Memorial Day..... And why I hate it...

Two words. Marching. Band.

We used to do three different parades on Memorial Day. We had these horrid all weather wool (meaning equally inappropriate for all weather) royal blue uniforms. You'd sweat under them through summer and early fall and freeze in them in post season football. Now if you know anything about marching band uniforms from 30 years ago, this will all sound familiar. They're designed to fit basically no one. Okay, so maybe 3 or 4 guys in the brass section actually have well fitting uniforms, but the rest of the band, forget about it. There were pants with this weirdly adjustable waist, that were in no way created to fit a girl who had even begun puberty, a blazer, a overlay with the shoulder flaps and a plumed hat to top it all off. Your uniform wasn't even designed to fit you ~ it had been purchased initially for someone who graduated 5 or 6 years earlier and then passed down, class to class, frequently with some very odd tailoring having taken place in the length of the pants or the length of the sleeves.

On Memorial Day, we would all wear shorts and tee shirts under our uniforms and whip the uniforms off as quickly as possible between parades to give our bodies the opportunity to return to a normal body temperature.

Now, it wasn't the parades that were killer, it was the standing at attention at the end of the parade for the Memorial Day speeches that was killer. People would pass out. You could count on someone from the flute section to go first, then someone from the colorguard, eventually the brass section would lose someone and then some poor soul would drop under the weight of a drum set. It was the middle parade in Hudson that killed us. They seemed to let every veteran have the opportunity to say his peace on that one day of the year.

There were mishaps. There was the year at our home parade (first parade of the day) when my sister, the drum major, gave the wrong signal, and instead of playing a nice Sousa march as we headed into the cemetery, the band broke into Another Bites the Dust. I believe that year was the last year we used contemporary music in the parade. Thinking back, it was a rather odd cemetery ~ not a whole lot of space and most of the parade had to wait outside. It was one of the oldest cemeteries in town and I doubt if there were even WWI vets buried there. It was probably strictly a Revolutionary War veterans cemetery.

Then there was the year we were going to cut back to just two parades. The band director called the city where our third parade was located and told them we couldn't attend because we had a scheduling conflict. So they rescheduled their parade, just for us. I don't really remember that parade very well ~ for any of the four years I marched in it. I must have been suffering from some degree of heat stroke by the time we got to it and was operating strictly on brain stem function.

But the best year was the one when some smart ass (probably in the brass section) started a drop pool. You didn't have to identify who would pass out, just guess the number. The band director put the kibosh on that one. He bet on zero and then brought all sorts of water and spray bottles to the parades, demanded that Hudson allow us to stand in the shade. Basically, as my sister pointed out, did what he should have been doing all along, but also cheated. He won the pool, but we continued to have water at every parade after that. We considered it a victory all around.

By my senior year we were getting new uniforms. Polyester this time, I believe. Still ill fitting ~ they wouldn't be band uniforms otherwise. By that time I was drum major and got to wear a skirt, the advantage of which was that it had not been designed for the male figure. We still froze in post season football and actually wished for a bad football team so we could avoid the post season. It wasn't the half time show that killed you, it was the four quarters of sitting on the metal bleachers waiting for a touchdown to play the Minnesota Fight Song (again, NO idea why that was our victory song!!), but I'm proud to say I learned to play it on trumpet for basketball season. (I was a state ranked oboe player.)

When I mentioned all the parade memories to my mother, she let out something between a groan and a sigh, announcing that she no longer attended parades. She had been to too many after all the years of girl scouts and marching band ~ as if! She didn't even have to march in them!!!