Fall 2015 Intern
One sweltering Monday in the third
week of July, I stood in a parking lot with a hundred other students in lines
exactly five yards apart—the outline of a football field had been painted in
white over the yellow parking lines. One of my band directors stood on the
scaffolding built at the side of the parking lot on the top of the hill where
injured students stood and played. The other one stood in front of us. The
perfect marching band step, he informed us, was exactly five yards in eight
paces. Heels start on the white line and eight steps later, heels end on the white
line. Forward and backward. Never step off with your right foot. Stay in step.
Then he turned on a white speaker
and twisted the yellow dial on the black metronome to 120 beats per minute. The
upperclassmen said we would soon hear the metronome in our dreams. I hadn’t
believed them then. But I quickly learned they were right. Tick-tick-tick-tick, five-six, five-six-seven-eight-step.
Marching band was a point of pride
for my school. We never worried about the football team bullying us as usually happens
in movies. During half time the quarterback played trombone and marched with us
in his bright orange jersey.
On that day in July when I stood in
a marching basics block with the rest of the band, I hardly knew what to
expect. The movie Drumline had come
out a few years earlier, but the story of the college student with an attitude
who couldn’t read music didn’t prepare me for the amount of work that went into
every day of practice. Our first week of band camp totaled almost 40 hours and
the temperature could easily top 90 degrees. Once school started we had our
normal practice during band period, Monday through Friday, plus an early
practice and a late practice once a week. We traveled at least four hours by
bus every other weekend for two days of competition, where eight judges used specific
criteria [PDF link] to determine which trophies—if any—we took home. Nobody
took marching band for an easy credit.
It was hard and sometimes
disappointing, but marching band is also what I remember most fondly about high
school. We sweated in shorts and tank tops in July; we shivered in jackets and fingerless
gloves in October. But before we marched out for our final competition each
season, we stood shoulder to shoulder, turned our backs to the field, closed
our eyes and hummed “Amazing Grace” together.
Did You Know?
Hailing from California, the Concord
Blue Devils have won the Drum Corps International (DCI) World Championship more
often than any other drum corps. They’ve won 17 times as of 2015, the first time
only two years after earning full DCI membership in 1974.
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