At this time tomorrow, I will be on my way from London, Ontario, to Muskegon, Michigan, the town where I was born and raised.
Every fall, for the high school homecoming football game, all the alumni of the high school marching band are invited back to join the current marching band to participate in the pre-game and half-time festivities. Someone tells me this has been going on for nearly 40 years, but I started going only about ten or so years ago.
- We meet up, socialize, and rehearse late in the afternoon.
- And then we rehearse with the current high school marching band.
- The band alumni form their own procession and "march" to the stadium playing a school song [It's no long thighs parallel to the ground and 8-to-5 as it was when we were younger, but we sure have fun].
- We play school songs* with the high school band during the pre-game show.
- We participate in a portion of the half-time show, playing some piece to which we will have received the music only during the rehearsal a few hours earlier. One year we did 25-or-6-to-4, a great Chicago hit.
- Every time the football team scores, we play school songs (which seems often since the team is pretty good).
- After the game, the homecoming court is crowned (while the band members stand around and freeze our noogies [or so it seems], no matter what the actual temperature is).
- And then the combined bands march from the far end of the field through the tunnel under the stadium. The fans are lined along the walls of the tunnel and hoot and cheer us the entire way. What a thrilling feeling it is, marching to a really catchy cadence from the drum section, swinging our horns in unison, and straight-faced the entire way as the fans go wild! Here is a video of the event from last year:
- After the march through the tunnel, the combined bands march down the street to the old high school gymnasium/auditorium, where the drums set up in the middle of the gym floor and go through a complex series of cadences while band members, old and new alike, prance/dance/jog around counter-clockwise in a huge circle. It struck me as a bit weird my first time there, but since then I have wholeheartedly joined in and loved it.
- After what feels like ten or fifteen minutes, the pulsing, sweating bodies break out and form a huge circle, holding hands and sing the high school Alma Mater (yes, I still remember the words).
- And then we race (figuratively, not literally) to Fricano's for pizza, etc.
I have made it back for only about four or five of these events in the past ten years. But for this year, I made sure I had no other commitments for the homecoming game because I have made so many friends during these band reunions and have renewed so many other friendships.
*The Muskegon Big Reds have four school songs.
- "Indian Boy." The high school band is no longer allowed to play this for PC reasons, but at the end of the third quarter, the band alumni go into the crowd and play it. It is all totally unapproved of and actually disapproved of by the current band leadership. But they tolerate it because we love doing it and fans in the stadium love it.
- "On Muskegon". Some school across Lake Michigan over in Wisconsin seems to have usurped this song from us (as have the Saskatchewan Roughriders!). When I played french horn in high school 87 years ago, we had afterbeats; now I play alto horn, and we have the trombone part, which is much more fun.
- "Red & White", a really kick-ass fight song written by William Stewart, an amazing musician, conductor, composer, designer, mathematician, geometer, inspiring leader, and stern taskmaster. He died of a heart attack during my last year in high school, a severe loss to the music programmes in the Muskegon area.
- "Alma Mater". A truly beautiful piece of music, also written by William Stewart. These two pieces by Stewart move me every time we play them. I'll try to attach some audio files of recordings made by our band back in 1959. The files are rather large MP4s:
and the