Can I trade my plume for a wooden shoe?

Last night, I went to the choir and band concert at LC. Let me tell you, our kids put on a good show. I was impressed. I was also overcome with depression. You see, it dawned on me that I am old. Me, myself, and I was involved in band and choir in high school. I miss those days, and those days were a LONG time ago. Like 10 years.

So there I was, listening to yet ANOTHER version of Kyrie Eleison, and the memories of high school music came flooding back. I went to a small high school. Our band and choir consisted of not only the musical kids, but also the speech geeks, the brains, and the athletes. It was like an episode of Big Brother every day during 4th hour music. This made band fun, however. Watching "Joe Cool" beat that trapset in Pep Band during the varsity girls basketball game, or realizing that the offensive line of the football team makes up our entire baritone and tuba section. Studs.

In choir, it was a different story. It was easy to get by in choir and be bad. One girl even said to me once, "I'm just here for the credit. I don't even like to sing." Gasp! Can you even believe that!?! The nerve of that girl. Coming onto MY turf with that "too cool for school" sass! I would have liked to see the look on her face when I showed up at volleyball practice and said to her, "I'm just here to see how many times I can hit the ball into the net. I don't even care about this game." Lucky for her, I was a member of the National Honor Society and, therefore, was bound by honor at a national standard to be nice. Had it been the Local Honor Society, this blog entry would have gone in an entirely different direction. But I digress.

We also had a marching band. Oh. My. We were so bad. I remember practicing out on the football field during those chilly fall days, secretly praying for the Good Lord to come quickly. I don't think we were really that BAD, but there was another school in our conference who was the creme de la creme of marching bands. The Pride of the Dutchmen Marching Band from Orange City.


Don't they just look intimidating. Sheesh. I'm getting that "so nervous I have to pee" feeling just looking at the picture. They were the bigtime. They wore pristine red and black Dutch uniforms, which I'm pretty sure were hand sewn by little Dutch women in Holland. They actually marched in wooden shoes. Meticulously hand-crafted wooden shoes. We had a hard time marching in our Nikes. The Pride of the Dutchmen have marched in the Rose Bowl Parade AND the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. They're out on the field forming wooden shoes and windmills. We're trying just to march in a straight line. On a positive note, we wore plumes. Tacky, bushy orange plumes. Kinda like this except orange. And bushier.
  How is this positive, you ask? Because if you position your orange plume just right, no one in the stands will recognize you. That is until you forget to watch where you're walking and accidentally trip over the yard marker while marching onto the field. Plume gets all kiddywampus on your head, your clarinet goes flying into the behind of the person in front of you; it was ugly.

It was about this time in my reminiscing that I realized I was still attending a high school concert in real time. Time goes fast. Too fast. Before you know it, you've sold your high school instrument to pay for college books, the old robes you wore for four years so you'd look "unified" are now being worn by younger and and even more clueless teenagers, the "Best Female Vocalist" award you won senior year is packed away in a Sterlite storage tub in your parents basement, and those bushy plumes...well, let's just hope they haven't claimed any more victims of a trip and drop. Pretty sure that's an award that will always be mine.