Marching Band

Concert bands, the larger ones, typically include woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments. Sometimes they throw in a string bass. Why? I have no idea. Whatever the reason, I was sometimes called upon to sit in during concert performances at various sites because apparently home grown string bass players were scarce. That was fine with me. I got to hang out with fellow would-be musicians, visit schools I’d otherwise never see, and sometimes get to play really interesting musical works. Once I even had a solo part. In a concert band. At USC. In the 1960s. Which just goes to show…you never know where you’re going to end up if you’re talked into playing the double bass instead of the piccolo. Marching bands were a different story at that time. They hadn’t invented rolling platforms that allowed bassists to saw and walk at the same time. So in order for me to be able to join the marching band, I had to pick up a different instrument. Why I would want to be in a marching band may be the first question to get out of the way. The answer was, I didn’t. What I wanted to do was hang out with my friends and wear a uniform. If you can possibly wrap your head around this notion, the girls in the marching band at the high school I attended had to wear skirts instead of pants. Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school and certainly were not allowed to represent the school wearing trousers at off-campus events. We didn’t even have the same jackets as the boys. Ours were tailored for a young woman’s body. We looked exactly like airline stewardesses or World War II WACs. Custom ordered, custom tailored, with sensible shoes. No, I did not attend a private Catholic school. I attended one of Los Angeles’s many public high schools, one that had a Principal who didn’t believe students should waste their time with frivolous, non-academic pursuits, such as a marching band. Nonetheless, we put forth our best efforts and made do with the few numbers in our ranks. If you recall, I mentioned that I had to pick up a different instrument for marching band. I meant that literally. I didn’t PLAY a different instrument; I merely picked one up and carried it around, pretending to play. Choosing my decoy was done for me the same way playing the bass was chosen for me. They needed a tenor drum player, so they strapped one on me, handed me a pair of mallets, and said go forth and march. And don’t forget to hit the drum once in a while. Tenor drums are like snare drums, only bigger, and they don’t have metal bands across the bottom to give that crisp military snap so they don’t need sticks. They’re played with padded mallets you’re supposed to whirl around over your head when you’re not busy trying to hit the drum instead of your thumb. Bang! Twirl. Whack! Twirl. And while you’re doing that, stay in line and keep marching while the drum bruises your left thigh. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget to tune the drumhead so your Whack! sounds the same as the other whacks around you. It wasn’t all bad. Playing tenor drum was what introduced me to the benefits of alcohol, whiskey to be more specific. After a day of marching in the rain, during which the drumhead became so soaked and stretched out it no longer went Whack, but Thwung, I came home with a cold. My mother happened to be at home and she knew exactly what medicine to administer: a Hot Toddy. Have you ever had a Hot Toddy? You should try it sometime. It’s better than Vitamin C. Actually, it’s full of Vitamin C, thanks to the lemon and honey. Just be prepared to take a long nap after you’ve had a steaming mugful. Ma told me to get out of my soaked clothes and stretch out on the couch. Then she delivered a glass filled with hot honey and lemon water, with something else I couldn’t quite identify because the honey and lemon tasted so sweetly warming and soothing. The something else was scotch, just enough to knock me unconscious. I woke up hours later totally rested and completely cured. (Don’t tell anybody, but years later when I couldn’t get my colicky firstborn to stop crying and go to sleep I tried a Hot Toddy on her, slipping a tablespoon of whatever liquor we had into her warm bottle of milk. She didn’t fall asleep, but she did stop crying. She swung happily in her wind-up baby swing for hours, crooning baby songs in totally tipsy joy. “La, la. La, la. Whee!” When he walked into the room, her father asked who was that baby and where was his daughter. After I confessed what I’d done, we agreed Ma’s secret remedy should probably remain a thing of the past.) Fast forward from high school to my first week as a college music major. I was in band; it was football season; ergo marching. Did we have any practice time before the first Big Game? I can’t remember any. All I remember is showing up 15 minutes before we were supposed to be on the field, only to discover all the tenor drums were taken. Now what? The intrepid band teacher strapped a bass drum on me, handed me two mallets, and shoved me out the door. You, know small drum, big drum, basically the same thing. There were several problems with this plan. The first was that the drum was so heavy I had to lean back and stare at the sky to keep from falling on my stomach. The second was that I couldn’t see over the trampoline strapped to my chest. The drum frame filled my entire line of sight. Further, there was not a sailor’s chance in the Sahara that I could display any fancy mallet tricks. It was all I could do to remember to give the beast a whack every few steps. By now I was in the middle of a major anxiety attack. There were people in the stands watching us and I was supposed to remember the marching routine but my mind went blank. Fully, absolutely, totally empty of all prior instructions. Since I couldn’t see where I was going, I did the next best thing and kept walking. Unfortunately, I was walking diagonally from the end of one line to the opposite end of another line where a drummer, trombonist, or piccolo player would hiss at me, “You’re in the wrong place! Get out of here!” I would then blindly pivot away and desperately head for the end of the next line that fell within my limited viewing range. Apparently, there’s nothing funnier than a woman, staggering under the weight of a huge bass drum, frantically zig-zagging back and forth across the field in her desperate quest for home while occasionally giving herself a good whack with a mallet. When I returned the drum to its rightful place back in the music room, my teacher said nothing about the debacle, perhaps because the audience thought I was the team mascot performing a rehearsed clown act. However, before the next game, before I could head for the drum racks, he stopped me, handed me a clarinet and said, “Carry this. Pretend to play it. Stand in line with the other clarinetists and go where they go.” When he wasn’t looking, I learned to play the trill at the end of the National Anthem, so it wasn’t a total cheat. I could bleat out one note. But I never revealed this to my instructor. Instead I got even with him by marrying our Drum Major, whose father was a clarinetist.