Drum corps for Macy’s
The summer of 1994 will go down as one of the highlights of my entire life. That was the year I graduated high school, after which I toured the United States with the Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps.
For those who don’t know the first thing about drum corps, imagine the marching band at the high school or college football game doing their thing. Then imagine this same band doing the exact same show all over the country in a nationwide circuit of competitions.
It was my first exposure to a performance environment with exceedingly high expectations, and although I had some challenges as a 17 year old away from home for the first time, I thrived in the environment.
I only did this for one summer because I had previously committed to joining the Army a few months prior, and that kind of commitment is typically of the “irrevocable” type. So I left the experience thinking it was a one and done type of situation.
Until 2013 comes along, and it’s announced that this same drum corps has been chosen to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and that alumni have been invited to perform with them!
I immediately sign up, pay the fee to participate, and all of a sudden I get to perform with my drum corps again!
Fast forward to November 2014, and it’s time for the rehearsals for the parade. Now this is for a parade, and it’s over 450 people of ages varying from 17-75 performing, so we need to keep things simple. Basically moving forward with nothing in the way of formations, mixed meters, anything that requires more than a few hours of rehearsal, because that’s all we had.
I’m giving all this back story so I can share what happened during a break while getting a drink of water at these rehearsals. I overheard a couple of the current members of the group, who are probably 20 years old or so and accustomed to the really complex stuff I’ve described say something along the lines of, “This is stupid.” The other replied, “Yeah, this is drum corps for old people.”
Now I didn’t have any real reason to intervene in their discussion, nor to correct their improper attitude. But not having a reason to do something isn’t always a reason to not do that thing. So in the spirit of simply making conversation among brothers, I said, “Guys, this is drum corps for Macy’s. We think this is boring too.”
We all laughed and then went back to the boring old parade rehearsal.
All in all it was a memorable experience – one I don’t feel the need to do again if given the opportunity. But it was an important lesson that sometimes we do things that are boring, or beneath our abilities, simply because it’s in service of the bigger picture. In this case, it was to represent the organization and the drum corps activity in general in a really high visibility situation. Who cares if it was simple marching routines? It was fun, and gave a lot of people something to remember for a really long time.
That’s reason enough to tolerate doing things “for old people” or because NBC has strict guidelines as to what can be done during our 30 seconds of fame.