So, not quite done with Band....

The 8th annual Marching Band exhibition was last night at the high school. This is the first year that I haven't had a kid on the field at some point -- the first show was SR's senior year, and then DB hit middle school, and the MS band plays the anthem at the very beginning. Only 12 bands this year, one brand new. One band only did one piece -- their director came in as a new hire halfway through their scheduled band camp, and they're scrambling to catch up -- but did it quite well. Other bands who are usually very good weren't up to their usual standards, and a couple of the often less confident/less accomplished bands were very good, so it was a good evening all around. There were a couple of outstanding twirlers, and the girls from the Saline studio were all uniformly good (and it was easy to tell that they all work out of the same studio). There was one twirler who seems to work with a collegiate twirler, either from MSU or UMich, as she was *very* good in a collegiate style. Chelsea's twirler is a national champion, so she was very good, but not in the same style.

I was in my usual spot, down at the field gate past the bleachers on the far side of the field. One band director said 'we have to stop meeting like this'. DB showed up after the show had started (he had class in Ypsi until 5), and he wound up working the upper field access gate -- someone left early, and he was there and recognised by the field security head, so....

Three bands did Bruno Mars' Uptown Funk. One of them had a serious case of 'white band can't funk', especially in the guard which was supposed to be dancing. I could tell that they were supposed to be funky, but.... not so much. Another band did The Time Warp, and *nobody* danced, even though the guard was basically standing still and waving their flags around. Why couldn't they have danced? (maybe the 'pelvic thrust' thingy, but if that was the case, they shouldn't have made a point of telling us that The Time Warp is one of those dance songs that tells you how to do the dance?)

I was not impressed with the program this year. There were a lot of things wrong with it. Many of them were the kind of thing that just make something look 'not right', but they're also easy to fix. If you think about it, which apparently the people doing the layout this time around didn't. Silly things, like columns centered on a page, or evenly spaced on a page; or putting a subheader on a column text that wraps to the next column (or avoiding a column wrap entirely by putting in a break); or being consistent with the arrangement of splash page-title-bio-program for each band.