Prediction: We have only maybe five years before there will be an explosion of women rockers, DJs, R&B artists, rappers, and folk singers in these United States.

These places – Portland, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, Austin, Bay Area, Minneapolis, Tennessee, North Carolina, Boston, soon to be Seattle – are the ports of a new authority, towns where today's female musicians are teaching young women to rock. Thanks be to Portland for setting rhetoric into action - creating the first Rock and Roll Camp for Girls in 2002, putting instruments and PA systems, songwriting skills and stage wisdom into ears young enough to think it natural, normal, good and common for young girls to rock out loud. And so it will be, let us hope.

The organizers of New York's Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls are nothing short of miracle workers, getting together some 90 girls aged 9-17 and probably around 45 volunteers in an arts high school in downtown Brooklyn for two sessions over the course of the summer. All the counselors are volunteers, something like 50 percent of the campers are there with reduced or free admission. There are enough drums, basses, guitars, amps, mics, mic stands, and PAs for everyone...and free picks. Fundraising concerts and auctions occur throughout the year to make this all possible.

I worked as a camp counselor at the second session, one day after returning from LA to NYC. To my charge, five 10 year olds who I would make feel welcome and shepherd through the sometimes-awkward world of learning an instrument, forming a band and carrying through with the project. At orientation this was nailed in - it will be stressful. Really? Oh my, I forgot how it is to be a little kid. Two hours into the first day of camp, I saw what they meant. This was a camp full of major personalities in small statures, enthusiastic participants in new situations potential for disaster. Throughout the week, counselors did skits to defuse potential problems, teaching by subtle example how one could coax bossy know-it-all band sergeants into something like equal members. Or how to include the shy one, or how to make the new guitarist feel confident enough to keep going.

By the end of the first day, bands were formed and songs were coming together, even with girls who had just picked up their instruments for the first time. Those bands sounded a lot like...Gang Gang Dance band practice (I used to rehearse across them when I was in Cowboys & Indians) but the drummers were more willfully attempting to carry a beat. It was joyful to walk through the halls of the school listening to the racket, singing the Atom + His Package lyric "I had a dream when I was in high school/That I attended the punk rock academy." When a vocal would break in through the din, in time, I would shiver.

Day three maybe, I was wandering the halls during instrument practice. Amy, a guitar teacher, had to help a student who was homesick and crying in the hallway. Could I teach the class? Another counselor and I walked in to the beginner's guitar class and taught them "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" in about 15 minutes, then we played along with it on CD until Amy returned, ready to resume class. Crisis averted - my fear of teaching instruments vanished, my first competent display of guitar in public performed (I've been in secret for several years).

There were also a variety of workshops from music business to band art (making merch). Daphne Brooks and I taught four sessions of music history, "Women Who Rock," to the girls, who are broken into sections by age. Okay, Daphne B. mostly taught the class, but I helped run the games and jumped in a few times with my own facts and tidbits. She's a real force to watch at a teacher, switching modes from the older girls to the younger and riffing off suggestions of how Bessie Smith might sound like Pink while all the while weaving a new, inclusive history of 20th century great ladies "who rocked" regardless of their music genre or time period. My game invention was to take the line "take another piece of my heart now baby" and have each girl in class sing it differently from the rest, then play Janis's own. One girl burst out afterwards "Just now Janis Joplin became my new favorite singer." I've never had such an easy time convincing someone as this - try to do it yourself and see how hard it is to do it well.

One thing that was a new situation for me was the "you rock/I rock" policy. Essentially, this means that at Rock Camp you never say you're sorry when you ‘mess up' a part, you just say "I rock." Likewise, if someone else messes up, they rock. There are no "correct" song structures, there are no key signatures, time signatures, there is no "in tune" but the one the player wants to be in, and it's your job as counselor to help them get to that place. Each band coach managed this, as well as the personality conflicts, with a different degree of agility and patience, but generally everyone stuck to the idea that the practice was more important than the result, and the audience was expected to respond to the practice (hear/see the practice) and not judge the result. It was very, very similar to my Masters work with art school trained pop musicians in that way, and very...liberating to me as a musician long trapped by ideas of how something should sound, given my background/training and critical ear.

Not to be fooled, one of the girls in my group was unhappy to be put on keyboards in her band when her true passion was guitar. "I decided to not even play the keyboards during one time we played the song and then afterwards I asked everyone what they thought of my part," she said. "I made it look like I was playing but I didn't push the keys. Everyone told me I rocked." ....And, I, as the wizard of this Oz, went behind the curtain and got her switched to guitar so she wouldn't have to test the limits of this a-critical construct.

Few will utter the words "feminist utopia" about the Rock Camp for Girls, but I will. After one week solid - from Sunday training sessions to Saturday showcase - I saw actions almost exclusively that would fall into both camps (pro-empowered women, pro-harmonious community) and was thrilled. The counselors were largely as kind and open to each other as they were to the campers, opening new friendship doors, musical opportunities, and forging important alliances. The girls met each other, hung out with a bunch of inspiring older women musicians, and learned to rock. Later, the girls will add critical, evaluative skills to their musicianship, but hopefully after the fire to get out and play has been long stoked. This is the crucial thing and it was clear as they stood under the lights at the Highline Ballroom on Saturday afternoon that for quite a few, this was the first of many more performances.

One final moment. Every day during lunch, female musicians came in to play concerts for the kids. On the final day, Mary Timony came to play a few songs and take questions. My senior year of high school I almost ran away from home to come to NYC to see Mary's band, Helium, play a show at the Knitting Factory. I worshipped her and wanted desperately to sing and write songs like she did. Now she was standing, just another enthusiastic woman playing for a big group of girls, inspiring them to want to rock. And me? It was my 29th birthday, and Mary was playing my own private party with a room full of folks who, even if they don't end up rocking as musicians will surely be put on the path to rocking in other, equally inspiring ways. It was, to use the most commonly heard response to any aesthetic question asked at camp that week, awesome. And it really was.