The wooden tables in Camp Boggy Creek’s mess hall were pushed aside to make room for a dance floor. A DJ was brought in to spin records, a chocolate fountain was stationed on the buffet and balloons spelling out “Let’s Party!” were hung on the wall.
The camp counselors, most in their late teens and early 20s, exchanged their shorts and t-shirts for dress gowns and suit jackets and showed up to reclaim the prom that COVID stole.
“We missed out on a lot of big events that every student looks forward to,” said camp counselor Trinity Gunn, who was a senior at Rickards High School in Tallahassee in 2021, the thick of the pandemic.
On the evening of the camp-hosted prom, Gunn and her fellow counselors were conveyed from their summer cabins to the de facto banquet hall in a minibus. Camp director David Mann served as chauffeur. He wore a Joker jacket and had dyed his mustache purple to complement his outfit.
Camp Boggy Creek is a non-profit in Eustis that offers free summer camp to children with life-threatening illnesses.
About one third of its 76 counselors are former campers. Childhood illness restricted much of their early lives. And then COVID claimed key parts of their high school experiences.
In 2022, when in-person camp resumed for the first-time since the pandemic, Boggy Creek’s senior staff saw the impact.
“You could just see all the hits that our young team had taken over those couple of years,” said Dan Jurman, CEO of Boggy Creek, who, on prom night, was decked out in black tuxedo and bowtie.
The summer prom, he and his staff decided, would be a fun way to boost morale.
Sarah Wolfgang came to the Wednesday evening dance with her boyfriend of three years, Rylan Thomas, delighted to show off the camp she attended for nine summers.
Wolfgang was 4 years old when she was diagnosed with stage three leukemia. Chemotherapy damaged a knee and caused her foot to point out at an angle.
“It’s hard for me to get up and do stuff. As an adult, you learn how to deal with it. But when I was younger, it restrained me from doing a lot of stuff,” Wolfgang said.
She looked forward to high school where, with cancer behind her, she counted on participating in student life. But in her junior year at Vanguard High School in Ocala, the pandemic hit and, once again, she was confined to her home.
Wolfgang first attended Boggy Creek when she was 9 years old, after her doctor recommended it. The camp made her “feel like I could actually be a kid.”
With the prom, Boggy Creek again gave her a sense of normalcy. As a child, she recalls watching the Disney channel and seeing girls getting dressed up in prom gowns.
“The magic that happened there, I wanted it,” Wolfgang said.
The dance was free but for what is known at camp as a shoutout. As each counselor walked into the dining hall, they were issued a paper heart and had to write down the name of a co-worker, and recognize something good they’d done, then paste it to a chalkboard at the front of the room.
About 50 counselors attended the dance. They moved from the buffet to the selfie station, which featured LED lighting and a tripod for cell phones. But mostly, they were on the dance floor.
Wolfgang said she and her boyfriend are both introverts.
“But camp has a way of drawing you out of your shell,” she said. At one point, the D.J. played a slow song and Thomas asked her to dance.
“Even though we did not know what we were doing, we were just super happy,” she added.
In addition to the dance, Jurman and his senior staff have hosted other events for Boggy Creek’s summer counselors, such as pool parties and bowling nights, that they hoped would help their young employees recharge and recapture some childhood fun.
“You figure anybody who’s 22 and entering the workplace for the first time is carrying some of this weight of what happened to them four years ago,” he said.
