Today, I began my thirty-fourth year of teaching, starting our summer school credit recovery program. (Which is nearly identical to what I do at the alternative school throughout the rest of the school year, which is why I've been doing summer school the last several years.) When I started teaching, in 1984, I did so because my mother was dying of cancer, and she needed the help teaching her band classes. I discovered that I enjoyed teaching, that I was good at it (considering I was just starting), and that it felt like I was doing something worthwhile for a job.
So I made it my career. Twenty-nine years of that was being a music teacher - mostly band with some choir, classroom music, orchestra, electronic music, guitar, and math thrown in. In the early years, when rules were more lax and I taught at a small school that needed subjects covered, I also taught a little bit of art appreciation, p.e., drama, and even a semester of special education. (The district fired the previous SpEd teacher mid-year after a string of abusive behavior was uncovered. I was asked to put the program back together again so they could hire a "real" teacher for the coming year. I learned what a joy it was to work with kids at that end of the spectrum, and that the paperwork would kill me.) Mostly, however, I was known as a band director.
And it was after one of our many big performance trips, a four-day trip to march in the Portland Rose Festival Parade in 2012, that made me realize that I could no longer handle the physical demands of the job of a high school marching band director. I literally got off the bus at the high school late Sunday night after a long trip home from Portland (including a broken bus in Pendleton), stood watching the crew unloading the bus as the students unpacked their gear and got picked up by parents. I then went inside the building, made sure everyone was cleared out and had their rides home, and went into the auditorium and commiserated with and on the piano for an hour or so. Making sure it was the right decision.
It was. Even with the Lord's healing help that summer, I would not have been able to teach the band that year. Unfortunately, I saw the program deteriorate that year before my eyes under my hand-picked replacement. It fell to my sixteen year old son to tell the recalcitrant students, "Look, my dad is NOT coming back, okay? So suck it up, and make the best of it!"
Meanwhile, I've spent the last four years of my career in charge of the alternative school, where I could be much more sedentary and still help students who needed it. Fortunately, with the reduction and difficulties that have faced that program since I left, I've been in a building across town, where I didn't have to hear about the problems with the band program nearly as often. Heartless, yes. But the current director doesn't want any advice from me, it seems, so there's a limit to what I can do about it. As a Christian, I refuse to lie when someone asks me what I think of the band situation. ("Well, they're working really hard, aren't they?")
That was the kind of program I was running when I started: a small one. In the little town I started in, though, when there were only thirty or so kids in each grade, having twenty-five kids in the high school band was still respectable. I built that program to the point where we had about half the school in grades four and up in the band program. But after eight years in that little school, the educational funding crisis in California had reached the point where they were going to merge my program with the band program in the neighboring town, and that director was retiring, so I'd be running both programs. (They were looking out for me, I'll gladly give them that.) But I could see the writing on the wall - music was a dying part of the California school system.
I moved to Idaho that summer, no job in hand. I'd decided that Boise felt the most like Sacramento had felt when I was a kid (I was 28 that summer), and sure enough, after ten days of applications I had four job offers in hand. (My reputation had followed me north.) I took the one in Kuna ("Q-nah") and taught grades 6-12 for seven years, building the program there from seventeen students in the high school band to the 110 we marched my final year. I taught some math and guitar and electronics and orchestra, but primarily band. As the town grew, and my new wife and I decided we wanted to move farther away from the big city, the school district in Payette offered us the sun and the moon and half the stars to take over their band program. Unfortunately, that offer wasn't really there until the fourth year (after I'd raised quite a stink over broken promises), and that was the general theme of our seven years there. We had some great friends, however, some amazing experiences, and I learned a lot about teaching in - shall we say, difficult circumstances.
And for the last eleven years, I've been here in Jerome, my favorite stop along the way. Now beginning year 34, my 53rd birthday approaching in August, my health deteriorating slowly, I think I have enough strength in me to make it through the 2017-18 school year, especially with the superb assistant teacher I have. And ideally, she and I can help more students rise up from the dregs of scholastic society and make it back on track to graduate.
And by the end of next school year, if we haven't been snatched up by the Second Coming of the Lord by that time, it won't be long after that for us to wait. I feel confident that if we start a 35th school year in the fall of 2018, all the other true Christians and I will fail to finish that school year. At this stage of my life, as fragile as I've gotten, that's the goal: make it to Christ's pick-up date. That may not sound like much of a career goal at this stage, but frankly, that's more important to look forward to than anything about the dying profession of teaching in this country.
Showing posts with label marching band. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marching band. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Lifespan - and a story of a Short lifespan...
The last show I ever taught and had
performed wasn’t supposed to be – but I’m awfully glad it was.
In 2010,
as long-standing followers of Act II
Ministries and this blog will attest (and sit down, by the way – you don’t have to be so long-standing!),
I re-connected with my high school sweetheart, Melissa Perusich, with whom I’d
had an on-again, off-again, on-again relationship with for ten years
interrupted by distance and her traumatic childhood/young-adulthood. In 1992,
we finally gave up and went off to relationships with people who reminded us of
the other. Eighteen years and one spousal desertion each later, she reached out
to me, I reached back, and in December we married and blended our eight-child
family. It was through her that I finally came completely to Christ, and with
her that I began Act II Ministries,
and in her memory that I continue it through this blog and novel-writing and
other avenues unrelated to this conversation, after her death in 2014, three
days short of our fourth anniversary.
But in
2011, both of us were still fairly healthy, and I had created a marching band
field show that was representative of
our life together, though not exactly a mirror of it (it’s marching band, not a
Lifetime Channel Movie of the
Week!). The show was called LIFESPAN, and it told the story of two
childhood sweethearts (played by my youngest son and twin daughters, one at a
time!) meeting on a playground. They frolicked to “When You Wish Upon A Star”,
and then exited to the front, where my bride Melissa was in hiding behind a
barrier and helped my son change outfits – we simply changed girls
entirely!
In came
two of my color guard students, a dramatic young man named Adrian dressed as my
son had been, and an outstanding dancer named Sabrina dressed as my daughter
had been. They represented the two of us in high school while the band played “Summer
Nights” from Grease!, and then during Rhapsody In Blue they were
drawn into their own professional worlds and grew apart, Adrian and the brass
section moving off back field, leaving Sabrina and the woodwinds up close – and
alone.
Sabrina
created a remarkable solo dance to Evanescence’s My Immortal, and the
brass brought Adrian back with the opening of As If We Never Said Goodbye,
from the musical Sunset Boulevard.
As we discussed yesterday, the students have a great deal of input into these
shows, so they get ownership in the
final product. Besides the creation of Sabrina’s dance number, they came up with
a big “push” (the whole band moving forward together in a powerful section of
music) where they literally stepped over the color guard lying on the
ground! (Rehearsing that the first few
times was nerve-wracking!)
Here’s where it gets
a little freaky.
At the
very end of that song, the song where they re-unite, Adrian’s character falls
ill, and it segues straight into the ballad, What’ll I Do?, where
Sabrina nurses over Adrian, who’s sitting in a rocking chair. At the end of the
song, he passes away, she cries over him, and then she passed away. It was just a story at the time, but
basically, as soon as Melissa and I re-united, we both fell ill, and she
passed away, and I… well, to be
continued.
The band
turns and sings Amazing Grace, and then plays a big version of
it, which ends with my littlest son and the other twin girl, both in glittery,
shiny white and silver “angel” outfits, holding hands and “flying” up a
corridor through the band to a shining star and cross at the top of the pass –
while the band segues into just a little bit of “When You Wish Upon A Star” to
end the show on a very light note, surrounding the star and cross and the two
little kids.
Interestingly,
towards the last three weeks of the season, my “angel” daughter had to have a
cast on her legs (to correct a cerebral palsy defect), so the teenager who
volunteered to “fly” her up the corridor kept getting kicked in the head by her
casted feet, which she didn’t always have the strength to keep up out of his
face! Poor Blake!
SO, as the school year progressed, and my condition worsened (as did
Melissa’s, for that matter), we ended the year by taking the marching band to
perform in the Portland Rose Parade, which was an amazing experience worth an
essay of its own. I got off that bus back at the school at midnight the morning
before summer school started, and knew I couldn’t handle the physical
challenges of teaching band any longer. I turned in my resignation as band
director, but the district graciously found me another position – first,
teaching math, and then as the director of our alternative school, which I am
to this day.
No more field shows. But that last one was the story
of my life with the woman I’d loved throughout it, and she was a part of that
show as well. (Melissa was also an outstanding flautist, and sat in with the
band whenever she was strong enough.) My oldest son was a freshman and marched
in the show; my second son was a fifth grader at the time, and he really wanted
to be a part of the band those last few years I was there, so he was playing
suspended cymbal in the ‘pit’ (down in front where the non-mobile instruments
are parked). And my three youngest children were actors in the show. It’s the
only band photo I have on my wall: the Jerome HS Ambush of Tigers from 2011,
including me and all five of my children in their uniforms for the show (Melissa refused to be in the picture, and I
suppose since technically she was “pit crew”, that was appropriate. But still…).
But I won’t be able to write a field show about that. Not any more.
It had never been the plan for that show to become my ‘swan song’. I had a magnificent show prepared for 2012 called “EMPIRE AND REBELLION”, where we split the band in half and created a battle between the two halves. I utilized forty different melodies in the show: some for two measures, some for two minutes. We were going to use both the old and new uniforms, and had all sorts of tricks and stunts we had prepped to include. But it was NOT the kind of show that a new director should have to teach, and he set it aside to do a much more conventional show based on the music of Chuck Mangione.
In retrospect, though, I couldn’t have planned it any better, and God knew that when he set it up. I was only beginning my walk with God, but His Hand was apparent throughout our marriage. Even through her death, I’ve seen His Hand guiding me beyond life with Melissa – that first year was so hard! But last year I met Dana, who has helped me move on with God’s plans for my life without having to leave my life with Melissa behind completely. Now, Dana and I are working together as Christians in love, with me serving in the mentor role that Melissa used to serve for me. Perhaps it won’t be long until she’s the one writing this blog when I’ve moved on!
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
The Spring Musical - bringing back memories!
The
weekend’s posts are fairly sparse because my two youngest sons’ musical went up
on stage May 4-7. My seventh grader was asked to work stage crew with the high
school cast because of his fine work with the middle school musical earlier
this year, and my sophomore was the male lead in the production of Mary Poppins (the Dick Van Dyke
character, Bert).
As a proud father, I’ll gladly tell you that it was a very credible performance, and that my son was one of the highlights of the show. (But as a proud father, I’ll also tell you that my youngest son’s curtain work was exemplary, too!)
As a music teacher of thirty years’ experience, one who put on his share of these productions over the years (and let the pit in a few others), I’ll echo that sentiment. The young man who’s taken over the local high school’s drama program, himself a product of the previous director’s outstanding program, does a splendid job with his productions. More importantly, he does a superb job with his students. They – and their education – come first.
One of the
most important lessons I learned teaching large groups of teenagers in
producing a show, whether on the stage or with a marching band, was that it was
more important how the show was created than that it was created.
No matter how good the production – and I
created some wonderful shows, and I created some that were not so wonderful
– the details of it will be forgotten in at most a few years by everyone
who saw it. But the growth that the performers experience in its
creation will last the rest of their lives.
Whenever I
wrote a field show, I shared that creative process with the students who were
going to participate in it. We always went out of our way to put together different shows than other
schools were doing – something that we thought would stand out. But the real reason they were different is that
they weren’t canned productions
that were sold as one size fits all. We wrote shows that meant something
to the students who performed them.
Once we
bought some music for a Cirque de
Soleil show called La Nouba, and there was quite a bit of the
music that we really liked. But it was clear that if we simply wrote a marching
drill to the show as written, it would be just another show. So we took the
parts we liked, and imagined what it sounded like to us. The group decision –
rebirth after a nuclear war. On top of that, we had new uniforms coming in over
the summer, and having a big “reveal” would be a fun thing to do for our home
audience.
So I
created the show AFTERMATH, where the students wore rain ponchos in the
school’s orange over their new unis. The opening simulated an atomic explosion
to the ending music from the Firebird Suite, ending in the soft and slow
Barber’s Adagio for Strings with our solo violinist (I allowed any instrument I could reasonably use into the band – meet
the students where they are). Next the students gathered around
garbage cans like in the nuclear wreckage (we let them do a full band drum
feature on garbage cans here – I don’t recall who thought of that, but it wasn’t
me).
Then the
rest of the show is the resurrection from the “aftermath” of war. (We used lots of quotes over a loudspeaker
in breaks between songs – like Einstein’s, “I know not what weapons World War
III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”.)
The band turned away from the audience as the pit played, and removed their
ponchos, then turned to reveal their new uniforms while playing one of the big
pieces from the La Nouba show
we liked. We used a requiem from Saving Private Ryan called “Hymn To The
Fallen” to recognize the cost of war,
and use a drill that I’d really liked and thought would be something the
students would enjoy and learn lots of discipline and technique from.
We wanted
to close with the other La Nouba
tune we liked, crossed with the exuberant and celebratory part of the Firebird
Suite we’d opened with, but we had to get there somehow. The idea of
re-discovering the previous world’s
music came to someone’s mind, and we brainstormed a collection of musical snippets
that they could “dig up” – the saxes found “In The Mood”, the upper winds found
“Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, the pit guitars found “Back In Black” (one of the
school’s theme songs – playing to our home audience!), the low brass found “Amazing
Grace”, “Beethoven’s 5th”, and they even came up with the idea of “discovering”
the Macarena, rejecting it, and putting it back into the ground!
To top it
off, the pep band was heavily into using “Louie Louie” as their “theme” that
season, so that was the piece that wrapped up the discovery section – all of the
marchers came together to play that one when it was discovered, and then I
wrote an easy segue into that closer.
This show
was probably the most successful one we did while I was at Jerome: not because
it was the most sophisticated or the best written or anything, but because it
was a show that the entire ensemble had bought into during creation (which, by the way, continues all the way
through rehearsals, and even during the last week of the season we still change
things!). It also happened to be the first year that Jerome’s band
surpassed the local bell-cow program to win the district championship, and that
wasn’t by accident.
And I know
that kind of thing happened with this production of Mary Poppins. The directors would often ask my son to simply
create some choreography to fit a
particular song or transition. And he wasn’t the only one – the directors trusted the students’ ideas, and
knew they could veto anything that wasn’t appropriate, or perhaps didn’t fit
with the rest of the show. This investment encouraged the students to
buy into the production. My son, for example, spent a great deal of time trying
to figure out the backstory of his
character, so his created material fit the background of Bert. (He
decided that Bert was a previous child of Mary’s nannying, which
explained his affection for her.) The directors allowed each student to explore
their character, to instill some of their own personality into those creations.
And they
cast every play incredibly well – you cannot imagine anyone else playing those characters. (That goes along with
choosing the right play! That’s a challenge for choosing the right music
for a band as well – who are you going to want to feature, which are your
strong sections and who will you need to hide or bolster, that sort of thing.)
More tomorrow – when I’ll
tell you about the last field show I ever wrote and taught, and how appropriate
it was!
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Hollywood Christmas Parade stories...
Back in an essay surrounding the Rose Parade, I mentioned one of the "big" trips I ever took a band on was to the Hollywood Christmas Parade, back in November of 1999, and made the comment that I really needed to devote an entire post to that trip someday.
"Someday" just became "today".
I had just started teaching the band program in Payette, Idaho, having been lured out of the burgeoning metropolis of Boise that the dirt-scrabble town of Kuna was being devoured by. (It turns out that I like visiting cities, but I prefer living in small towns. Who knew?) Bill Parks, a band director from whom I learned a ton of things from (good, bad, up, down, you name it), had already laid the groundwork for a combined Payette/Fruitland/New Plymouth "county band" to march in the HCP that coming Thanksgiving weekend, so I got in on the second floor and Parks, my good friend Joel Williams and I led three bands combining to about two hundred who usually competed against each other to make ONE band to perform at this big event. [Big parades like big bands. Bands around 100 students aren't usually "big enough" to be accepted by these big-time shindigs. I'll tell you a story about THAT later....]
[No, I'll tell you now:
When I was growing up in northern California, I lived in two school districts - kids on my side of the street usually chose to go to Placer HS, which had an amazing band director named Clyde Quick, from whom I learned more about teaching than anyone except my own parents, who had a strong program that performed well but was more dedicated to creating exceptional human beings first. Kids on the other side usually went to Del Oro HS, which had an amazing band director named Ron Jones, a military man who raised exceptional human beings as a by-product of creating military-styled marching bands that were the stuff of legend.
When Del Oro was first growing, as a school and as a band program, Ron applied his Del Oro Golden Eagle band to perform in the Pasadena Rose Parade. The school was small, and though he had bands with 20-30% of the school population in them, that was still only 100-120 students. He showed me the rejection letter once, saying they didn't take "insignificant little bands" in their parade. This was in the late 1960s. Twenty years later, when DO had traveled to Austria, among other places, and had literally retired the sweepstakes trophies in several of the major competitions in Northern CA - I wish I could say I had anything to do with that, as I'd started teaching one of his feeder schools in 1984, but my contributions were minimal even then, and zero in the formative years - the Rose Parade actually reached out to Ron and asked if he would bring the Del Oro band to perform in Pasadena before he retired in the next couple of years.
His answer was classic. "I'm sorry, but we don't perform in 'insignificant little parades'."
Best comeback I've ever heard, because it took twenty years to set up.]
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
We had to create 200 brand new uniforms for the event (green, just about the ONLY color none of our three schools had in our own repertoires, "so none could boast"). We had to raise a HUGE amount of money for 200 students, another 40 or so adults, find rehearsal time OUTSIDE our normal school scheds to put the three bands together and put together not ONLY our parade routine at a world-class level but ALSO a standstill routine for a contest to be held at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL the day before! Oh, and I was a new teacher in a new school, learning a new system. We won the district marching band title that year anyway, by two-tenths of a point. And my wife was pregnant with a child we would eventually lose at birth. Worked our BUTTS off that fall!
Here's one of my favorite moments from the parade itself, which was AMAZING (three miles long, huge grandstands PACKED the entire length - it was the most incredible actual PARADE I ever participated in!). There were all sorts of celebs scattered throughout the parade, which we knew ahead of time, but we only knew what our band order was - which band we were ahead of, which one we were behind. Then the bands merged with the celebrity/car/horse part of the parade about three blocks before the step off in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater (y'know, where all the handprints are?) on the red carpet. Who did WE end up next to? My then three-year old son's favorite television star...the Bear In The Big Blue House himself! One of the Fruitland parents walking alongside got a picture of me posing with Bear at that moment, and when my little Hamilton saw that? I was a celebrity myself... Lord, I wish I had a copy of that picture today!
One of the most interesting lessons I learned in the entire process of putting the programs together was the disparity of teaching and conducting styles involved, and how style had little to do with success. I mentioned above being influenced by the two high school directors of my youth - Clyde was people first, which made the process work out for the best; Ron was process first, which made the people work out for the best. (And on top of that, my elementary director was a retired orchestra teacher, a 'little old lady' named Ardis Whitehead, who did amazing things with us and was as far removed from both Clyde and Ron as you can imagine!).
I also had the experience when I was one of the two elementary/junior high teachers for Ron Jones' program - I was a loud, energetic, demonstrative, always laughing kind of teacher, and the other feeder program was run by the wonderful Mrs. Joss Bravo, the exact opposite of my style. Whenever we combined our bands for Del Oro events (as we often did), my students would have to squint to find Mrs. Bravo's conducting, and her students would duck and cover when I started waving the stick around like Harry Potter! (JK Rowling hadn't written those stories yet - just pretend, OK?)
One semester, I taught Ron's freshman band class, and I started teaching like I usually did, Ron quickly pulled me aside and said, very nicely, "I know you're good at what you do the way you teach, but in my program, I'm going to insist you teach in my modality, since these kids go back and forth between instructors." And then he did something amazing. To demonstrate this, he proceeded to teach one class period the way I TEACH. It freaked his students out, and he could make it work, but it wasn't HIM. His point? When you run your program, you need to run it the way YOU need to run it to be most effective. Style isn't important. Consistency is. Students need to know what to expect. I've never forgotten that.
And that came back to me a decade later in 1999.
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
When we held combined rehearsals, you had Bill, who made ME look quiet and conservative on the podium. There's a reason Bill burned out in about four years, took a couple off, and then went to a new band job for the next few years - it would've been impossible to keep up the pace he kept up! (Two years after this, he went into administration full time.) And then you had Joel, who as fun-loving a guy as he was and is, would have reminded you of Ron Jones with the baton: his students came to attention when he took the podium, even in concert band. There was NO talking except his.
In between? There was me. Bill's students freaked out at Joel's expectations; Joel's students freaked out at Bill's. I ended up doing a lion's share of the student-coordination work, simply because my style was most palatable to the entire body of students involved. Eventually, everyone got used to everyone else, but it was an interesting meshing of disparate styles that made me remember Ron Jones' words often.
(Ron used to come to Idaho after he retired to judge marching contests, often ones I had my bands in. His tape recorded commentaries were delightful, because he'd give us the usual narrative that a director would oft play for the students the next class period...and then there'd be a break, to give me an option to turn off the player, and then slip in about 30 seconds of "I'm glad to see you doing this or that with your band here, Gordon..." Always a treat. Not quite the treat I got when I brought Clyde up to judge festivals here, and seeing his pride in what I'd become as a director as a parent felt like the closest I could get to my dead parents' praising me. But close.)
There were bands from throughout the nation there - we had ridden busses from Payette County to LA, seventeen hours over the Nevada desert overnight, but some had ridden 36 hours on busses (the band from South Dakota!), and some had their kids scattered on seven different flights from Virginia into LAX (that poor director was SO worried that something would happen to one of his group's flights!). Bill and I had our own busses, and our own bus drivers - all former truckers, veterans of the road! - but Joel's Fruitland district had 'locals', what they called 'housewife drivers', whom they didn't trust to make a trip like that. So while our kids were riding big yellows across the desert, Joel's kids were on luxury busses riding in reclining seats! Our kids felt a bit jealous...until the hired gun drivers got themselves lost going from the Hollywood Bowl to Magic Mountain, and spent SIX HOURS on the road while our kids were enjoying the park! Never were we so thankful for our own drivers and our 'big yellows'!
Speaking of our "big yellows"...we were riding those big yellows through the streets of the city to get from our hotel over to the Hollywood Bowl for the "standstill competition" (a thinly veiled excuse to simply be able to say we've played in the world-famous Hollywood Bowl of Bugs Bunny opera fame!). On the way, we're stopped at a stoplight, and we notice on the right side of the bus, across the street, there's this bank in a strip mall that's literally being held up by three or four bank robbers as we watched! Being Hollywood, we're scoping for camera crews, all that sort of stuff, but none to be seen: apparently, it was a legit robbery in progress! Then we saw a SWAT team (don't know whose - probably local police?) creeping up along the street side of the bank, which would've been their blind side. About five cops looking like in about thirty seconds all heck's gonna let loose.
So the kids on my bus are BEGGING to stop and watch what happens, or worse yet, get out and try to help the cops stop the crooks! It's utter bedlam on my bus (Two other busses of ours are right behind us - one of them never even noticed them, and the other only as they were passing it on a green light.) And finally "Mack" McKensie, the biggest guy in the band (also played lineman on the football team. All of the linemen...), shouts out the best bathplug to the bedlam he could have possible said: "Yeah, 'cause THAT'S exactly what those cops need right now - a bus load of HIGH SCHOOL kids!" Um, yeah, point taken. Never mind. Don't know what happened; it sure looked like the good guys were going to win...
Magic Mountain amusement park was an amazing experience, and the second to last thing we did on the six day trip. (The televised parade itself was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and we literally got off the street, changed out of uniform, put everything on the trailers, and started home overnight.) Bill Parks and I had slaved away at the arrangements for this trip, and all the little stupid stuff we had to put up with for MONTHS to make this work, and we decided that the heck with all of this! We slipped away from the gaggle of students from our bands who wanted to hang out with us, and went off to ride rides on our own, and spent several hours whining to each other about all the problems we'd faced to make this stupid trip happen, and poor little us! Finally, Fruitland's band arrived, and then that evening we had the awards ceremony from the Hollywood Bowl competition we'd had that morning.
Some logistics you need to understand: the Hollywood Bowl is built on a hilltop - LA itself is hill country - and that South Dakota band was in a hotel at the very foot of that hill. (We were all in a dozen different hotels. One of my jobs upon our arrival was to help our 200 kids find their hotel rooms, and explain to our rural bumpkins that "304" meant their room was on the third floor. That knowledge had never come up in their lives before!) Remember, that South Dakota band had ridden on busses for 36 hours to get there. So, listen to what the contest director told us that evening (and I'm paraphrasing - it's been eighteen years...):
"Hey, everyone, I need to tell you about something that happened after you all left the Bowl this morning. The South Dakota band was walking down the hill towards their hotel after the competition. A mom and dad, band parents for them, walking down the hill on the sidewalk with their nine year old daughter, watched as a reckless driver crashed off the road, across the sidewalk in front of the couple and killed their daughter right in front of them."
And at that moment, Bill Parks and I looked at each other, and were ashamed for having complained about the trivial crap that we'd been whining about all day. I lost touch with Bill in the late 2000's, when he and his wife moved back to their home town of Stockton, CA. But the two of us were changed as teachers and as people in that moment. The new question was now, "Did everyone survive the trip? Then it couldn't have been that bad." Priorities. Be careful of what you complain about, because it could be SO much worse.
[And isn't that true of us in every direction we look? "Boy, it's hard work being a Christian!" Really? Want to go to Africa or Asia, where they're known to kill people just because they believe in the truth of the Living God? And you're bitch'n because you can't pray out loud in class? Shut. Up.]
"Someday" just became "today".
I had just started teaching the band program in Payette, Idaho, having been lured out of the burgeoning metropolis of Boise that the dirt-scrabble town of Kuna was being devoured by. (It turns out that I like visiting cities, but I prefer living in small towns. Who knew?) Bill Parks, a band director from whom I learned a ton of things from (good, bad, up, down, you name it), had already laid the groundwork for a combined Payette/Fruitland/New Plymouth "county band" to march in the HCP that coming Thanksgiving weekend, so I got in on the second floor and Parks, my good friend Joel Williams and I led three bands combining to about two hundred who usually competed against each other to make ONE band to perform at this big event. [Big parades like big bands. Bands around 100 students aren't usually "big enough" to be accepted by these big-time shindigs. I'll tell you a story about THAT later....]
[No, I'll tell you now:
When I was growing up in northern California, I lived in two school districts - kids on my side of the street usually chose to go to Placer HS, which had an amazing band director named Clyde Quick, from whom I learned more about teaching than anyone except my own parents, who had a strong program that performed well but was more dedicated to creating exceptional human beings first. Kids on the other side usually went to Del Oro HS, which had an amazing band director named Ron Jones, a military man who raised exceptional human beings as a by-product of creating military-styled marching bands that were the stuff of legend.
When Del Oro was first growing, as a school and as a band program, Ron applied his Del Oro Golden Eagle band to perform in the Pasadena Rose Parade. The school was small, and though he had bands with 20-30% of the school population in them, that was still only 100-120 students. He showed me the rejection letter once, saying they didn't take "insignificant little bands" in their parade. This was in the late 1960s. Twenty years later, when DO had traveled to Austria, among other places, and had literally retired the sweepstakes trophies in several of the major competitions in Northern CA - I wish I could say I had anything to do with that, as I'd started teaching one of his feeder schools in 1984, but my contributions were minimal even then, and zero in the formative years - the Rose Parade actually reached out to Ron and asked if he would bring the Del Oro band to perform in Pasadena before he retired in the next couple of years.
His answer was classic. "I'm sorry, but we don't perform in 'insignificant little parades'."
Best comeback I've ever heard, because it took twenty years to set up.]
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
We had to create 200 brand new uniforms for the event (green, just about the ONLY color none of our three schools had in our own repertoires, "so none could boast"). We had to raise a HUGE amount of money for 200 students, another 40 or so adults, find rehearsal time OUTSIDE our normal school scheds to put the three bands together and put together not ONLY our parade routine at a world-class level but ALSO a standstill routine for a contest to be held at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL the day before! Oh, and I was a new teacher in a new school, learning a new system. We won the district marching band title that year anyway, by two-tenths of a point. And my wife was pregnant with a child we would eventually lose at birth. Worked our BUTTS off that fall!
Here's one of my favorite moments from the parade itself, which was AMAZING (three miles long, huge grandstands PACKED the entire length - it was the most incredible actual PARADE I ever participated in!). There were all sorts of celebs scattered throughout the parade, which we knew ahead of time, but we only knew what our band order was - which band we were ahead of, which one we were behind. Then the bands merged with the celebrity/car/horse part of the parade about three blocks before the step off in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater (y'know, where all the handprints are?) on the red carpet. Who did WE end up next to? My then three-year old son's favorite television star...the Bear In The Big Blue House himself! One of the Fruitland parents walking alongside got a picture of me posing with Bear at that moment, and when my little Hamilton saw that? I was a celebrity myself... Lord, I wish I had a copy of that picture today!
One of the most interesting lessons I learned in the entire process of putting the programs together was the disparity of teaching and conducting styles involved, and how style had little to do with success. I mentioned above being influenced by the two high school directors of my youth - Clyde was people first, which made the process work out for the best; Ron was process first, which made the people work out for the best. (And on top of that, my elementary director was a retired orchestra teacher, a 'little old lady' named Ardis Whitehead, who did amazing things with us and was as far removed from both Clyde and Ron as you can imagine!).
I also had the experience when I was one of the two elementary/junior high teachers for Ron Jones' program - I was a loud, energetic, demonstrative, always laughing kind of teacher, and the other feeder program was run by the wonderful Mrs. Joss Bravo, the exact opposite of my style. Whenever we combined our bands for Del Oro events (as we often did), my students would have to squint to find Mrs. Bravo's conducting, and her students would duck and cover when I started waving the stick around like Harry Potter! (JK Rowling hadn't written those stories yet - just pretend, OK?)
One semester, I taught Ron's freshman band class, and I started teaching like I usually did, Ron quickly pulled me aside and said, very nicely, "I know you're good at what you do the way you teach, but in my program, I'm going to insist you teach in my modality, since these kids go back and forth between instructors." And then he did something amazing. To demonstrate this, he proceeded to teach one class period the way I TEACH. It freaked his students out, and he could make it work, but it wasn't HIM. His point? When you run your program, you need to run it the way YOU need to run it to be most effective. Style isn't important. Consistency is. Students need to know what to expect. I've never forgotten that.
And that came back to me a decade later in 1999.
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
When we held combined rehearsals, you had Bill, who made ME look quiet and conservative on the podium. There's a reason Bill burned out in about four years, took a couple off, and then went to a new band job for the next few years - it would've been impossible to keep up the pace he kept up! (Two years after this, he went into administration full time.) And then you had Joel, who as fun-loving a guy as he was and is, would have reminded you of Ron Jones with the baton: his students came to attention when he took the podium, even in concert band. There was NO talking except his.
In between? There was me. Bill's students freaked out at Joel's expectations; Joel's students freaked out at Bill's. I ended up doing a lion's share of the student-coordination work, simply because my style was most palatable to the entire body of students involved. Eventually, everyone got used to everyone else, but it was an interesting meshing of disparate styles that made me remember Ron Jones' words often.
(Ron used to come to Idaho after he retired to judge marching contests, often ones I had my bands in. His tape recorded commentaries were delightful, because he'd give us the usual narrative that a director would oft play for the students the next class period...and then there'd be a break, to give me an option to turn off the player, and then slip in about 30 seconds of "I'm glad to see you doing this or that with your band here, Gordon..." Always a treat. Not quite the treat I got when I brought Clyde up to judge festivals here, and seeing his pride in what I'd become as a director as a parent felt like the closest I could get to my dead parents' praising me. But close.)
There were bands from throughout the nation there - we had ridden busses from Payette County to LA, seventeen hours over the Nevada desert overnight, but some had ridden 36 hours on busses (the band from South Dakota!), and some had their kids scattered on seven different flights from Virginia into LAX (that poor director was SO worried that something would happen to one of his group's flights!). Bill and I had our own busses, and our own bus drivers - all former truckers, veterans of the road! - but Joel's Fruitland district had 'locals', what they called 'housewife drivers', whom they didn't trust to make a trip like that. So while our kids were riding big yellows across the desert, Joel's kids were on luxury busses riding in reclining seats! Our kids felt a bit jealous...until the hired gun drivers got themselves lost going from the Hollywood Bowl to Magic Mountain, and spent SIX HOURS on the road while our kids were enjoying the park! Never were we so thankful for our own drivers and our 'big yellows'!
Speaking of our "big yellows"...we were riding those big yellows through the streets of the city to get from our hotel over to the Hollywood Bowl for the "standstill competition" (a thinly veiled excuse to simply be able to say we've played in the world-famous Hollywood Bowl of Bugs Bunny opera fame!). On the way, we're stopped at a stoplight, and we notice on the right side of the bus, across the street, there's this bank in a strip mall that's literally being held up by three or four bank robbers as we watched! Being Hollywood, we're scoping for camera crews, all that sort of stuff, but none to be seen: apparently, it was a legit robbery in progress! Then we saw a SWAT team (don't know whose - probably local police?) creeping up along the street side of the bank, which would've been their blind side. About five cops looking like in about thirty seconds all heck's gonna let loose.
So the kids on my bus are BEGGING to stop and watch what happens, or worse yet, get out and try to help the cops stop the crooks! It's utter bedlam on my bus (Two other busses of ours are right behind us - one of them never even noticed them, and the other only as they were passing it on a green light.) And finally "Mack" McKensie, the biggest guy in the band (also played lineman on the football team. All of the linemen...), shouts out the best bathplug to the bedlam he could have possible said: "Yeah, 'cause THAT'S exactly what those cops need right now - a bus load of HIGH SCHOOL kids!" Um, yeah, point taken. Never mind. Don't know what happened; it sure looked like the good guys were going to win...
Magic Mountain amusement park was an amazing experience, and the second to last thing we did on the six day trip. (The televised parade itself was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and we literally got off the street, changed out of uniform, put everything on the trailers, and started home overnight.) Bill Parks and I had slaved away at the arrangements for this trip, and all the little stupid stuff we had to put up with for MONTHS to make this work, and we decided that the heck with all of this! We slipped away from the gaggle of students from our bands who wanted to hang out with us, and went off to ride rides on our own, and spent several hours whining to each other about all the problems we'd faced to make this stupid trip happen, and poor little us! Finally, Fruitland's band arrived, and then that evening we had the awards ceremony from the Hollywood Bowl competition we'd had that morning.
Some logistics you need to understand: the Hollywood Bowl is built on a hilltop - LA itself is hill country - and that South Dakota band was in a hotel at the very foot of that hill. (We were all in a dozen different hotels. One of my jobs upon our arrival was to help our 200 kids find their hotel rooms, and explain to our rural bumpkins that "304" meant their room was on the third floor. That knowledge had never come up in their lives before!) Remember, that South Dakota band had ridden on busses for 36 hours to get there. So, listen to what the contest director told us that evening (and I'm paraphrasing - it's been eighteen years...):
"Hey, everyone, I need to tell you about something that happened after you all left the Bowl this morning. The South Dakota band was walking down the hill towards their hotel after the competition. A mom and dad, band parents for them, walking down the hill on the sidewalk with their nine year old daughter, watched as a reckless driver crashed off the road, across the sidewalk in front of the couple and killed their daughter right in front of them."
And at that moment, Bill Parks and I looked at each other, and were ashamed for having complained about the trivial crap that we'd been whining about all day. I lost touch with Bill in the late 2000's, when he and his wife moved back to their home town of Stockton, CA. But the two of us were changed as teachers and as people in that moment. The new question was now, "Did everyone survive the trip? Then it couldn't have been that bad." Priorities. Be careful of what you complain about, because it could be SO much worse.
[And isn't that true of us in every direction we look? "Boy, it's hard work being a Christian!" Really? Want to go to Africa or Asia, where they're known to kill people just because they believe in the truth of the Living God? And you're bitch'n because you can't pray out loud in class? Shut. Up.]
Saturday, December 17, 2016
The Christmas "Season", part two
To read the first part of this essay, click here, please.
During December, it was the choir teacher who had the busiest schedule (as a marching band teacher all those years, that was a nice change!), because everyone wanted the singers to come carol for Christmas! (I taught choir in my small California school, but in my quarter-century in Idaho, I always had too big a band program to be able to cover choir as well.) Usually, we just had our winter concerts and a few basketball games to play pep band at, but we did our share of caroling and town tree lightings and snowy parades, sometimes on the back of flatbeds, welcoming Santa to town. We marched through malls big and small, around parking lots in driving snow: whatever we were asked to do that the kids would be safe doing and that didn't impede the educational process in the classroom.
Twice, we practiced our parade marching in winter weather in Idaho in preparation for decidedly UN-wintery locations - once, for the Fiesta Bowl Parade in Glendale, Arizona; once for the Hollywood Christmas Parade in, duh, Hollywood. The trips themselves were amazing - one of the realizations I came to early in my career about teaching in SMALL towns was that most of the children had never been out-of-state before, let alone perform in fancy places like the Hollywood Bowl, where we got to perform in 1999, or to march down Main Street Disneyland, as we did three times in my career. Christmas often reminds me of the good fortune I had to have those experiences, and to share those experiences with children across 29 years of teaching...
AND the parents who chose to participate as well! Many of the adults who were interested and able to jump in and help with our program in any of the four towns I taught in are still close friends, some of the most important friendships I've ever had. They also (I think and hope) had some fantastic times through our band programs - not just on the big trips but on the little ones, even hanging out in booster meetings. I recall telling some parent once not to worry about making it to a particular meeting, and they felt hurt: "That's where all my friends are!"
Here's how much our band was about the people instead of the curriculum: What do you think the best part of a competition road trip was for many of the students (AND parents)? The bus ride. Never in my career did I ever take a band on a plane trip anywhere - although we did once take a ferry across from Tsawassen, BC, over to Vancouver Island to perform in Victoria at the provincial capitol building. I've never been in a "rich" district - I never wanted to make students raise a thousand dollars per participant to be part of the band. (Many of our fundraisers were expressly for subsidizing the poorer families' participation!) The bus rides were elongated slumber parties, in a sense (how anyone can sleep on a bus escapes me!) - they spent hours with their best friends, watching videos or hanging out or whatever else teenagers do (in public settings!) to enjoy the company.
For me, the key was to make every trip educational in and of itself, so we didn't have to fake that part. Every Disney trip, for example, included a studio session in backstage Disney, where they worked with professional clinicians and equipment and simulated the process of laying down a soundtrack for a Disney film! The students always emerged from that with eyes widened. I programmed rest stops at scenic locations - if we went to Portland (from Idaho), we stopped at Multnomah Falls; if we went to Seattle, we spent time at the Experience Music Project there; if we went across the Sierra Nevadas, we tried to stop at Donner Pass.
The other key to trip planning with a hundred or so teenagers of mixed gender, by the way, is to plan the entire trip down to five minute intervals (not that you won't be changing it on the fly when a bus breaks down or something!). Don't give them free time to get in trouble! We also slept in open gymnasiums whenever it was practical (not the night after a seventeen-hour bus ride, though!) - again, the students LOVED it because it was a literal slumber party with all their best friends. Then, "Uncle Gordy" would read a bedtime story (Really! Robert Fulghum, Chicken Soup, that sort of thing), update the itinerary for the next day, recap the highs of the day just past, and then have a definite bedtime for ALL. THEN, the adults would take shifts (this took me a few years to convince them to do, by the way) and there would always be someone available when there was a sick child, or to discourage mischief (boys were on one side of the gym, girls on the other, and Uncle Gordy slept on the six-foot wide DMZ), or whatever else needed to be taken care of. Intentionally, I scheduled slightly less than ideal sleep, so they felt the need to use the time for sleep, AND to make the final bus ride home a quiet one!
"The children were nestled all snug in their seats
In hopes that the teacher wouldn't turn on his beats.
For he didn't need as much sleep as the rest,
And that's why he managed to pass the kids' test.
And they heard him exclaim, as the bus rolled away:
Merry Christmas, and Thank God this isn't a sleigh!"
During December, it was the choir teacher who had the busiest schedule (as a marching band teacher all those years, that was a nice change!), because everyone wanted the singers to come carol for Christmas! (I taught choir in my small California school, but in my quarter-century in Idaho, I always had too big a band program to be able to cover choir as well.) Usually, we just had our winter concerts and a few basketball games to play pep band at, but we did our share of caroling and town tree lightings and snowy parades, sometimes on the back of flatbeds, welcoming Santa to town. We marched through malls big and small, around parking lots in driving snow: whatever we were asked to do that the kids would be safe doing and that didn't impede the educational process in the classroom.
Twice, we practiced our parade marching in winter weather in Idaho in preparation for decidedly UN-wintery locations - once, for the Fiesta Bowl Parade in Glendale, Arizona; once for the Hollywood Christmas Parade in, duh, Hollywood. The trips themselves were amazing - one of the realizations I came to early in my career about teaching in SMALL towns was that most of the children had never been out-of-state before, let alone perform in fancy places like the Hollywood Bowl, where we got to perform in 1999, or to march down Main Street Disneyland, as we did three times in my career. Christmas often reminds me of the good fortune I had to have those experiences, and to share those experiences with children across 29 years of teaching...
AND the parents who chose to participate as well! Many of the adults who were interested and able to jump in and help with our program in any of the four towns I taught in are still close friends, some of the most important friendships I've ever had. They also (I think and hope) had some fantastic times through our band programs - not just on the big trips but on the little ones, even hanging out in booster meetings. I recall telling some parent once not to worry about making it to a particular meeting, and they felt hurt: "That's where all my friends are!"
Here's how much our band was about the people instead of the curriculum: What do you think the best part of a competition road trip was for many of the students (AND parents)? The bus ride. Never in my career did I ever take a band on a plane trip anywhere - although we did once take a ferry across from Tsawassen, BC, over to Vancouver Island to perform in Victoria at the provincial capitol building. I've never been in a "rich" district - I never wanted to make students raise a thousand dollars per participant to be part of the band. (Many of our fundraisers were expressly for subsidizing the poorer families' participation!) The bus rides were elongated slumber parties, in a sense (how anyone can sleep on a bus escapes me!) - they spent hours with their best friends, watching videos or hanging out or whatever else teenagers do (in public settings!) to enjoy the company.
For me, the key was to make every trip educational in and of itself, so we didn't have to fake that part. Every Disney trip, for example, included a studio session in backstage Disney, where they worked with professional clinicians and equipment and simulated the process of laying down a soundtrack for a Disney film! The students always emerged from that with eyes widened. I programmed rest stops at scenic locations - if we went to Portland (from Idaho), we stopped at Multnomah Falls; if we went to Seattle, we spent time at the Experience Music Project there; if we went across the Sierra Nevadas, we tried to stop at Donner Pass.
The other key to trip planning with a hundred or so teenagers of mixed gender, by the way, is to plan the entire trip down to five minute intervals (not that you won't be changing it on the fly when a bus breaks down or something!). Don't give them free time to get in trouble! We also slept in open gymnasiums whenever it was practical (not the night after a seventeen-hour bus ride, though!) - again, the students LOVED it because it was a literal slumber party with all their best friends. Then, "Uncle Gordy" would read a bedtime story (Really! Robert Fulghum, Chicken Soup, that sort of thing), update the itinerary for the next day, recap the highs of the day just past, and then have a definite bedtime for ALL. THEN, the adults would take shifts (this took me a few years to convince them to do, by the way) and there would always be someone available when there was a sick child, or to discourage mischief (boys were on one side of the gym, girls on the other, and Uncle Gordy slept on the six-foot wide DMZ), or whatever else needed to be taken care of. Intentionally, I scheduled slightly less than ideal sleep, so they felt the need to use the time for sleep, AND to make the final bus ride home a quiet one!
"The children were nestled all snug in their seats
In hopes that the teacher wouldn't turn on his beats.
For he didn't need as much sleep as the rest,
And that's why he managed to pass the kids' test.
And they heard him exclaim, as the bus rolled away:
Merry Christmas, and Thank God this isn't a sleigh!"
Friday, October 7, 2016
Fall for me means something BESIDES football.
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.
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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