Marching band may or may not have been derived as some kind of military torture. Learning the music, the notes, and the dynamics well is just one part of a more massive whole. You have to practice said music until you memorize it because you can’t very well march around holding sheet music and an instrument. Then you have to learn drill, or the different formations you hit while marching. Then you have to figure out the path you march to get from spot to spot. Make sure you roll your feet a certain way, with the toes up. Make sure you’re moving in time with the music. The lines in your formations must be straight. And all the while, that music has to be on point. You practice every weekday until 6 pm. Fridays are football games, and there’s a competition almost every weekend.
There is no free time in the fall when you’re in marching band.
For two years, I played the flute in the band. It’s hard to say whether or not I enjoyed it. Sometimes it was fun - when we started going away to band camp, I had a decent enough time. But while I had a handful of very good friends in the band and the color guard, I didn’t fit in with the whole band crew. They were pretty cliquey, which made sense if they also played in the concert band and spent even more time together throughout the year. I’m not the world’s most social person, so I couldn’t find much of an in with the flute section.
In my junior year, Mr. Nichols
needed a pit player. There were 18 flautists that year, and I was the one with the most piano experience, so I surrendered my flute for malettes. I didn’t know until then that the set up of keys on the xylophone and its cousins, the vibraphone and the glockenspiel, are the same as the set up on a piano keyboard.
Moving to the pit was the best thing that happened to my marching career, particularly as I could give up the physical marching. The other pit members and I were a truly motley crew, and it felt like none of us fit in anywhere, which was a nice change of pace. Not to mention that on days when the band would practice drill, I could literally nap under my xylophone. A sophomore boy was our section leader, but I knew I could play better than he could, and he wasn’t stuck up about his position. We didn’t take a lot of orders, but made a lot of decisions with each other. We all joked around and had a lot of fun together.
The next year, I stood a good chance at being pit section leader, and I was so much happier in the pit. But it was my senior year, and I was looking to major in musical theater in college. So I quit marching band in favor of a fall musical at St. Joe’s.
But what I did not quit, the club that really had my heart, was A Capella Choir. Granted, that was a class, second period every year of high school, but even if it had been a club, I loved it so much I never would have left. We were an amazingly talented group, and having been admitted as a freshman, I knew I was one of the better singers. That year, I also gained admittance to Treble Choir, an all girls’ ensemble, and, my favorite, Show Choir, where we sang show tunes to choreography. I was devastated in my junior year when we canceled show choir- comparatively, it was one of our weaker groups, and hiring a choreographer didn’t seem worth it anymore.
My strongest high school friendships were forged in this group. I had a tight clique with Cheryl and Maria, both a year older than me, Sabrina, who I’d been friends with since first grade, Chris, who I dated briefly in freshman year and who ended up marrying Maria, and Peter, who had been one of my best friends when he moved to Edison from Buffalo, NY in fifth grade but mysteriously disappeared in middle school. (It turned out he went to TJ, the other South Edison middle school, but I didn’t learn that until day 1 of A Capella Choir.) The next year, Amytza joined our crew, along with Katie and Jessamy occasionally.
I’ll digress a bit here and say it wasn’t always good times in choir. There were people I definitely didn’t get along with. For example, three of us (me, Sabrina, and a girl named K) had Social Studies first period freshman year and would walk from Mrs. Stocker’s class to choir together. A few weeks in, K mysteriously stopped walking with us.
One day, when Sabrina was absent, Kerin walked with me again. As we trampled downstairs, she said, “I’m sorry I stopped walking with you. I think you should know that Sabrina talks about you sometimes, and I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of that.”
The next day, I mentioned it to Sabrina, who rolled her eyes and tutted. “She told me the same story about you when you were absent a few weeks ago,” she informed me. Knowing each other for as long as we had, we trusted each other over someone we had just met. But the interaction makes me so sad looking back on it. Kerin and I had a lot in common - advanced classes, fierce devotion to choir, love of musical theater - and we should have been close friends. I don’t know if she was threatened by me or found me irritating for some reason or had trouble with female friends. Ah, well.
Another minor social issue I had was over a small position of authority. Each of the four voice parts had a section leader, usually one of the most talented singers who knew their part well and who had longevity with the choir. During my freshman year, it was a girl named Victoria, whose voice I adored. Sophomore year it was my friend Cheryl. Junior year, Cheryl was one of the four choir officers, so the position was open. I mentioned to our teacher, Mr. Brown, that I was interested. He sat back in his chair and looked at me in a different way than usual, a very pensive expression in his eyes. “Huh.” He had clearly not considered me before. “Yes, I think you would make a very good section leader.” So I was appointed.
The problem was that another soprano thought she would get the job, a girl named Shayna. While she had been in choir for the same amount of time as me, she hadn’t been in it since her freshman year. Her voice was thinner than mine, and she had quit treble choir to be on the wrestling team, thus showing great loyalties to another group. But Shayna was a year older than me and felt that she deserved the position. There was a very decent contingency that agreed with her, and they treated me with a cold shoulder. It wasn’t that bad because I wasn’t friends with them anyway. And really all I had to do as section leader was take attendance everyday.
That year, Sabrina, who was in even more choirs than I was, wasn’t able to formally take A Capella as a class due to honors French. But the following year, she was back to A Capella, and she was given the role of section leader. I don’t think Mr. Brown considered that I liked the position or that it would feel like I was being demoted by not getting it again. He possibly didn’t even remember that I had been SL the previous year.
Those heartbreaks were minor compared to some of the others I experienced.
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