Normally on a Friday, I might spend a minute or three looking at Saturday's college football games and give you some shots in the dark on some games of interest (I'm really looking forward to Fla St @ Miami, ND @ NCSt, BYU @ Michigan St, UW @ Oregon, Tennessee @ A&M, Houston @ Navy, and even North Dakota St at upstart Missouri St!), but tomorrow holds more interest for me for a different event:
The Mountain West Marching Band Invitational at Idaho State University.
I spent twenty-nine years waving a stick at teenaged musicians, resisting the urge to yell "Avada Kedavra!" whenever they missed a note. But truth be told, I probably got more sheer joy putting together marching shows that were enjoyable for the students and I to put together and, hopefully, for the audience to watch as well. If you've ever created, whether it was art or music or even a child, you know that joy of getting to "show off" the results of your sweat and tears to an attentive audience. And going to marching band competitions was the chance to put our creations on display - and going to ISU was always our favorite contest.
Why? Well, it's close (we often traveled to Washington or Nevada or Utah to find competitions), and so there were lots of bands we knew there. It was indoors, and in Idaho in October that's sometimes not only a plus but a must. And it was a great chance for our own patrons to see the show in a finished state without a talkative football audience to contend with, AND from a vantage point where they could actually SEE what we were trying to make on the field. (No matter which school I taught at, our home stadium was never more than twenty feet high; hardly conducive for watching marching band formations!)
But Pocatello also holds many specific memories for me... warm-ups in the parking lot, with six other bands going through their warm-up simultaneously... going down that steep ramp into the dome (and back up the OTHER steep ramp after the show!)... trying to aim at the press box where the judges were - which was seemingly a mile up in the air!... having to stand out on the field fifteen extra minutes waiting for a judge to return, and I decided to go out on the field and visit every single student to reassure them not to freak out... making my LAST show there, the show called LIFESPAN that described the (fictional) life of my bride Melissa and myself... bag lunches at the busses after the show - or before, when we got large enough to compete in the largest division...doing the Macarena in the parking lot of the Pocatello Golden Corral after the show...
We spent most of the day lounging in the upper deck, where we get to see tiny bands we can sympathize with (thankfully, my students always internalized the message that we were there once, and that there were admirable qualities with every band) and incredible bands we bowed at the feet of (on the occasions that the SLC valley didn't have a competing show, we'd get to see groups like American Fork HS, who competed on a completely different plane than we ever did. (One of my students once pointed out that they had more coaches than we did wind players!) But MAN, did they deserve every accolade they ever got!
Once we happened to be at that Golden Corral with many of their students after the show. 2009. We did the Macarena with them, said our goodbyes, loaded buses, and went our separate ways. Fifteen minutes laters, one of their buses crashed, killing a woodwind teacher of theirs. Despite the fact that my students had just won their first ever District IV title there that day, all they could do was grieve and send condolences to the AFHS band and staff - they wore ribbons all week in mourning. It took a reminder at the last football game of the year by our athletic director to get them to celebrate their own achievement.
Over the weeks, I'll share with you many more stories from those days. But if you're in the Poky area tomorrow, stop in at Holt Arena and support some kids who work their tuckuses off to produce something that the "instant gratification" generation can rarely put together. For that matter, if you're around ANY marching competition this fall, spend a couple of hours enjoying the best of what our teenagers can do. You won't be sorry.
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