Band-A-Thon!

What is band-a-thon you ask? Well I'll tell you. Band-a-thon is a 25 hour long rehearsal for marching band. As a marching band instructor, I was there the from 8am Saturday til about 7:30am Sunday. It was great.

The kids made some real progress and their show that they put on for the parents went amazingly well. They had one of the best rehearsals every which was surprising seeing how we started at 8am. The day was rather uneventful, but night time held a different story.

We'll start with their downtime, which I slept through for the most part, from what I hear was rather interesting. While I slept in blissful ignorance starting around 11pm everyone else was just getting started. The first story I hear was our lovely color-guard instructor, Beth, was forced to go swimming much earlier than she had planned, and with a different set of swimwear than she had planned. She wasn't overly upset, which in all honesty surprised me, she did however proceed to hug every person she came across. The next story I heard was of two friends of mine, who will remain nameless, took the golf cart for quit the lengthy spin around the school. I still don't have all the details. The rest of the stories fall under the usual shenanigans category such as playing ditch, getting in trouble, horror stories of the poor souls trying to sleep, and so on.

At 3am we started our sectional rehearsals. The woodwinds had the fortunate pleasure of using the library and having two instructors that actually slept. Needless to say Jamie, the other instructor, and I were much to happy for 3am. After we our music time I gave each student a Santa hat, than pulled it down over their eyes(hahaha). It was time to play follow the leader, blind folded. They all grab hands and we were off!

We toured the school with various different leaders and than headed to the cold outdoors!

Once outdoors we ran and marched around the field blindfolded. Manage to lose a flip-flop in the process, but it was successfully recovered later. Next we headed back inside to the library for our last team building exercise.

That's right a trust fall! The above picture was taken from the angle of the person falling, they were standing on a table. The picture is of our human net! We actually got almost all of them to fall onto the net of woodwind players, my little brother included. At the end they all insisted that Jamie and I also fall, because trust goes both ways. Those kids are too smart for their own good. We did end up falling and they caught us, but it was the most nerve racking thing I have done in a while.

After that it was an hour of down time, and hour of ensemble rehearsal, clean-up, breakfast, and home time. After the hour rehearsal I peaced out and promptly collapsed into my bed until 4:45pm. All in all it was a great time, tiring, but great.