The Show

Today we did our first march of the show.

Our show is the music of Chuck Mangione. You can find a copy of it to listen to at here, under, suitably, “Mangione Magic”. There are four songs: Mangione Opener, Feels So Good, Echano, and El Gato Triste (“The Sad Cat”).

We were at an away game today, at Reading. Don’t ask me where that is. I just know that I got there. The bus driver can worry about how to get there. Carrying our instruments, we marched away from our buses into, approaching it from the back, the Reading stadium, a hulking, unimaginative concrete structure with a view of the field and a nearby street. There was one scoreboard at the near end of the field. We were on the left side of the stadium, with the Readingites at the right side. Finneytown scored first, amazingly. Everyone cheered at our touchdown. I’ll bet they would’ve cheered harder if they’d known those were the only seven points we’d get.

We played some stand songs for the first two quarters, and then filed out onto the track to get on the field. In marching band, you don’t just walk onto the field. You line up at the back and march onto it. We did that, and then drum major Chad Rogers gave us our dups, to begin playing and marching around.

Marching isn’t nearly as easy as it looks, and it probably looks pretty hard. There are about nineteen things you have to be considering simultaneously at any given moment, some of which are: keeping the right tempo, not missing any notes, whether you’re in step, whether you’re in phase, what the form is looking like, where you’re about to go, what size steps to take, your roll step, and whether that noise behind you is a train or just a really loud tuba. As it turned out, it was a train, rolling along on a track that’s apparently somewhere very close to the field. The train blocked out about the last half of El Gato Triste, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me messing up right up near the end. I just forgot what was happening, forgot where I was supposed to be going. But all in all I did fairly well; perhaps not as well as I’ll have to do in the contest tomorrow, but fairly well. Final football game score: Us, 7; Them, 30.

Yep, we get to go to a contest in Oxford tomorrow, rather than sit on our butts like we ought to be allowed to do after the first show. I have to be up by 1340. This will be a challenge. I’m tired. Good night.

File under: band


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Anonymous

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Hey Nathanael,
What did you think of the math quiz?
Marching does look pretty hard. Ms. Johnson had us march around while playing our violins the other day, and we were about ready to cry. Especially since we marched past the end of the pit, and the big hole in the stage just loomed right next to you. We all almost fell. I am quite contented to fiddle with my butt in my chair. Well anywho good luck at the contest and tell us how it goes.
Rosie

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