I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade this weekend. Which of course brought back memories of my marching band time. I was in band from 7th -11th grade….marching band for 10th and 11th grade. There was a certain degree of burnout since we did work very hard during the fall season. So its no surprise that many of us did drop out during our Junior and Senior years. My dropout was energized by the fact that many of my friends decided to drop out. I remember coming home and telling my parents that I was dropping out of band. They had been heavily involved in band and must have enjoyed much of the social part of it. So they were mad at me for dropping out.
As a marching band our emphasis was directed toward the contests. These were competition events that only the band parents went to. Whereas when most people think about marching bands, they think of football games and Christmas parades….which members of the band put relatively low emphasis on. We really didn’t care too much for football games and parades, only performing good enough to pass for respectable at these events. Yet when it was time to decide how much to give to school music programs, whether or not a band was in the local Christmas parade was a good measuring stick on whether or not the school board/county commissioner/powers that be granted money to the program.
We had some warped rules in band. Mostly it concerned whenever we’d march back to the stadium after competition. We marched back in line…usually without our instruments OR our uniforms. Here we were in street clothes marching back completely solumn…military faced….with our arms crossed….in a single file line. And whenever someone would try to break the line just trying to get through, we were supposed to yell “Don’t break ranks!” Some event ran right over the people. Talk about class. Looking back on that I think it was pretty dumb. It we had been in some type of military uniform, I could sorta understand it. But we were a high school band….and somehow justifying trampling over people and being downright rude to people.
It’s not that I hated it. I made alot of good friends in band and learned alot about life and organization and doing your part for the whole. I just think that it was particularly overhyped at times.