...and I'm a Rose Parade junkie...

Why does the Rose Parade hold such fascination for us that in the long-standing era of exclusivity in broadcast rights (Super Bowl ONE was the last sporting event covered by dueling networks, fifty years ago this month!)? John Nabor, a Pasadena resident and native, was asked that very question at the end of the ABC coverage this morning, and had most of the right answer: While the rest of the country is snowbound, we're celebrating a New Year with flowers and beautiful weather. It's a celebration of 128 years of tradition....

All of that is true. But there's more.

Yes, there's all that tradition - for example, if you watched today you were reminded that the reason for not holding the Tournament of Roses on a Sunday was that the parade would scare all the horses parked outside the churches on a Sunday morning. No more horses outside churches. A, we don't use horses to go places anymore - only horsepower - and B, we don't go to church any more, at least as a society.

But it's not just looking back - on New Year's Day (or its equivalent), we make our resolutions looking forward. We pray for a better year than the one just past. We want a sign of HOPE for the future, and what better sign of hope than a beautiful parade, entirely positive in nature (you never noticed that? It's very intentional...), on a fantastic sunny day in beautiful Pasadena, California. There's a reason every network that can afford to sends their crews to be a part of it - it's as important a part of that transition from old to new as the ball dropping on New Year's Eve in NYC...in the cold...often in the snow...always in the dark...get the contrast?

There's more to it than all of that for me personally, too.

I went to school in Pasadena for a year and a half, a student at the California Institute of Technology (as we never called it - it's always been CalTech). I was a band director for twenty-nine years, and taught marching bands that traveled the western US for most of those years. (Never marched in the Rose Parade, as student or director. And it's six miles long and starts at 8 a.m. - I don't regret missing it.)

So, I particularly appreciate watching parades in general, and the Rose Parade in particular. [I also admit that the purist in me HATES the Macy's Thanksgiving trend of making the entire parade stop so they can do a Broadway number for the cameras. Imagine the rest of the parade: stop, start, stop, start... When we took the Jerome HS band ("the Ambush of Tigers", thank you very much) to march in the Portland Tournament of Roses parade in 2012 (the little sister of the Pasadena version), we'd have to literally stop the parade every twenty minutes or so for a two-minute television commercial break! (There was also a fifteen minute delay for one of those Occupy Wall Street protests, but that's another story...)]

Over the years I took high school bands to several different "events" - maybe the most "glamorous" was the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which I got to take my band to back in 1999. Turn the corner, and the lights covering the televised portion of the parade (it's a nighttime parade) looked like Close Encounters UFOs were landing. The first quarter, half mile of the parade was marched on a red carpet, for Pete's sake! The crowd estimate was something like 1.5 million, and I absolutely believe it. I need to dedicate a blog entry to that entire trip. I'll save the rest and write that up sometime.

Some of the other trips we took were just as memorable, even if they weren't nationally televised. Yeah, the Fiesta Bowl parade was cool, but probably the most fun any of my bands and I had was on a trip where not a single performance had more than a thousand viewers. In 2002, we took a trip to Seattle (performed at the Seattle Center, marched through the complex), went north to Edmonds and competed in an indoor marching show, crossed the border six months after 9/11 (and THAT story alone is worth a blog entry!), performed in Vancouver, and ferried across the strait to Vancouver Island alongside three whales, toured Butchart Gardens, performed at Victoria's Parliament building.... none of it earth-shattering, but every person who went on that trip had the experience of a lifetime. 

And then there are the "every year" events, the ones you do as part of your community. The county fairs, the homecoming parades, the annual city celebrations... That's where you connect with your patrons as an employee of their school district. I used to always try to include my seventh and eighth grade band kids with the high school band and color guard whenever we marched for Homecoming when I taught in both Payette and Jerome. We'd end up with two hundred kids sometimes, hardly looking like what the Rose Parade precision did today, but the reactions! Parents seeing their kids perform with "the big kids", the classmates seeing them perform, and most importantly, the elementary kids getting to watch a huge band march by, and hopefully piquing their interest down the road....

Last story for today, but gosh, there are so many to tell! Since I retired from band directing, when I started getting sick, it pains me to report that the band program here (where I still teach the alternative school) has shrunk dramatically. Good young director who hasn't figured out how to connect with a larger number of kids yet. So, my daughter CC told me last month about a conversation she had with some fifth grade classmates after the high school band visited their school...

"The band isn't all that great, are they...", said the friends.
"Do you remember how the band used to be?" she asked.
"Yeah..."
"My dad was the director of THAT band..."

Pride is a sin. And I'm still working on purging it from my Christian personage. But obviously, Im not there yet...