Up With People stint ends for Las Vegan Cameron Dillard

Kimberley McGee

Tuesday, Aug. 10, 1999 | 10:31 a.m.

Up With People in Las Vegas

What: Up With People presents "Roads."

When: 8:30 p.m. Saturday.

Where: Sunset Station Amphitheater in Henderson.

Cost: $14.

Information: Call 542-7777.

At the tender age of 8 Cameron Dillard knew what she wanted as she sat in the audience of an Up With People concert.

Excitedly, she pulled on her father's shirt sleeve, pointed at the stage and said that one day she was going to join the effervescent group that was dancing and singing beneath the bright theater lights.

Then she forgot all about that first experience with UWP, a nonprofit entertainment and community service youth group, as the now 20-year-old Las Vegas native tended to the trials and tribulations of growing up.

Then they came back.

As a senior at Basic High School in 1997 Dillard was again awed by the exotic 18- to 25-year-old performers of the international organization. The travel, the performing ... the travel. A year with the group sounded perfect for the college-bound Dillard, who wasn't quite sure what she wanted to be when she grew up.

Heading toward Denver, Colo., in July, 1998, Dillard's view of the world, and herself, was about to come into sharp focus as she prepared to hit the road in the appropriately named UWP show, "Roads," which is on the final leg of its two-year world tour and will be performed Saturday at the Sunset Station hotel-casino. (UWP will also perform at private community functions in Las Vegas Wednesday-Friday.)

"I can't believe all the places I've seen," says Dillard, who recently returned to Las Vegas after a year-long stint with the group, staying with host families in more than 200 cities throughout the world. Saturday's show is her final performance.

To realize her dream, she had to raise funds to pay for food, transportation and other expenses. She began by selling her car, holding yard sales and working odd jobs until she had collected more than $13,000, the amount needed to take her around the world and out of college.

"I wasn't doing very well," she says of her freshman year. "I wasn't focused."

Loving the travel was no surprise. Loving the charity work, which UWP does in each city, was. "I didn't expect to enjoy the community service as much as I did," Dillard says. "It made me feel so satisfied to give to other people."

She helped build wheelchair ramps onto homes, cheered up Kosovo children taking refuge at a U.S. military base in Germany and worked to make the lives of others just a bit better. "They say that we are so special for doing ( these) things," she says. "But they are the ones who are special, they're the ones who are (surviving) through a bad time."

UWP members also learn the business side of performing, running an organization and raising funds and finding host families through month-long internships. Although the cast seems to be always smiling, it's grueling to put on a happy face all the time!

"It got very tiring after a while," Dillard says. "It's hard, it's not a year that you go and you have fun all the time and people are smiling and laughing ... that is what everybody else sees from Up With People -- just a group of kids who are always having a good time. No, it's not like that. It is very physically demanding and extremely emotionally demanding."

Every three days the smiling 150 group members are shuttled to strangers' homes and donated hotel space around the city. "You're away from home, you go from place to place within a few days, there's no real stability," she says.

Each member shares their life stories with their host family and is encouraged to have dinner or spend the evening talking with their hosts until they are no longer strangers. If they don't share the same language they swap hand signals and personal belongings to get a sense of each other. Then the cast moves on to another city.

"You have somebody just stay in your home and you live with them for a few days and then you walk away saying 'I love you!' " Dillard says.

But each town offered a new experience -- she saw snow for the first time in Germany, pink sand in Bermuda and found out things about herself that she otherwise wouldn't have, simply rambling around the hallowed halls of higher education.

Members of each host home have written messages and pasted pictures, flowers and even sand to Dillard's memory book, an oversized, colorful blank book with a yellow smiley face the size of a dinner plate gracing the cover.

"It's neat to be able to look through all this," she says, turning the orange and purple pages covered with cutout pictures of smiling faces and animals and scrawled with kind messages from each host family.

One photograph is of carved Halloween pumpkins perched atop snow-covered porch steps in Germany. "(The host mother) had never seen a carved pumpkin," Dillard says. "She didn't want to see them until they were all done."

She was so exuberant about the giant gourd art that she displayed them outside for two weeks, where they rotted.

Dillard has framed a few of the hundreds of pictures from her Up With People experience. They range from the snow-covered hills of Germany to sand-covered cast members on a Bermuda beach, but her favorite is a perfect snapshot of scuba-clad Dillard grasping a dolphin by its "cheeks" and kissing the top of its gray-blue nose.

"We all complemented each other's personalities pretty well," she says of the many friends she's made in the group over the last year. But ...

"Then there's some people in the cast whom you just don't quite get along with because when you have 150 people (from) 22 different countries there's going to be some clash of personalities," she says.

Learning to work with and around those types of obstacles, she adds, made her a more generous person, as did some of her experiences outside of performing and touring. "We went to a concentration camp in Germany," she says. "It was so solemn and very emotionally wrenching to us."

Soles of worn shoes, plates and eating utensils lay where they had been left more than 50 years ago by Holocaust survivors. A simple marker read "5,000" at a mass grave climbing taller than the foreign visitors quietly walking past.

"It was very intense," Dillard says. "A lot of people were taking pictures but I couldn't bring myself to actually take a picture of it ... in honor of the people who died there."

A military base close by was practicing maneuvers, shaking the ground beneath the tour group member as they wandered through the grim remains of the camp. "You could feel the ground shaking ... (and) imagine what it was like (then)," she says.

She has been home for five weeks, trying to debrief herself after the time spent with all those Up people. "I was ready to come home and now that I am, I'm still trying to detach myself from the year," she says.

Dillard currently works part-time in the ticket office of the Las Vegas Stars and is signed up for classes at the Community college of Southern Nevada in the fall.

"I'm glad I did it," she says. "I did a year of college ... but my mind was somewhere else. I would suggest people doing that before they start school if they are going to (travel)."

Although the pace is grueling, she says, the rewards are tenfold.

"I feel I've learned a lot more in the last year than I ever could have in college," she says. "I'm definetely more mature, more focused, all those things I learned in Up With People because you have to be flexible and ready for anything ... on an every day basis."

And always with a smile.

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