Getting Trivial

On a cold and somewhat rainy night in November of 2007, we held our first Trivia Night in the band room at Houston.  My one certain memory from that night was Lori Tingle running to the front to hand me something and wiping out on the wet floor as she tried to stop.  On this, the 10^th anniversary of our first soirre’ into all things trivial, I remember how much fun we all had.  I hope to repeat that experience on this November 10, at 7:00 p.m. in the band room.  I am asking anyone who can help with this to checkout a sign-up genius list at:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/60b0949adab2d6-trivia

I need help and, as I am sure you all know, I no longer have a band of folks who do things because I tell them to.  Now I am hoping you will all help out because I am begging and the cause (new equipment for the band) is good.  In case you are pre-2007 and don’t know how this works, the most important thing is to show up.  We will build teams of no more than 10 to a team.  There will be 10 rounds of 10 questions (one question each from 10 different categories).  We will have limited concessions (drinks, pizza, candy).  It all takes about 2 hours and cost $10.00 to play. 

There were also some lessons learned in the first 10 years of doing this sort of thing.  One night, I caught a parent looking up answers on their cell phone (a big no-no).  Our prizes are not large enough to risk eternal damnation for cheating on a question like, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”  My wife no longer buys tickets for our “Split the Pot” drawing.  Her name was randomly drawn the first 3 times we did this and, even though we donated the money back to the band, the optics were really bad.  The most prevalent problem was excited folks shouting out an answer so loudly that not only other people playing but also some people across the street would know their answer.  Sometimes that answer was wrong!  Once, Audrie Pleasants was running concessions and got so excited about an answer SHE shouted it out….. and she wasn’t even playing.  From picking team names (Nesvick’s Naughty Nose Pickers) to the exciting battle for last place, I hope all of you will join us on Nov. 10.

What is the only U.S. State to grow coffee?

The New Tuba Cases Are Here !!!

            As a brief tribute to Steve Martin in “The Jerk”, “The new tuba cases are here.  The new tuba cases are here!”.  The band at Houston has been using sousaphone cases that were in such bad shape and so old they may have been manufactured by John Philip Sousa himself.  As was noted in a previous epistle, I have been raising money through donations to pay the $5,400 necessary to purchase these cases.  Ex-tuba players are notoriously cheap and I have ended up short of my goal.  Nonetheless, I ordered the cases and they are in.  My options are to leave the balance on my credit card and hope Amy pays for them or to have a fundraiser.  To that end, and knowing that not much gets by my wife, we are having a TRIVIA NIGHT on Friday, November 10, at 7:00 p.m. in the band room at Houston. 

            For those who are unfamiliar with our trivia night procedures, they are simple.  On that night, you need to arrive at the band hall just a little before 7:00.  The cost of participating is a mere $10.  You will join up with others to make teams no larger than 10 members each.  We will do 10 rounds of 10 questions each and award some sort of prize to the winning team.   Questions will come in categories like, “Things That Taste Like Chicken”, “Words That Rhyme With Mulroy”, and “How Many Nesvicks Does That Weigh”.  And now a quick story:

            We were having a trivia night some years back and some serious trivia players came as a team.  These were non-band, bar room trivia aficionados who expected to win.  At the end of regulation, they were tied with a rather rag tag group of band kids and parents.  The tiebreaker question was, “What’s the first thing you know?”  The serious team put their heads together and came up with what they thought to be a serious answer backed up by science and common sense.  Their answer was, “Your mother’s voice”.   The band team gave the correct answer, “Ol’ Jed’s a Millionaire”.  The serious folks never returned and the morale of the story is:  Don’t Be Too Serious!

We will have limited concessions (drinks, candy, pizza, caviar, road-kill).  The whole thing takes a little over 2 hours and can be lots of fun.  What I need is a lot of bodies to show up so ask your friends, former band mates, neighbors and pets.  At some point I will post a Sign-Up Genius asking for help with setting up, cleaning up, concessions selling, and score keeping.  Until then, please make plans to attend on Friday, November 10.  The thought of me sitting alone in the band room trying to figure out how to tell my wife we are now the proud owner of sousaphone cases should be motivation enough.  If you can’t make it and want to donate using the PayPal button on this blog, please do!  I hope to see many of you in November!

Have A Little Fun With It!

            I went to Houston versus Germantown football games for 25 years in a row.  Mostly I just laughed at the ridiculous seriousness of it all.  Sometimes fights would break out.  Not actual fights mind you, but what passes for fights among spoiled suburbanite children who want to shoot their mouths off and then look around for an adult to intervene before they have to pay a price for said mouthing.  Sometimes administrators and coaches would have been better off to take the doctor’s pledge, “First, do no harm”, as they got a little too wound up in us against them thing.  And sometimes it was just chaos.  Energy plus desire multiplied by youth. 

            Not that I find anything especially wrong with all that transpired.  I was responsible for some of the foolishness myself.  In the summer following my first year, Houston was hosting summer school.  A young man who was attending summer school and happened to be from Germantown High School wandered into the band room and started talking smack about band.  Not “football” mind you, but band!  He was wearing a GHS Band t-shirt with their logo on the front.  Some of my guys asked if they had to listen to such mouthing and I said no.  So, they held him down and cut the logo off the front of his t-shirt.  We actually still have the logo in our archives.  His mother called Mr. Clayton the next day to complain.  Mr. Clayton told her to dress her son more appropriately before sending him back to HOUSTON High School.  Today that would be a front-page article in the Commercial Appeal.  Which reminds me:  What do you get when you throw a Red Devil off the Empire State Building?  Applause.

            The first time we beat Germantown in football at their field, the Houston kids wanted to storm the field.  A problem arose because the field was protected by a rather high fence that had no gate in it on the visitor’s side.  This wasn’t going to stop a group of over adrenalized teenagers who began climbing the fence and jumping off the stands onto the track.  The principal of Germantown at that time was a quiet and unassuming man (sarcasm off).  He came toddling over to the visitor’s sideline and started yelling for the kids to get off the field.  He then pointed at me and yelled, “and shut that band up right away”.  We did what any self-respecting visiting rival band would do.  We played louder!  That was also the first night I had ever seen a football team (Germantown) come onto the field for the 2^nd half warm-ups while their own band was still performing.  Two thoughts:  Show respect for ALL kids efforts at the game…… and Karma is a bitch.  Which reminds me:  What do you call a movie about a kid attending Germantown High School?  “The Devil Knows Nada” (with apologies to Meryl Streep).

            We played a game at Germantown on Halloween one year.  I let the pep band wear Halloween costumes to the game.  A lady administrator at Germantown did not want to let us in, as we were not all dressed uniformly (paragraph 3, subsection F of the “How to Over-Administrate Handbook for Morons”).   At some point after we were seated, the same lady tapped me on the shoulder, pointed to my mellophone players (all girls), and said, “Those 5 will have to go!”.  It seems that they had dressed as pregnant nuns.  Now, I agree that is not the best costuming decision they could have made.  I would have gone with pregnant Red Devils.  The nice lady and I reached an agreement that involved the removal of strategically placed pillows (none of them were actually pregnant).  Should I have noticed this issue before we arrived?  Probably.  Was it in poor taste?  Absolutely.  Can you find a problem if you go looking hard enough?  I think you know the answer to that.  Which reminds me:  What do you say to a GHS graduate when they are wearing a 3-piece suit?  “Will the defendant please rise”.

           

            I started by saying I found all of this to be a little silly and I still do.  We need to support our schools while always remembering why we are at school in the first place (that education….. remember).  Have fun when and where you can, but maybe tone down the serious a bit.  There are obviously good things about both schools.  Heck! I was replaced by a GHS graduate in Mr. Taylor. which reminds me:  You know why GHS graduates are uniquely qualified to work at the DMV?  Because, as my preacher often says, “The Devil takes many forms.”

.....And That Has Made All The Difference.

          There is a certain amount of terror that goes with taking 200 kids out of town on an extended trip.  Part of it is logistics.  For example:

      A.     When you get to the hotel, where do you park the truck?

      B.     When you get to the hotel, where do 200+ folks gather to get keys? (make sure boys and girls don’t have adjoining rooms)

      C.     When you get to the hotel, how do you get to your room without causing other guests to have a seizure?

      D.    When you get to the hotel, who does the room check?

      E.     When you get to the hotel, where is the best place to watch rooms from so that kids don’t mate?

Every time you move them, feed them, load or unload them, dress them or meet with them, there has to be a plan.  Every rumor has to be chased down.  Every over-zealous parent has to be tranquilized.  Every illness has to be tended to.  For many freshmen, their first overnight trip with the band is their first one without mom and dad.  Because of this, at the first truck stop break we take in the middle of the night in South Alabama, they will inevitably buy 2 bags of Twizzlers (because 1 won’t do), chips, chocolate, some combination of soda and energy drinks, and a dozen day old donuts because “they were on sale”.  They will eat most of this within 30 minutes of purchase and when we reach our destination, they will let me know that they are near death from some sort of mysterious, sudden-onset stomach flu.  An hour later, having thrown up the bulk of the previous night’s purchase, they will find me to tell me they are feeling much better….., and to borrow money for lunch since they spent all of theirs at the truck stop. 

            Sometimes the problem to be solved was not of the kid’s doing.   We pulled up into the parking lot of Sea World in San Diego and unloaded before I realized that I had left the Sea World tickets back at the concert venue an hour away.  David Pickler handed the Sea World folks his credit card as collateral and they let the kids enter while a bus driver took me back to get the tickets.  Another time, we arrived at a Texas Rangers baseball game only to discover that the tickets we had were for the night before.  The large envelope they came in had the correct date but the tickets inside were for seats that already had people in them.  Evidently, the night before, there had been a large block of empty seats in the outfield bleachers and that had seemed odd to the Rangers ticket people.  Proving that God takes care of Band Directors and idiots, the Rangers gave us box seats on the first base side (all they had available) and did not charge us an extra penny

           

Having said all of the above, I did truly enjoy traveling with the band.  Our kids always seemed to be able to handle whatever happened with patience, grace, and a sense of humor.  I have played Red Rover with band kids during a snowstorm in Union City the night before All West Tryouts, in the parking lot of a truck stop in South Alabama at 2:00 a.m. on the way to Disney World, and the infamous William Ingram Red Rover incident in Texas many years later while returning from a Spring trip.

I have a lot of special memories from those trips and not all of them involve someone doing something stupid. At the moment, one trip sticks out in my mind as particularly memorable for an unusual reason.  When we took the band to New York City in 2014, it fulfilled a bucket list item for me by allowing me to conduct on the stage at Carnegie Hall.  The kids did a wonderful job but the performance is not my most memorable occurrence from that trip.  It started to snow that night while we were on top of the Empire State Building.  In actuality, it was snowing UP the side of the building.  I thought that was one of the coolest things I had ever seen.  It had stopped snowing by the time we came down and so it was off to the hotel with the kiddos to put them in bed for the last night.  After getting all of the younger ones back to the hotel, we decided to let the Seniors walk back down to Time Square for desserts (mainly cheesecake) at Junior’s.  It started to snow again and I mean really, really snow.  That 2 hours with the seniors (of which Mary Ann was one) was as nice a 2 hours as I have ever spent.  “The road goes ever on and on…”, or so said Mr. Tolkien.  Thanks for sharing it with me for just a little while.