I'm starting to get really nervous about revisiting my marching band past. I should have been practicing this rental piccolo every day, not just the five or six times I'd picked it up over the last couple weeks. I'm still spitting and buzzing my lips when I over-tighten my embouchure. I am finding certain notes absolutely impossible to hit, and unfortunately, some of them are absolutely critical to make sense of the fight songs. I need to spend the next 48 hours doing nothing but practicing, and I have more things to do than that. I shouldn't get too worked up about it, knowing that the point isn't to perform a solo in an acoustically balanced concert hall, but to have fun in the stands with old farts like myself and the kids who are at the top of their game right now. The important thing is the march down memory lane. There will be at least two people from my era that I know will show up, including the one woman who was in my squad (group of four) the entire time I marched in college. I haven't seen her since senior year. This is what it's about.
I got home from bunco tonight (where I chatted with a woman wearing a shirt that said "Go, Fight, Cure," technically naming two of the songs I was rehearsing before I went out), and I played the recording of the Voice from earlier this evening. The show opened with a performance of On Broadway, and it just played into the band memories that have been pouring in for me, in a welcome cascade. I don't remember whether that song came out during my high school years, or just before them. We definitely played it, once in a show, and then for a year or two afterward in the stands and maybe one parade? It was a dead-on arrangement, and it used to make me really groove to hear the bass line played by tubas and baritones. There are a few songs that live forever in my heart as marching band arrangements. I still feel like Mr Roboto belongs to me, somehow, from the arrangement our high school director's buddy made specifically for our band, and I feel like I ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a couple trombone players on either side of me, in a hundred-person line, if I ever hear the opening notes of Goldfinger, the first show I ever marched.
I've been tied in a few knots about the marching part of all of this too. The old guys only have to shamble onto the field in a block, but it has been so long, I am feeling the slightest twinge of stage fright. That's unusual for me, as I have never shied away from performing, ever. I thrive on being in front of a crowd, as long as I have a script to read from or a piece of music memorized. I am pretty sure "the show must go on" was invented for me. I once marched in the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland, five minutes after fainting with appendicitis pain, and I didn't feel a thing. (Song played? I Go to Rio. Some things you never forget, I swear.) But somewhere in the last twenty-plus years, I seem to have found a tiny case of the jitters, over walking down Pearl Street in the Stampede, or being on ground level in Folsom Field. Well, let's be honest. The biggest panic is over sitting next to twenty year old piccolo players who don't spit and squeak and buzz their way through Fight. I bet all of THOSE girls can hit a high B flat. Me, not so much.
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