I‘m no stranger to reporting here what my family and I do on weekends from time to time. Whether it’s taking a bit of a brewery tour, going to a private museum, vacationing out in the hills, tooling around the state capital, doing service and meeting family, vacationing out in the hills again, or some other thing I find myself unable to link conveniently at the moment, such exploits as I and mine have are not exactly strange to this webspace. (I don’t think they’re terribly strange in the world outside, either, but I’m hardly a reliable judge of any of that.)

In any event, this past weekend offered another such small excursion. On Saturday, after Ms. 8 had done her rehearsal (she remains active in a nearby theatre program, among many other things), she, her mother, and I met my in-laws for a bit of a birthday celebration. That much was nice to do, and I was pleased to leave with a belly full of food I didn’t have to cook. After that, though, we had the excursion of note. (We eat with my in-laws pretty commonly, as it happens.)

Said excursion took us back to a place where I’d once spent a lot of time: the downtown campus of what is now UT San Antonio. When I became an English major (more than twenty years ago, now), I spent one or two semesters more or less exclusively on that campus, surrounded by what was then not one of the more developed parts of town (that has changed) and studying in buildings markedly different from the prevailingly brutalist architecture of the Main Campus. (That’s also changed; the older buildings are still as they were, but the newer construction has moved away from that model; it is lighter, generally, than the Downtown Campus, but more like it than like the brutalist basis of the John Peace Library.) It took longer for me to get to it, admittedly–I was commuting in from Kerrville, then–but it also gave me space away from where I felt I had embarrassed myself, space in which I could get re-grounded and from which I could move ahead into what I thought would be better things.

The event that attracted us downtown was a production of The Tempest being put on at the Buena Vista Theatre, one of the larger indoor spaces at the Downtown Campus. Actors from the London stage put on the show, something that has happened annually (save the height of the coronavirus pandemic) for decades and in which I had participated in my time as an English major. (Traditionally, the English honor society provides ushers for the event, and I was very much a member of that society in my undergraduate days.) It was something I remembered fondly from my own time–I got to see Much Ado about Nothing because of it–and so when I found out it was on again, I thought my wife, our daughter, and I should go and attend.

The production, as could be expected and as I had hoped, was excellent. The actors’ physicality as they moved among the parts–there were five on stage playing all of the roles, so they swapped in and out among characters throughout, specific costume pieces helping to indicate who was where and when–impressed, and the ease with which the lines were delivered brought the three of us, at least, into the performance. It was pretty much what watching live theatre should be, what watching Shakespeare staged should be, and I’m glad both to have gotten to see it and to have taken my daughter to see it.

I’ll hope I hear about when it happens again.

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In my most recent post to this webspace, I write of how I got into band. I note that I grew to love it, a love I think clear from the several efforts I’ve made to remain involved with it. But it was not a linear thing, and there have been times I’ve not been very pleased with how things went, even in that part of my life when being a band nerd was more central to my self-concept than it has since become. (It’s still there, but it’s far from the biggest or most forward part of it.)

I’ve noted, I think, that I was in marching band in high school. Between my freshman and sophomore years, for reasons I am not going to get into here but which are at least partly matters of public record, the high school I attended found itself with a new head band director. Said band director made a number of changes to how things were done in the band program, and many of them were good, although my arrogant little shit of a self pushed back against a number of them. (Then, as now, change for the sake of change was not something I appreciated, and I saw the changes taking place as being in that line. I was wrong, as I realized later, but I was still an ass who deserved a lot worse than I got.) Rather than being a time and space to goof off and act out, band began to be something to take seriously and take some pride in, and from what I remember, there were more than a few in the program who did just that. (Some, of course, had already been doing so.)

Consequently, when Bandtober came around, the band was ready to go. We did a couple preliminary contests, doing better than we had expected to do in each of them, so that when UIL Region Marching Contest was set to happen, we felt ready for it. And on the morning of that contest, despite overcast skies, we assembled at the high school early on, ran our show one more time, then checked our equipment and uniforms and loaded onto several school buses and a rented truck or two, heading east on Interstate 10 to face the judgment of experienced clinicians, educators, and assessors–a judgment I recall being confident would be much in our favor.

As we drove east, however, the clouds that had been hanging above us began to lay down their burdens. By the time we reached the intersection of Interstate 10 and Loop 1604, we had heard the news: the contest had been postponed due to lightning observed and rain expected to last throughout the day and into the evening. We drove around the awkward cloverleaf that the meeting between the two highways was then–it has since been rebuilt, with construction not complete as I write this, into a massive directional interchange–and started back for home, quiet not in focused anticipation as we had been on the way down, but in stunned disappointment.

It was some days later that the rescheduled contest met, or at least our portion of it. It was not at the originally scheduled site, but at what was then the rival school to the one I attended. (As with many other things, matters have changed since; the schools do not, at this point, compete directly with one another, and they have not for some time.) And the rain that had postponed the contest continued not just for the day, but for several days, so that the field was still wet when we stepped onto it, and we were not the first to compete on it that afternoon. We may, however, have been the worst; people didn’t have all of their materials ready, pieces of instruments fell off and got kicked to the sidelines, and a member of our color guard who would go on to compete in and even to coach Drum Corps International events slipped on a patch of mud and slid across part of the field.

With the performance ended, the lot of us marched sullenly off to the side, clearing the field and the track numbly. The results, when we got them, were much as expected–bad–and it was not easy to make the case in the following weeks that we deserved any consideration, any chance to excel. Because that’s one of the things about marching bands that those outside them do not often realize: there’s really not a next chance this season. There are preliminary contests, invitationals and the like, that matter because they offer practice and assessment, but at each stage of the real contest–region, area, and state where I was and am–there is one chance to make it, eight minutes of playing time and sharply limited time to get onto and off of the field before and after. There’s always next season, sure, but in each year, it’s one and done–unless you do well enough to move ahead, which is never a given.

That year, we missed our chance. That year, we had tried and faltered. That year, we had put more focused effort into a few weeks than we had exerted the full year before, and we ended up doing worse than previously. It was the kind of thing that, had we not just had the upheaval in the program that we had had–and to which I and others responded poorly in more than one way–might well have resulted in some changes to the faculty. As it was, there was a lot of doing to make sure we didn’t lose more than a contest; in more recent years, a program cut might have been in the offering, but even then, the performance made it hard to argue for additional funds to support the program.

But there was a next year, and in that year, despite some other challenges away from the marching field, we did better. We did much better. And about that, I might well write another time.

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As this month of October begins, marching bands in many places are gearing up for several weeks of intensive practices and weekly competition performances. They will rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more before piling onto school buses and driving for hours in lingering heat to other schools’ stadia to play in the bleachers and at halftime, only to pile back on, drive for hours, unload and unpack and air out their uniforms so that they will maybe be dry in the morning when they return, rehearse, and pile into school buses for more hours on the road in advance of one final run-through and a single shot to perform and maybe, maybe win out over all of the other bands in their class that day. It’s the kind of thing I spent years doing, it’s the kind of thing I still volunteer to help others do, and it’s at least one kind of thing that I love.

Such wasn’t always the case, however.

When I was much younger than I am now, as I was moving into sixth grade, I was presented for the first time with options for classes I would take. I had the choice to take art, band, or choir. Art, at least at the school I attended (which does not exist anymore, not even in a successor campus), was a half-year course; band and choir were full-year courses. Sixth grade also had a required health class and a required gym class–but for students in art, health class was paired against art, so they had a full year of physical gym. For band and choir students, the health class was paired against the gym class; taking either band or choir meant getting out of half a year of gym.

For me, then, being at the time skinny and looking decidedly down on the paltry concerns of physical education (I’ve said I was a little shit when I was younger), it was clear that band or choir would be the choice for me. And since, at that time, my voice had not found its resonance and clarity (I’m told I have a good voice for radio; I’m told the same about my face, if I’m being honest), and I had even more trouble carrying a tune then than I do now, but I grew up among performing musicians and had ready access to a number of wind instruments, there was little question that I would take band over choir.

I…was not a good student in band. In my defense, I did have some physical issues that got in the way of some things; I had some rather interesting braces at that point in my life, and there is a reason I was in motor skills labs when I was in elementary school. More pertinently, though, I was, if it can be believed, arrogant, thinking that because I came from the family I did that I was above doing the exercises that my classmates did, putting in the practice that at least some of them did, and it was the case that some measure of natural talent carried me further into things than I had any right to go at that time. It caught up with me soon enough, and I made some shifts in response–but those will be stories for another time. (I have to have something else to write about, don’t I?)

It took a while for me to find my love for playing, to find the passion for it that would more or less carry me through high school (although I am certain I romanticize some things to an unhealthy extent) and into the beginnings of my college career. (It’s why I minored in music, in the event.) I’m glad it did, and I’m glad that I can still pick up a horn and play a tune on it (although I know I ought to practice more, but I don’t play publicly at this point, probably for good reason), but I have to acknowledge that what I’m glad of now came from a then I’m very much not glad of. But I think many look back at who they were at the age I was then, the age Ms. 8 is now, and are not pleased with what they see, and I take some comfort from the idea that I am not alone–as I hope that my reminiscing will help others know they are not alone, and perhaps find comfort therein.

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