Hey, Summer Campers!

Summer camps have been showing kids the time of their lives for generations upon generations. That means that there are literally millions of adults out there who were once summer campers like you. It’s not really surprising then to think that there are lots of celebrities whom we all know and love today who went to summer camp themselves. 

Natasha Lyonne is one of those famous people. Like a number of her contemporaries like Jon Favreau, Robert Downy Jr., Adam Levine, and Zooey Deschanel, she went to a summer camp called French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts in the western Catskills. She may have even been there at the same time as these other alumni.

She was born in New York City and raised Orthodox Jewish. Natasha’s grandparents on her mother’s side were Hungarian Jewish and were both Holocaust survivors.

Her parents started her at 6 years old in business with the Ford Modeling Agency and she made her way into TV and films. She was cast as Opal for six episodes of ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse’ and went on to make appearances in movies like ‘Heartburn,’ ‘A Man Called Sarge,’ and ‘Dennis the Menace’.

In retrospect, she disagrees with her parents’ choice to start her in business at such a young age, but it didn’t last long. Two years later, they moved from Great Neck, New York to Israel and they lived there for a year and a half.

She never cared for growing up on the Upper East Side, so when she came back to the states with her family, they settled in Miami. She was an excellent student enrolled in honor classes, but when her parents got a divorce, it had a horribly negative effect on her school life resulting in eventual expulsion. She did, however, graduate from Miami Country Day School.

Her acting career continued with several  TV appearances, like on her camp mate’s show ‘New Girl’ as well as ‘Will and Grace’ and ‘Law & Order’. She’s even dabbled in doing some voice work for an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ as well as Cartoon Network’s hit show ‘Steven Universe’. She flexed her voice work back in 2005 as Loretta Geargrinder for the feature film ‘Robots’.

Having received a nomination for the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, Natasha has really shown her acting muscle and the world recognizes her talent. She has since appeared in Orange Is the New Black, Russian Doll, and Poker Face.

Throughout struggles and hardships in her life, she’s made her way on the road of success. Summer camp can help teach resilience. How might summer camp help you on your path? You can check out French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts for yourself right here and, as always, thanks for reading.

- John

Hey, Camp Fans!

At Everything Summer Camp, we look far and wide to see what famous celebrities happen to also be former summer campers. So far, we’ve posted about 90 celebrities! When we discovered that Sara Gilbert had gone to camp, we knew we wanted to mention her on the Blog! She’s best know for her role as Darlene Conner on the very popular 90’s sitcom from ABC, ‘Roseanne’.

Sara attended Interlochen Center for the Arts which is famous for graduating top students in dance, theater, music, and art. Located in the beautiful northwestern region of lower Michigan, Sara spent her summer days soaking in the summer sun as it beat down on 1,200 acres, nestled between two lakes.

One day when she was six her older sister, Melissa, got a plaque on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and she decided that day that she would be an actress. But she had talent all over the board. She developed a great interest in photography alongside her visual art. She was a skilled writer as well.

She landed some appearances in several made-for-TV-movies and she did a commercial for Kool-Aid as a kid. And by the time she was 13, she got the role of Darlene, the middle child in ‘Roseanne’. She became a crucial character in the show and Sara received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her performance. She even wrote one of the stories for an episode in the fourth season of the show.

The production of ‘Roseanne’ was happy to work around the schedule demanded by her education as she simultaneously continued her education, and eventually attending Yale University (from which she graduated in 1997 with honors, majoring in Art with an emphasis on Photography).

Since her days on ‘Roseanne’, she has gone on to make appearances on select episodes of shows like ‘The Simpsons’, ‘24’, ‘Law & Order: SVU’, ‘The Big Bang Theory’, and more. A wonderful actress, Sara had summer camp help show her her own potential. What will summer camp show you? And, as always, thanks for reading.

- John

Hey, Campers!

Did you know that kids have been going to summer camp for more than a hundred years? That means there are literally millions of adults who were once summer campers just like you. Many of them have gone on to become famous folks who we all know and love. I have a great time featuring celebrities who went to summer camp—people like Drew Carey, for example!

Drew knew what summer camp was all about, alright. He isn’t actually a former camper as he never attended at an age young enough to be a camper; he did, however, spend a summer as a camp counselor at YMCA Camp Y-Noah in Akron, Ohio.

As you may have gleaned from his TV show, he lived in Old Brooklyn, a neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio with his parents and two older brothers. He may have been the youngest, but he grew up fast. He was only eight when his father died of a brain tumor.

With a dabbling interest in music as well as comedy, Drew played the cornet as well as the trumpet in the marching band of James Ford Rhodes High School. After high school, Drew went on to study at Kent State University for some time before enlisting into the United States Marine Corps Reserve in 1980 where he served for six years.

In 1985 Drew was being paid to write jokes for a friend’s radio show in Cleveland. His friend suggested he go to the library to borrow books about how to write jokes. Drew to the suggestion as actual advice and did so.

His understanding of the funny bone led him to win open mic nights and he eventually became Master of Ceremonies at the Cleveland Comedy Club. Drew started performing in comedy clubs all over Cleveland and Los Angeles. After making a name for himself in stand-up, he landed a gig on the Johnny Carson Show. His performance went over so well that Johnny invited him to sit down—a rare invitation for a guest comedian.

He made his first appearance on ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ in 1994 and he had a number of small appearances in television for a year or so after that, but all the while, he was working on something much bigger on the side with his friend Bruce Helford: ‘The Drew Carey Show’.

The show was about a fictionalized version of Drew himself and how he dealt with the stresses of life and work alongside his group of childhood friends. The show was very successful and ran for nine whole seasons, airing a total of 233 episodes.

After that, Drew got involved in the comedy sports arena—hosting the improvisational comedy show ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’, which regularly featured funnymen like Colin Mockery, Wayne Brady, Ryan Stiles (who costarred in ‘The Drew Carey Show’), and a slew of other guests who would come back often in later episodes.

The show was a tremendous hit and is still in production today, though it is no longer hosted by Drew. Instead, Drew continued his hosting career on a different show—one you may have heard of before called ‘The Price is Right’…! The honor of carrying this infamous gameshow after the show’s original, legendary host, Bob Barker, is a great one.

Check out YMCA Camp Y-Noah in Akron, Ohio for yourself if you’re interested and, as always, thanks for reading.

- John

Hey, Campers!

Countless campers just like you have been relishing in the joys of summer camp for more than a hundred years. Literally millions of adults who were once summer campers when they were closer to your age. It comes as no surprise then, to know that there are a lot of former summer campers who have gone on to become celebrities whom we all know and love today.

Jessica Biel is a summer camp alum. She attended Perry-Mansfield: Performing Arts School and Camp. Located in the mountains of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Perry-Mansfield has been showing kids a first-rate education as well as an awesome summer experience since it was first founded in 1913.

Jessica didn’t necessarily know that she wanted to be an actress back then. She was interested in gymnastics and soccer as well. But she definitely knew she wanted to be on the stage. She was coached in the art of singing at Perry-Mansfield and liked to do musicals in the productions her hometown would put on. At just nine years old, she had already played lead roles in ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and more.

She made money as a model for a while as well, but was most happy when she landed her first role in a film called, ‘It’s a Digital World’. It wasn’t long after that that she found the role that would really launch her acting career: Mary Camden  from the family drama ‘7th Heaven’. Throughout her time on the Warner Brothers show, she went to school at Fairview High School and continued her education afterward at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

‘7th Heaven’ was a very popular show which turned out to be the longest-running family drama TV series in all of television. Her role as Mary brought her lots of recognition and interest for roles in film. Her character on TV only scratched the surface of her career. If Perry-Mansfield sounds like a place you have interest in, check it out for yourself some time and see the good it did Jessica Biel. And, as always, thanks for reading.

- John

Hey, Campers!

With countless numbers of kids going to summer camp for more than a hundred years, there are literally millions of adults who were summer campers when they were children. It’s not surprising to discover then, that lots of former campers went on to become celebrities that we all know and love today.

I’ve told you about Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, alumni of the wonderful Stage Door Manor Camp. You can check out a Blog post about Zach Braff right right—and one about Natalie Portman right here. And for today’s post, we’ll learn of another Stage Door Manor alum who attended around the same time: Mandy Moore.

Sited in a former resort in the Catskills Borscht Belt in Loch Sheldrake, New York, Stage Door Manor provides awesome venues for its campers to get the experience of being on the stage, in the spotlight. Spending three weeks of her summer among Stage Door Manor’s awesome theatre spaces like the Carousel, the Cabaret, the Forum, the Merman, and the outdoor Garden Theatre, Mandy was inspired at a young age to seek out a career in acting.

The granddaughter of Eileen Friedman, a professional ballerina from London, Mandy looked up to her grandmother as a strong source of inspiration to follow her dreams of stardom. “My parents thought it was just a phase I’d grow out of, but I stuck to it and begged them for acting lessons, for voice lessons,” Mandy is quoted to have said.

She didn’t just give her full effort to her lessons, but she immediately went to plugging herself and before long she was starring in a number of productions around town and singing the National Anthem at local sporting events.

When she was 13, she started writing her own music and she was overheard performing by a FedEx delivery employee who had a friend at a record company. The delivery man took a copy of Mandy’s unfinished demo to send to his friend and before she knew it, Mandy was signing a record label.

After launching a music career, Mandy entered into her acting career as well, bringing to the screen great characters from memorable movies like the ‘Princess Diaries’ and ‘A Walk to Remember’, and doing fun voicework for movies like the ‘Dr. Dolittle’ sequel, the ‘Brother Bear’ sequel, as well as the Disney hit, ‘Tangled’.

More recently, she starred in the NBC family comedy-drama television series, ‘This Is Us’ as Rebecca Pearson, the mother of the family. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance in 2016. Staying dedicated to her passion sure has paid off for Mandy. Her summer camp experience surely helped ignite the flames. If Stage Door Manor sounds like the camp for your kid, be sure to check it out sometime and, as always, thanks for reading!

- John