelines, grabbed a finger rocket (a foam rocket with a rubber band inside that you pulled back and launched it with) and thought it would be funny to hit me in the back of the head while I was talking....BUT...I turned around at just the right, or rather, wrong, time.

As the entire crowd gasped and stared I clutched my eye, my body instantly folding as I garbled a groan into the mic and it echoed around the Gym. Being hit in the eye with a finger rocket from about 10 feet is similar to being hit in the eye with a foam whiffle ball bat. There are warnings that come with the package that say "do not shoot people in the eye; it can dislodge their retina".

So there I am, hunched over in pain, clutching my one eye that is by this time streaming tears down my face, while everything that I was saying about the game had been apparently shot out of my head along with my eyeball (wait, was it still there? I wasn't quite sure). After a few long seconds I knew that the show must go on, so I grunted out something about the next round and managed to continue.

Sam still feels guilty, as he well should. And now I wear safety glasses when I play finger rockets.