This one time, in college…
Homecoming my sophomore year. This was the worst show I had ever participated in… well worst marching band show… It just kept getting worse and worse. (This was the show that solidified my belief that an HBCU Drum Major needs to be more than just a dancer and a set piece). As an inside joke, we renamed our band director "Barry J Blige" because he made this horrible, horrible arrangement of Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” that he added the “X-Men Animated Series Theme” in counterpoint. It was hot garbage. Blige was REKNOWNED for his terrible arrangements and terrible drills (we always made a paisley)...
Back to the… experience. So the Drum Major has us March out on to the field to make our first set... and we wait.. and wait... It is the middle of the day so the sun is beaming down and the band is just on the field doing nothing. My sousaphone is reflecting the suns brightness and heat into my eyes and warming up my uniform, which is already making me sweat profusely. We wait for AT LEAST 5 minutes and still nothing. Think about that: 5 solid minutes of a marching band just standing in place. not playing, not marching; just standing. nothing else is happening. the crowd is starting to get antsy.
THEN all of the sudden, Blige comes jumping over the back wall (Being a small school, our stadium only has one side for the stands, so the opposing side is just a cinder block wall) in a white tuxedo and runs across the field. We are all looking around asking, “what the hell is happening?”. It turns out that he was supposed to be dropped off in the middle of the field by a helicopter... but guess what never showed up...
But wait there's more!
So Blige finally starts the show and what happens? Some of the band managers are running across the field with fire extinguishers to make this yellow fog. You know how fire extinguishers work, right? So we start marching through this fog of suffocating gas and everyone is choking and coughing, not the most conducive atmosphere to play wind instruments. The Mustard Gas finally dissipates and we finish the show.. Did I mention that since it was Homecoming, it was a DAY GAME?! As we are marching off the field, we hear all these explosions.. some big, some small... the crowd is ducking and diving on to the ground thinking that the explosions are gunshots... the band is scattering trying not to get shot for doing this terrible show... The ONLY person not moving or running for their lives is the band director; because he is the one person who knows what is happening. He had fireworks going off...IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY!!
Almost all of this could have been avoided if the Drum Major had any power or control to start the show… or if he even knew what was happening. That was the moment I knew I would NEVER be a Drum Major at KSU. I reflected on when I was Drum Major in High School; I had complete control over the field and the show: it was MY band, and MY show. At an HBCU it's still the band director's show. I almost quit the band that day.
