While it is the case that no few marching bands have had their contest seasons end, it is also the case that many are moving ahead to higher-level contests; Bandtober is far from done, and so I will have more to say about it yet than the one or two comments I’ve made about it in the past few weeks. One part of that “more” is that I have continued to work with the marching band at my local high school, not only because my daughter is in the band program and I want her to have the best possible program as she moves ahead, and not only because my being out in the community and helping with such groups is good for me and for the business I manage, but also because I have long benefited from strong band programs, and I believe in them as Good Things (yes, the capitals are on purpose). What I learned from being in bands across years has done a lot to sustain me, and it has opened up opportunities for me that would not have been available had I not had the experiences I did in the band programs that were far kinder to me for far longer than I deserved; I do want other people to have such opportunities, and so I work to help make them available, even if only in small ways as I am able.

My third year of high school was an interesting year to be in the band. The school district where I was enrolled had declined to replace the marching band uniforms I and the rest of those in the band had worn my freshman and sophomore years despite those uniforms being clearly well beyond their expected lifespan. Many or most of them were mildewed through, the fungus resisting all attempts to dry-clean it away. Many or most of them were stained with years of adolescent sweat that had stewed in uniform bags and dark closets, what should have been white yellowed beyond redemption and what was blue splotched and speckled with dark spots that no scrubbing would take out. No few of them had hook-and-loop closures that had long since failed but still demanded wear, obliging several to trust themselves to safety pins that all too often came undone and hooked themselves into the backs of necks, adding bloodstains to already-befouled jackets. And for all of that, for all the complaints across years about all of it, the district shrugged its collective shoulders and muttered something about budget constraints before buying jockstraps in bulk and pom-poms aplenty.

The band’s answer, or the answer fit for anything resembling public discussion, was to have each member purchase their own uniform for the year. Given the show we marched (“1945,” complete with swing classics and patriotic medleys) and where we were going to start marching it (Kerrville has long been billed as a retirement community, and a lot of the retirees were and are veterans, no few of whom then remembered the 1940s), the decision was made to have those uniforms mimic the khaki uniforms of World War II US service personnel, complete with rank markers to denote class and leadership positions. They weren’t perfect replicas, of course, but they worked well enough for what we needed them to do. (That the color guard wore maroon didn’t hurt, either; there were and are a lot of graduates from Texas A&M in town.)

I remember the uniforms taking more care and maintenance than the ones we had had before, but that had the advantage of having me in a clean getup every time I took the field. (Taking care of my uniform is also part of how I learned to iron a shirt and trousers, skills I have definitely used since.) I also remember that, between the publication of our buying our own uniforms and how we performed in them, the school district found space in the budget to buy a new set of uniforms (for which I was the test run, as it happened; it might have been coincidence that the “display model” sent was in my sizing, but perhaps not). And that outward show of support, I am given to understand, helped things continue in a good way for a while…but by that time, I wasn’t around to see what was happening. My brother was, but I had other concerns then.

Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have been more open then than I was to keeping in touch with people and institutions in which I had played some part. It’s certainly the case that, as I’ve moved back and moved on, I’ve searched for connections; I’d’ve had an easier time of doing so had I not made as much of a point of letting them go in my youth. I’m fortunate that the work I do now allows me to do something to establish new ones, and I can hope that what I do here and now will help those who have followed after me to have it at least a little easier than I did.

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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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