Yes, I know this is three months overdue, but I'm sure you expected it, being the professional procrastinator that I am.

In October, I told you I had state competition with my marching band. Well, I went to it with the rest of my band about two to three hours before our performance. It was a cold and somewhat windy day. Well...at least it used to be.

We go out on the field with our fingers literally frostbitten with Matt trying to lighten the mood by saying, "Make sure your bell is pointing straight behind you so it's not pointing towards your crotch," (which we all snickered over, might I add). As soon as we step out on the field, the wind picks up to abnormally strong amounts, and by that I mean with an excess of 60 mph. It was so cold (and the wind wasn't helping) that I thought my frozen fingers were going to drop my horn (luckily, I didn't though)!

Looking back, it was actually kind of funny (though it wasn't at the time). We marched out on the field with the annoucer saying (at I quote this word-for-word), "And from Chesterfield, Virginia, we have the Llyod C. Bird Skyhawk Marching Band as our first band in Division AAAAA...and the last..." And yes, our band is really that large.

So, we all set up, and during the second set in, one of the freshmen tuba player's bell comes off and literally flies across the field (we were missing a screw because our tubas are really old and beat-up)! The poor boy turned as red as a tomato while the rest of the tuba players were whispering, "Leave it. Leave it and just keep moving." When we listened to the judges' tapes later on, they all noticed, one saying, "I hope no one steps on that," and another saying, "Holy hell! It really is rather windy out there!" But that's not all. Our colorgaurd prop Christmas tree (one of our pieces was from "The Nightmare Before Christmas") starts rolling away as we were marching on the field and a band parent had to go chasing after it, and then on the second piece, half the pit equiptment starts flying away. A tamborine flew right out of one of the players hands, the mallet was blown down, the bass drum was knocked over, the fairy chimes flew right off their stand, and then the cymbals fell off their stand and rolled away! I must say, I'm rather surprised looking back on it now that the mallet instruments didn't roll away as well. Not only that, but one of the drum majors' hats bounced down the track around the football field like a tumble weed, so the band parents wound up holding everything in the pit down. One colorgaurd got hit in the head with her own flag when it was blown backwards on her, and one of the batons the feature twirler was holding sailed right across the field (it had little flags on each end of it for decoration, which just resulted in it sailing farther than usual). We also had to walk against the wind in one set, so we all wound up getting pushed back a few steps and literally had to fight against the wind to get where we wanted to go.

In the end, we were all so nervous considering we've had so many superior ratings with our old band director, and now that we had a new one we didn't know if we were going to get another superior rating this year. The wait felt like the longest in the history of waits. The annoucer was like, "And Llyod C. Bird with a rating of.................SUPERIOR!"

We all started screaming that the other band members in a different band were holding their ears because it was so loud (which, you have to remember, is reasonable because we have over 150 kids). People who didn't even like each other were hugging each other. I think that the flying pit equiptment and tuba bell garnered us sympathy points. But seriously, we were all really happy and were talking about it for weeks. Not only that, but it was a unanimous superior rating as well!

See, this is why marching band should be considered a sport!

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