This is SPARTA!!!

Ok, so today is pretty comparable to a day in the 10th ring of hell. First marching band competition of the year, and yes I bet you’re thinking “Oh boy, band how bad can that be?” lol I’m not really writing to be a douche and try to get defensive about marching band because you’ll think what you think and i can’t control that. Just thought I’d tell you about my “spectacular” day…lol

Call time is 9am so i get to school around 8:55. We end up sitting around for about an hour loading the trailer and getting everything on the buses. (4 buses btw, we have 140 kids in our band. 28 of which are in drumline.) Anyway we leave and head to the town of Sparta where the competition is. We get there and chill for a bit, then start warming up.

Just so you know, there are 2 parts to the competition. There’s the parade part and the field show part. Parade obviously being a parade, and the field show is pretty much like the halftime show at football games. The 3-4 songs with special marching that makes formations on the field.

So we suit up and start marching the parade. We get judged on our parade technique and all that fun crap or whatever. Little did we know, the parade route was 3 MILES LONG. For those of you who don’t know, thats a long fucking way to march with a drum… So were more than halfway done with this parade and we approch this large podium stand thing with a bunch of official looking people standing on it. I don’t think you realized how pissed we were when we saw this. We all thought there would be judges marching along side of us critiquing and whatnot. NO, there was only like 40 seconds total that was judged and here we all are playing our hearts out the whole parade in hopes to score high. Well by this point we are pretty much spent because its 2PM, the sun is blaring, our uniforms are maroon and black, and we’ve been playing constantly for the past 30 min….. Meanwhile my left arm is just short of completely numb because my carrier was digging into my shoulder and cutting off circulation. lol

3 miles later……we get back to the buses and have some lunch. I can honestly say food never tasted so gooood. In fact, I’ll brb I’m gonna go grab some Doritos. XD jk It was pretty nice after that tho cuz we just kinda hung around for the next 3 or so hours because we didn’t take the field for our show til 7:30. Of course, the time soon came and we suited up again and started to warm-up. There were these little piss-ass black gnats that kept biting us while practicing. Damn near drove us all nuts lol.

So we’re minutes from taking the field lined up on the track. My stomach starts getting all funky. Not really a nauseous feeling it was just weird. Anyway we play our show and march off the field and put our drums down. We end up standing around watching the rest of the bands perform. At this point, I’m thirsty as hell, and my friend goes over and gets me a diet coke (everything else was gone) I start drinking that to ease my stomach a little.

Finally awards are announced and turns out we got “1st place percussion” for the parade section in our class and “2nd place overall” in the field show for our class. Overall i think we did alright. Here comes the fun part……..we get our drums on and we start walking back towards the buses to pack up and head home. My stomach is really bothering me at this point. Not sure if it was the fact that we “lost” or what but my main goal at this point was to keep my mind off my stomach. We get to the buses and my throat gets all dry. I ask my friend to take my drum off cuz i feel sick and i ran over to a tree and a lost it… =/ I was really trying not to puke, but i couldn’t fight it any longer. I have to admit tho that I feel a lot better now that I did that.

So we loaded the trailer and headed home. It was a pretty good bus ride. I can say its my first ride on a school bus at night…haha. We get home and I realize i have some college history homework that I have to submit online before midnight. I got it done with 3 minutes to spare so I’m still kinda shaken up about that whole thing.

All I can really say about today is….WOW. lol It was fun yet brutal. It was a good experience nonetheless tho. One down, three more to go. BRRRINNNNG IT ONN! haha That is all.

Đǻνǿ

~ by Davo on 28 September 2008.