When Worlds Collide: A Tale of Summer Marching Band

by Anna Luther

October 20, 2006 — Published in Accounts & Glimpses

“When Worlds Collide: A Tale of Summer Marching Band”

I will never forget that summer.

Isn’t it ironic?

Adam, my tuba-playing, marching-band-freak of a friend casually mentioned that the high school he worked for needed someone to teach the marching woodwinds. I was an accomplished orchestral flutist, had just started studying clarinet, and had no experience with marching bands. Who could be better suited to such a position than I?

I had finished junior year of college, and the reality of life after college loomed more gloweringly than ever. The frightening possibility of trying to pay bills with no standard “marketable” skills began to sink in. I was a flute performance major with no idea what I would do after graduation.

I had long loathed being part of “the system” — any system really, but in this case, the public school system. But at this point, I was beginning to come out of my “stick it to the man” phase. No matter that I had completely sworn off being a school music teacher. Unsure of what else I was going to be, I had nothing to lose by giving it a shot.

The day that Adam called to tell me that his boss wanted to interview me, I danced around my music department’s copy room, skipping and singing with glee. “Guess what, guess what!” I shrieked at my college advisor, whose office was across the hallway from where I was celebrating. “I’m going to teach marching band this summer!”

“But Anna,” he responded slowly, “you don’t march.”

Like something so trivial was going to stop me.

A band … that marches?

Pre-camp rehearsals for the season had already begun when I officially joined the staff. “My kids” (as teachers often refer to their students) had just started learning music and were stereotypical excited band geeks. Trading the latest bit of gossip gleefully with one another, the would-be marchers showed up early for rehearsals, their bubbly energy keeping them focused for all three hours of rehearsal. They listened carefully to the director, to Adam, and even to me, the one not really sure what was going on. I was impressed! Clearly, I had gotten a teachable bunch. I was happy. This was going to be a piece of cake.

The only thing that scared me slightly was that little adjective in front of “band”: “marching”. Maybe my advisor did have a point; I guess I wasn’t a marcher. The first rehearsal I attended, Adam ran basic drill exercises for the kids and invited me to participate by marching with the more experienced students. I was befuddled by novelties like marching in rows or moving twenty people as a single unit. These were exotic practices. In spite of this, I quickly learned to march so brilliantly that I could do the “eight to five” in my sleep. Okay, so maybe I didn’t learn that quickly. Okay, so maybe I still couldn’t do the “eight to five” without some help. Still, I learned what I needed to and was more than ready to help teach drill once band camp actually rolled around. Well, I thought so. In reality, nothing I had experienced musically or athletically could have prepared me for the epic adventure that was band camp.

Veggie bagels, sunburns, and drill charts

Band camp is composed of two weeks of intense musical and physical work preparing the show the band performs at competitions and football games every Friday and Saturday from September through November. Our camp began on a gray Monday morning. I was all set to teach — and to learn, I reminded myself — decked out in a tank top, shorts, and sneakers, starry-eyed and enthusiastic as only the uninitiated can be. Fearful of looking incompetent but emboldened by the bagel Adam had picked up at Dunkin’ Donuts, I trudged fearlessly onto the parking lot that would be our home for the day, armed with music scores and drill sheets.

That bagel held such promise. How could camp go badly if I had a toasted wheat bagel with vegetable cream cheese to kick it off? The cream cheese melted in my mouth, enhancing the flavor of its glorious vehicle, the scrumptious bagel. I would do band camp all over again just to get another bagel like that.

Unfortunately, while it was delectable and encouraging, the bagel did not have much staying power. It wasn’t long before my stomach made a compelling case for a full lunch. I somehow managed to hang on and teach drill to kill the remaining morning time. When lunch finally rolled around, I was following the drill charts like a pro (drill charts that looked like an obsessive-compulsive drill writer designed a connect-the-dots pattern over Lilliputian grid paper). I helped those kids find their spots like I was born teaching drill. At the same time, my skin had developed lobster complexion in one of the nastiest sunburns of my entire life.

After lunch was we jumped into music rehearsal. At last, my true love — playing music. I was in familiar territory, even if I had to trade my usual role of performer for the less familiar one of conductor. I loved instrumental conducting; granted, I wasn’t very good at it, but I had a lot of enthusiasm. I would stare at the score and wave my arms as well as I could and try to draw (and sometimes drag) the music out of them, praying that none of them would know that I was scanning desperately all three or four parts to figure out which one of the instrumental sections was the one that was playing everything wrong.

Somehow, I made it all the way through music rehearsal with only a few funny looks from the sharper kids who suspected that Anna knew less than she should.

Reproductive habits of butterflies

Wednesday the downhill slope began. We were focusing on a particularly difficult section of music and had just successfully mastered it (or so I thought — I would later be proven wrong when the band took the field only to forget it all), and as the young musicians lowered their instruments, I was greeted with: “Anna, do caterpillars come from eggs? Because I think I saw these two butterflies fighting or mating or something, and I wondered if caterpillars hatch from eggs.”

We’ve just finished rehearsing one of the most challenging sections of the show, and your first comment is about the reproductive habits of butterflies. Reproductive habits. Of butterflies. Clearly, we weren’t making as much progress as I had hoped.

By Thursday, my kids were glad of my patience with them. Little did they know I was ready to kill anyone who looked at me the wrong way. Adam, who had recommended I take this position in the first place, was the subject of devious plots to rid myself of him. There are so many ways to kill off your drill designer, if you think about it long enough or are inspired powerfully enough. You could lob the massive drill book at his head, push him off the scaffolding he stands on while watching the students, run him over with the tractor that carries the percussion equipment. The list just goes on.

I think I was approaching mental breakdown.

I’m pretty sure I did snap at some point. Friday rehearsal ended early — I can recall that — but I have no recollection of the weekend or Monday. I could have been dead for as much memory as I have. It’s probably just as well that amnesia set in; it made the time go faster.

Aural affliction and fieldtrips

The second half of camp ran together in one massive blur for me. My mind was slipping away little by little as the days went by, and I really couldn’t distinguish what happened and when. Those four days were a haze of heat, drill dots, over-exhaustion, and random snatches of Piazzolla. The whole sound-tracked fiasco pulsed to the incessant “gock block” — a torturous rectangular plastic device that I would beat steadily with a drum stick. The object was to ground the band in a single, stable pulse. It achieved that end with varied success. Bright red-orange so that it wouldn’t get lost among the brown-green grass of the marching field, the block numbed my hand from holding it for so long and from its perpetual, fateful knock. The only thing worse than the gock block was “Dr. Beat,” a crueler-sounding electronic device that had the uncanny ability to broadcast the world’s most irritating repetitive click. Even the staff would groan when Adam diagnosed Dr. Beat necessary.

Rehearsal had been particularly painful one afternoon for both the students and the staff. Nothing was going right. The students didn’t know what the staff wanted them to do, and the staff certainly didn’t know what they wanted the students to do. Looking particularly frazzled, one of my flute girls flagged me over. I trudged slowly toward her spot on the field, slowed by the invisible cement bricks that weariness had tied to my feet. I dreaded either a broken instrument (a common problem), a lost drill book (an even more common problem), or a sudden outbreak of tuberculosis among the woodwinds (a less common problem).

“Anna,” she said, her sun-burned face grinning impishly from underneath her now-grimy white visor-cap, “I want to know if the flute players can take a field trip.”

“A field trip?” Why did I get stuck with the sarcastic ones? “Where to, Becky?”

Something between exasperation and amusement crossed her face. “I think all the flute players should take a trip to the mental hospital, because we need it!” Becky, even a year later, I agree that we needed it — your inexperienced, exasperated, flute-playing marching band coach more than anyone. The only difference is that now I can laugh at it.

Oh, what a circus, oh, what a show

The final day of band camp was the preparation for and performance of the evening show for family and friends, that glorious culmination of the camp experience. I watched them rehearse and prayed that the old adage of “bad dress rehearsal, good performance” would come true for them. No such luck. In the actual performance, their precision somehow failed to reflect two weeks of intense, arduous, and careful work. I cringed and sighed my way through the performance as I watched and listened to what we had rehearsed a thousand times go disastrously wrong, reflecting instead two weeks of way too much time in the sun, half-memorized drill, even-less-than-half-memorized music. Maybe less time spent on the reproductive habits of butterflies and more on the musical genius of Piazzolla could have saved the flute section. And while my clarinet girls almost learned their drill, moving in the same direction as the rest of the band should probably have been reviewed a few more times.

But in spite of these “little” glitches, I glowed with pride (and only a little embarrassment). I hadn’t expected the performance to be perfect. I was proud of my kids for doing as well as they did. The frustration, effort, and sheer insanity inflicted on students and staff alike was more than rewarded by the pride in the parents’ faces as they watched their children perform. The parents shone with pride when Jonny stumbled, Meghan blasted through her out-of-tune flute, and Mackenzie left her hat on the bench. They saw their kids clumsily putter around on a poorly-tended field, rough around the edges, taking part in something much larger than themselves.

Something much larger than themselves.

Band camp was painful, irritating, and insanity inducing. But something much larger than myself. Does that make it worth it all?

Yes.

Illustration by Anatole Upart.