Meme 8

I was for the junior and senior years of high school a drum major for the 175-piece "Pride of Herndon" Marching Band. It entailed getting up on black scaffolding during homegame halftimes and moving marchers through a fourteen-minute show. It was a position that put one in a confusing position.

To be the highest-standing member! To make everyone wait to begin and then to tell them to begin! To be nearest of all band members to the stands! To stand each week assward to your peers! To wear so much ivory polyester, like a man at a bellstand eager to carry some bags for a buck! To be in those undeveloped years clad identically to 174 people!

It wasn't a challenge so much as a drag. Saturdays the band would file onto four buses to drive a short set of hours around the U.S. mid-Atlantic region to regional marching band competitions. The Pride of Herndon won or did not win. The drum majors won or did not win. Boys in the drum line allegedly got head from the girls in the color guard on the darkened busrides home. No parent chaperone and no officer of the marching band was the wiser.

The hand should be cupped. Thumbs out. Don't be rigid. See facing C's or collapsed L's as you hold the hands straight out from the sternum to get the band ready. Your sternum is a point on an infinite plane laid parallel to the ground. Raise your hands above the head and bounce the tips of the fingers on this plane. This is your ictus. Do it a million times. Down, in, out, up. Keep the hands light. Pretend it's real, good music coming out at you.

One Labor Day weekend, the Washington Redskins invited the Pride of Herndon to play the halftime show in its home opener against the Arizona Cardinals. At the first ictus, the band's sound went upward through the open ceiling of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. It was like conducting on mute. Spectators pissed or got food. Nobody won anything, except maybe the Skins. The whole band got shipped to and fro on actual county-run Fairfax Connector buses. Lights on to the drummers' chagrin throughout the evening's ride home. It took only an hour. A long hour. A bus of keyed-up teens. Gina had a can of spray deodorant and Lindsay smoked pot and had a lighter on her at all times. Aerosol blowtorches passed the time for maybe five minutes.

Give it a week. In his office after band Mr. Bergman's eyes behind his thick lenses were wide open with fury. "Why don't you tell me what happened on the bus ride home last weekend?" he asked.

The horn line captain listened to bad show tunes on his Walkman? The fat saxophonist sat with a bottle of Pepto Bismol on the empty seat next to him? Everyone chewed over the notes they missed, the steps they flubbed? No one felt famous?

No. A freshman, Elizabeth, got a headache. Her eyes began to itch. Her vision blurred. "She had to go to the doctor," Mr. Bergman explained. "She had a scratch on her cornea."

What a seventeen-year-old knows about how the body works could be written in crayon on his own corona glandis.

"She said you were lighting aerosol spray cans on fire?" His toupée that day looked freshly shorn. "On a public bus?"

Remember that every leader follows someone else's orders. Call Elizabeth on the phone at home and apologize to her. Apologize to her parents. Agree to pay the doctor's bill of 135 dollars. Ask no questions. Assemble the entire 175-piece band in the corner of the football field during a break in practice. Stand in the middle of the Pride of Herndon and tell the whole story. Leave people's names out of it. Take all the blame.

Drum majors had to go to camp for this, three August nights in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After a day's training, a hundred eager high-school kids would march in formation through the streets of this college town. Sound off.

ONE! TWO!

Sound off.

THREE! FOUR! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, ONE, TWO! THREE-FOUR!

It was considered good form to try to shout it out the loudest.