MELISSA OGLESBY
Girls Rock! Chicago: Stickin' It to the Man
Written by Sarah Martinson
Edited by Abby Adler
Four girl bands—Amped Out, Fallen Through, The Dead Pedestrians and The Jagged Tulips—were practicing at Roosevelt University for their first live public show. The rock bands were a part of Girls Rock! Chicago, a week-long summer camp program that aims to empower young girls that Melissa Oglesby co-founded with some college friends.
As Oglesby recalls that day years ago, when she arrived in her blue jeans, t-shirt and sneakers at Roosevelt to hear the girls perform for the first time, she was nervous. While the girls had spent the last five days writing lyrics, learning to play their instruments and rehearsing, Oglesby had been stuck in her office at her full-time marketing job. She had left it up to her co-founders and volunteers to take care of the campers and teach them how to play music.
So she was worried the girls would be unwelcoming to her—a stranger—even though she had booked the camp venue, vetted applications, bootstrapped funds and recruited volunteers.
Melissa Oglesby at the CHIRP Record Fair. Courtesy of Lee Kolcz
“Can I autograph your shoe?” Oglesby looked down to see an 8-year-old girl with straight, light brown hair.
“Yeah! Totally sign my shoe!” Oglesby said, surprised by the girl's confidence and friendly demeanor.
The next day when the bands performed in front of their friends and family, Oglesby was even more surprised. Before her performance, the girl who signed her shoe, Amped Out drummer Frankie Lipinski, said into her microphone, “I want to dedicate this song to my little brother because today’s his birthday.”
Oglesby recalls laughing with delight at Lipinski’s channeling her inner rock star. Lipinski was owning the stage and calling the shots, which is exactly what Oglesby and her co-founders wanted.
“There is so much pressure on girls in terms of what you should be,” Oglesby explains now. “The whole idea of camp is that there is not one way to be. You don’t have to look any particular way. You can look any way you want. You can think what you want. You can be what you want.”
“The whole idea of camp is that there is not one way to be….You don’t have to look any particular way. You can look any way you want. You can think what you want. You can be what you want.”
Melissa Oglesby
The Jagged Tulips performed a song at the concert that stuck with Oglesby called “Simple.”
“You think it is so simple/But it’s not so simple after all,” Oglesby sings, quoting lyrics from the song.
Oglesby founded GR!C in 2005 to change young girls’ perception of themselves, and in the process, her own perception of them changed as well.
Growing up in Long Island, New Jersey, Oglesby didn’t have younger siblings and she didn’t babysit. At age 8, she started playing the clarinet. When she was 14, she created her own zine and listened to punk rock bands like Nirvana. In high school, Oglesby wanted to play drums and join a rock band, but her parents and other family members discouraged her.
“They would tell me, ‘No, that’s what boys with behavioral problems do,’” Oglesby says. “It was a bit like, ‘No, you’re good at this. You should keep doing this, but don’t do that other thing.’”
At the University of Chicago, where Oglesby met her two co-founders Emily Bernstein and Emily Easton, she majored in gender studies and learned about third-wave feminism. Listening to her professors talk about sexism and micro-aggressions, Oglesby realized what she had experienced in high school was sexism. She realized she was being discouraged from playing drums for no other reason than because she was girl.
Armed with newfound confidence after college, Oglesby finally decided to teach herself how to play the drums and joined a rock band, but her experience as a young girl being discouraged from playing the drums because it was a “boy thing” stuck with her.
“All the people who worked to start Girls Rock! Chicago, something we all had in common was we were really involved in music one way or another, but maybe felt like we haven’t been treated the same because we were girls,” Oglesby says.
Melissa Oglesby at the CHIRP Record Fair. Courtesy of Lee Kolcz
While Bernstein was staying in New York in 2004 for a couple of years, she heard about an all-girls rock camp founded in Brooklyn and volunteered to help run the camp during the summer.
Bernstein returned to Chicago, affected deeply by the experience, and quickly persuaded Oglesby that they should start their own camp. However, the pair knew they couldn’t do it on their own, so they recruited Easton and put out the call for like-minded volunteers.
They discovered that another group of women in a band called “The Gamine Thief” had been planning to start a girl’s rock camp too. Since both groups had registered as nonprofits, to officially join forces, they had to file a merger.
Started from scratching with no money, the six women had to scramble to figure out how to start a girl’s rock camp—where and when to hold the camp, what the programming would be as well as what insurance they’d need and how to write media releases.
“Everything that anyone would have to figure out for a business we had to figure out,” Oglesby says.
Oglesby, her co-founders and the rest of their team had 17 campers enrolled when they finished pulling GR!C together. After the first day of camp, a news story was published about GR!C, and the co-founders were swamped with phone calls from parents wanting to sign up their girls the next day. By the next summer, 60 girls were registered for the week-long camp. Now, GR!C has two camp sessions each summer with 75 girls per each session and a waiting list. The camp is for girls ages 8–16 with a 4:1 counselor-to-camper ratio, and the camp cost is $500 complete with a professional recording session and final performance showcase at Thalia Hall.
Like many campers, Lipinksi participated in GR!C every summer until she aged out of the program. Being Oglesby and the other camp counselors, Lipinski felt like she belonged. The experience gave her the confidence to dye her hair and play roller derby even though that wasn’t what the popular girls at her school were doing.
Now a freshman at Michigan State University studying marketing and psychology, Lipinski feels anything but “normal” or average and is grateful for taking the risks that she did at camp. GR!C has impacted her life so much that she wrote her college admissions essay about it.
“Overall Girls Rock just showed you that it’s your world and you can be in it and you act how you want to people and you can do exactly what you want with yourself. You don’t have to do anything else because people are telling you to. I feel like learning that at 8 years old was such a turning point,” Lipinski says.
“I wouldn’t have the thoughts that I have and I wouldn’t be able to carry myself the way I can without Girls Rock.”