It Ain’t A Parade Without The Band !
While at Houston, Holiday Parades were the bane of my existence. When I first arrived, we marched in the Bartlett, Collierville and Germantown Holiday Parades. We gave up Bartlett when they started scheduling their parade on top of the Collierville parade. We quit marching in the Collierville parade twice for two separate reasons. Back in the day, they did the parade around the square in Collierville. It was so crowded that eventually a Shriner on a motorcycle ran over a pregnant lady (sad but very true). Our band had grown so large and the street there was so narrow that we were literally on 3 sides of the square at one time. Not only is that not conducive to a good performance – it is not a lot of fun. The year after the Shriner incident, I didn’t sign us up for the Collierville parade. You would have thought I had taken a poop in the town square (more on poop, later). Our not going became a huge deal. The town’s Mayor (Herman Cox) called and threatened to “withdraw town support” if we did not come. When informed that Collierville had never done anything to support the band, he “hrumphed” and hung up. Then the Principal (Clayton) and Superintendent (Mitchell) called to “encourage” our attendance. I offered to let THEM take the band if they could get the kids to go. They both took a hard pass. So that year we only did the Germantown parade (more on that parade, later).
After that year, the powers that be decided to move the parade to Byhalia Rd. to better accommodate crowds and performers. The lawsuit filed by the lady who was run over by the Shriner was, I am certain, a mitigating factor. I told the Mayor that we would give it another try. Keep in mind that I live in Collierville and really enjoyed every chance I got to take my relatively enormous band to their parade to be compared with the Collierville band. The athletic rivalry between Houston and Collierville was not the healthiest and, for whatever reason, some Collierville kids took it out on my band at the parade. Now, even though we call them Holiday parades, they are essentially a moving celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. As such, kids in a marching band should not have things thrown at them, be spit upon, and (as best we could tell) have bass drum heads shot at with BB pistols. Since all the Collierville kids dressed in Christmas camo, they were hard to catch. Needless to say that was our last Collierville Holiday Parade.
The headache caused by the Germantown Holiday Parade was for different reasons. Germantown is full of folks who like to be in charge of things. This generally entails telling other folks why they can’t do something or making decisions without asking those affected if the decision works. When they moved the parade to the second Saturday in December, they moved it onto a well-established date for ACT testing. Out of town band participation dropped to almost none while pain and suffering for kids trying to take the test increased exponentially. School folks were not a part of that decision.
They decided to alternate which of the local high school bands would lead the parade. Because the parade has every politician in town in a convertible car with a poster board sign, it takes forever. No high school kid who took the ACT earlier in the day wants to stand in the cold for an extra hour for the right to march at the end of the parade – all the while dodging horse poop. Not only is that not fun, helping provide an audience for politicians serves what community purpose? And speaking of cold, on the years where it was particularly cold, I would ask to keep the buses at the beginning of the parade so that the kids could sit on them and stay warm. The first time I asked for this consideration, they said no. A rather snooty lady in a golf cart told me it would not be appropriate (?) to have the school buses drive down the EMPTY parade route just before the parade began to get to the end of the parade. Simple solution – we left and went home. After we got to the school, some of the kids and I paraded through the neighborhoods for a while playing an arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard On High” coupled with the occasional “Louie, Louie”! Germantown’s future solution to the too cold or too wet problem was two-fold. They let us keep buses if we asked and they set a “rain date” for the parade to the following Sunday afternoon. I’d would never have asked kids to march on a Sunday but, thank goodness, it never came up.
So, what did we learn from all of this? Maybe we learned that things like community parades need to have a fun quotient. Maybe we learned that folks who make decisions need to gather all of the relevant opinions and facts before deciding. Maybe we learned that “Keep your head up” and “Look out for horse poop” are conflicting commands. What I learned was that, no matter the obstacle, the kids I taught would give great effort and find some way to have fun regardless of circumstance!
