It's pure MADNESS!

Back when I used to be a Scaper, we participated in a yearly event called "Midnight Madness" - don't worry, it wasn't actually at midnight, but it was a series of physical and mental "maddening" challenges in which the activity groups had to work together to solve an overarching problem. Sounds complicated? It kind of was, which explains why after my first year of Summerscape and after a rather large batch of RAs couldn't return the next year, I never got to do Midnight Madness again...

...until last night! For the past week and a half, the RAs were hard at work planning this year's madness theme, characters and problem. "Isabella Giovanni," the arch-nemesis RC at our imaginary rival camp, SummerView, had stolen all of the color from Summerscape! It was up to this year's campers to help bring color back to camp (hence the theme of the dance, "Color Catastrophe") with the help of some colorful characters, played by the RAs.

At 7:00 PM, we piled all the kids into Lay Auditorium, most of them completely clueless as to what was going on. Then we showed them an opening movie featuring all the RAs as the colorful characters and introducing the challenges to the campers.

A popular room was Seth's safe/laser room - the kids had to crack a code to break into our "safe" and then crawl through the lasers to retrieve his family diamonds:

Here's a clip from the challenge of "Madame A" (played by our RA Amanda) - the kids had to decode Mad Gab-type phrases:

Other challenges included making pendulums, throwing frisbees into hoops and boxes, crawling through a giant "spider web," lining up glasses of water to play a song, and recreating tangrams. In the end, it was Travis's team that pulled together and won Midnight Madness 2011.