Showcation describes itself as combining “the best parts of a sleep-away summer camp, an immersive music festival and a wild night out in New York City into a single choose-your-own-adventure weekend.” If you were there last month, you know they hit the nail on the head in bringing this vision to life.Picture this: you’re watching Baauer perform from the roof of a retrofitted school bus parked beside a lake and he fake-drops ‘Harlem Shake’ three times in a row.
Blown away, you step away to catch a breath.But past the edge of the crowd, another kind of chaos is unfolding.
In a pavilion adorned with red fabric and string lights, people are playing blackjack on a table covered with plush toys, plastic snakes, costume pieces, small gadgets and objects whose value seems to depend entirely on how convincingly someone could argue for them.Hosted by a fast-talking, clown-costumed dealer, players bet trinkets and oddities instead of cash.
You watch for a couple of rounds before someone invites you to a game of Mario Kart in the corner of the pavilion where people are lounging shoulder to shoulder in front of old CRT televisions.The setup is intentionally retro with legacy gaming consoles, worn-in furniture, lava lamps and multiplayer games that make strangers start trash-talking each other within minutes.
Racing in Mario Kart, brawling through X-Men Legends or ripping DragonForce’s ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ on Guitar Hero, the makeshift gaming lounge is another place for you to drift into.After time well spent on a Nintendo 64, you realize you need a snack to refuel.
Just beyond the gaming pavilion is Stef’s Cereal Bar, a free, makeshift cafe offering over two dozen kinds of cereal.It feels like walking into a middle-school sleepover.
You make yourself a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with fresh milk, sit down at a table with people you met five minutes ago, and suddenly everyone is ranking their favorite childhood cereals with the kind of...