A Place Where Dreams Get the Better of Reality

Her name was Jami Goldman. She was a camp counselor sitting at a table of 7-year-olds in the mountains above Malibu. She had two girls climbing on her back and arms while she somehow found a way to get a sandwich to her mouth and hold a conversation.

The first thing you noticed was that she was a double amputee, wearing two shiny metal prostheses. She and a friend were returning from a ski trip 11 years ago when they became stranded for 10 days by a snowdrift in Arizona. She lost both legs, above the knee, to frostbite. Now, at 30, she’s the U.S. record-holder in the 200 meters for handicapped runners. You might have seen her featured in a recent Adidas commercial.

And here she was, at the Dream Street Foundation camp, where she’d come for a reality check.

“I learn a lot from these kids,” she said. “I feel lucky. At least I have my health.”

*

I was an hour into my visit to the Dream Street camp and was already aware I’d seen things I’d remember vividly for the rest of my life.

The camp, run by a volunteer staff of 80 counselors, nine nurses and six full-time medical specialists, played host last week to 60 boys and 62 girls with AIDS, cancer, leukemia and an army of other life-threatening diseases. They were from 4 to 16 years old, most from low-income families. About 30 were flown in from other parts of the country.

Despite chronic pain and fatigue, the kids were running, jumping and clowning, playing with a vigor that made you wonder whether their bodies were suddenly in denial. Given a weeklong respite from the wear and tear they endure in the course of their typical regimens, their glee and gut laughter were telling signs of the power of camaraderie.

Around the Shalom Institute’s 150 acres of rolling chaparral with stands of California oak and blooming dogwood trees, you could see the white medical trailers that had been placed alongside the cabins to make it easier for campers to keep up with their scheduled doses of drugs and various therapies.

I watched a kid with little hair on his head because of years of chemo for his brain tumor. He was lip-syncing to hip-hop music along with a kid who is HIV-positive, hamming it up for the cameraman from a video production company. The up-tempo music and beaming smiles seemed incongruous with the reality. Then I remembered it was their reality, and I knew very little about it.

In another activity area I met Evan Franklin, a 10th-grader from Mountain Home, Idaho, who suffers from chronic glandular disorders. “I feel like I belong,” he said. “There are people here I can relate to, I can talk to. I’ve met kids who are worse off than me. My disease isn’t all that bad.”

I met Ian Fagan, a 16-year-old boy from Hermosa Beach, who was here for the fourth time. His head bears the scar from the removal of a brain tumor six years ago. He said he was now free of drugs and chemo, and he liked to jokingly tell people that the scar is a result of “Nam, man, I was shot in Nam.” He talked about the T-shirt he’d designed with the slogan: “What doesn’t destroy you defines you.”

Over in a field, a group of youngsters were being mounted on horses and taken for a ride. In another area, campers were making pottery. Elsewhere kids were climbing ropes, swimming, or flying through the air on a zip line.

Patty Grubman, a theatrical producer, co-founded the nonprofit Dream Street Foundation in 1988 with her brother, Billy Grubman. It cost the foundation $120,000 to put on its weeklong event, which included a carnival, an outdoor barbecue, a performance by a group of acrobats called the Vitas, a demonstration of the world’s smallest bike by Guinness Book record-holder Kid Lema, a dog show and a dance with two deejays.

*

Before I left, a 16-year-old girl from Chatsworth approached me and asked if I’d like to interview her. She asked me not to use her name because most of her high school classmates did not know she was HIV-positive. She told me her father had died of AIDS when she was a little girl and that her mom and her best friend had died of it last year. She now lives with her dead friend’s family.

I asked her if she was scared. No, she said. She takes 11 pills every morning and 11 pills every night and goes on with her life.

What do you want to be? I asked. An actress, or makeup artist, she said.

I asked the teenager what she was looking forward to in life.

Tonight’s dance, she said. Then she pointed to one of the junior counselors and a blush erupted across her face.

“Don’t tell him,” she said through a huge smile, “but I really like him.”

The wind was picking up. It filled the canyon with the scent of jasmine and the belief that, given the opportunity, all kids will find a way of celebrating life.