shirt is oversized and untucked; khakis spill over his dress shoes, and curly locks onto his collar. He is completely at ease, working each bit like he’s hamming it up with his grandparents, owning the room. A man watching far behind him doubles over.
Natalie recalls a rush of pride, and an inability to breathe. “This is what a real comedian’s mom feels like. It’s a mix of horror, nerves, and pride.” And almost immediately, one clear thought occurred to her: “This is going to happen so much. Whenever he gets a live mic, he’s going to be entertaining adults. He was seven or eight.”
“He’s taught himself everything,” she said. “He’s taught himself to swim, he taught himself the ABCs, he taught himself to read—this thing about not needing parents is not new.” She reconsidered. “It’s not that he doesn’t need us, he needs support.” Natalie and Cam seem to have a cozy relationship. Cam didn’t need parents charting the movement, but he needed a sanctuary. “I want to be home and protect Holden and stay out of things,” Natalie said.
Swimming was Natalie’s most vivid early recollection of discovering who her boy was. She took Cam to the pool as a toddler and tried to get him started on floating. “Resist, resist, resist.” And one day he was jumping up and down in the pool, then tried it at an angle, a tighter angle, and pretty soon he was swimming. “He didn’t want or really appreciate the need to reach out. It’s like, ‘I can do it myself.’ Just the way he was built.”
Reading was more gradual, but more revealing. She sent Cam to Montessori pre-K, and redecorated the long hallway to the boys’ rooms with alphabet wallpaper at eye level, to make learning fun. “He couldn’t wait for them to come down,” Natalie said. He loved pre-K, reading was exciting, but this “fun” business—he saw right through it and resented it. God, did he hate to be patronized. He didn’t have the vocabulary for that word yet, but the concept was infuriating.
By pre-K he was reading, and in kindergarten it really took off. By first or second grade he was plowing through chapter books. “I couldn’t keep him in books—it was just like flying out the door.” And when he was seven, Jerry Seinfeld did a comedy book for kids, Halloween— “And if you ever checked it out, you’d be like, ‘Of course Cameron was into this.’”
That’s also the period when politics got ahold of Cameron. “About in third grade, I started to notice the undeniable political mind,” Natalie said. “He was very pro-Obama.” He was going to Pine Crest Elementary School, a prestigious private school in Boca Raton, and Barack Obama was facing off against Mitt Romney for reelection. Cameron told her a lot of the kids’ parents were less liberal, and he was getting a lot of pushback. “Basically, his teacher would say he was on a soapbox and didn’t know the appropriate time and place—that eventually, he would have to turn the audience over to the teacher for the day. So there were a lot of those phone calls before the election.”
That went hand in hand with his interest in theater, she said. Mrs. Blakely was the drama teacher, “and she could tell right away that this energy needed to go somewhere. I think everyone kind of agreed, this energy needed to be after school.”
Pine Crest had a strong drama program for an elementary school, but Cameron outgrew that quickly, and moved on to community theater. High School Musical stood out, and Seussical, in which he played the Cat in the Hat. Music became a passion: first the cello, then the upright bass, but eventually Cameron decided his voice was his true instrument. For a while, politics took a back seat. “Because he felt the world was a safe place with Obama,” Natalie said. It came roaring back in 2017, when Trump was inaugurated—“And everything started to be really, you know, ugly? He just felt like he needed to tune in a little more.”
They sent Cam off to Starlight Camp when he was very young, and he was very excited. His older brother, Julian, had gone there, and his cousins too, and for two years they had raved about it. “There were periods, you followed your exact bunk to your exact activity, and he hated it,” Natalie said. Camp was supposed to be fun, and that wasn’t Cam’s idea of fun. So they tried French Woods, a