This is a Journal entry by 42

My Life as a High School Band Geek

Post 1

42

Let me see... it all started when i moved back to a desolate hole in Nevada from Virginia, and then decided to take band in Junior High to fill in my schedule. I started out with trumpet, was taught by this one kid named Greg (who's now one of my friends), and after about four days decided that clarinet was more my style. So after a month of learning clarinet and then another month of playing it, I lost all interest. It just wasn't exciting enough, and the fingerings tended to hurt my brain a lot. Alto saxophone was suddenly my favorite band instrument; I had to switch again. Of course, the band director wasn't too happy about me wanting to switch again or having a fourth alto sax in the band, but he finally let me change over.

Saxophone became a sudden obsession for a while, and then it was just any other ordinary thing all the way to the end of the year. The memories are a bit blurry, but I remember signing up for highschool band, and then learning that I would be going east for a Thanksgiving Day parade in Philadelphia. And as if that wasn't exciting enough, I learned a couple months later that the band was chosen to march in the Bands of America (BOA) show in Las Vegas in the spring of 2005. Sax was once again a total obsession. It was my life. And I realized that as early as rookie camp (for freshmen).

Rookie camp was three days long, for three hours a day, and started two days after school was out. It was where all the upper-classmen (supposedly our leadership) got to teach us how to march and make sure we actually learned it all. The "leaders" there for the saxophones: Aaron, Travis, and our trusty section leader Tyler. To get into detail about them... if you even care:

Aaron then was kinda tall, had shoulder-length scraggly hair, wore glasses, and was for all I can remember usually dressed in black... Hard shell but softy. Ford, my friend, and I didn't know his name back then so we called him the Weird Tall Dude. And in one of our saxophone get-together meetings at rookie camp, he made some perverted joke that he was metrosexual, and then Ford and I dubbed him Weird Tall Metrosexual Dude. Sad thing is we actually believed him until the first sectional. And today we still wonder... Anyhow, Aaron's a junior, still acts like a freshman, and now has stretch marks on his back from growing a foot in three months... Like you wanted to know, but I just thought I'd mention it.

Travis is a sophomore (and was the only one there), whom Ford almost picked a fight with while standing at attention, and from the very start has always been a dear tenor sax comrade to the overly obnoxious altos. However he tends to be a bit myserious, isn't that quiet, and tends to stay out of the way while getting in the way.... confused yet?


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My Life as a High School Band Geek

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