U of O: Festival of Bands

I'm not normally a philosophical person, but I've decided to give it a try. I'm tired of competing in marching band, I just like being in marching band and having the audience love us. Screw the scores, I want to have fun. So, that being said, I won't be griping about the scoring at U of O this year, I'll just be talking about the good stuff. . .

So, without further adeu, FOB!

Call was at 8 am and we rehearsed until about 10:00. We got a lot done, definitely cleaned some stuff in the closer that we needed to, and then we went to change into uniform.

We loaded the busses by seniority (w00t, seniority!) and I sat next to Greg, behind Jake and Hannah, and near some other people. It was during this bus ride that I discovered the absolute crazy-cool song "White and Nerdy". White and Nerdy is my official theme song now, just a heads up. The music video, is a little extreme, but most of the lyrics apply to me (because anybody that actually wants to watch the Star Wars Holiday Special is just weird). Anyway, we listened to Weird Al all the way up and had a good time.

Once we got to U of O we unloaded and changed, went to warm up, and got ready for our prelims performance. Here's me leading our sectional, giving my "inspirational" "pep" "talk" before we hit the field.

After that we marched prelims and it went very well. It was one of our better run-throughs. The drum break that I talk about in a previous post was a huge crowd pleaser, they went absolutely wild! We had our picture taken, and for the goofy one I stole all the plumes from my section and pretended to eat them, that was exciting. Then we changed and went to watch some bands. After that we ate dinner and got ready for our Finals performance. The finals performance went even better than the prelims performance, and I was very satisfied, a good final performance at U of O, because I won't get to play there again :( We changed back into street clothes and headed back to the stadium to watch more bands. On the way I bought a new OMB CD (2002). We saw a bunch of good bands, but my favorite was Grants Pass because they had UMBRELLAS! They all pulled out a blue umbrella from a holster on their uniforms and had an AMAZING visual!

After finals, the green garter band played and we all danced/moshed/pretended to know how to dance. Then we all went down a bunch of levels to the front couple of rows and pretty much just went out of control, jumping, crowd surfing, screaming, dancing, yelling. . . it was a blast!

That's me in the beanie. Notice that in the first picture I seem to be plotting something, and that in the second picture I've jumped on to the person in front of me and we're falling forward onto the kid in the black jacket. That kid in the front row of the second picture is in my section. He is screaming. He actually comments on this blog, so if you ever see a comment by "Patrick", just remember the screaming kid, ok?

Yeah, basically, that was a blast. We sang the fight song, danced the robot, and generally had fun.

The bus ride back was subdued because certain chaperones refused to believe that they had signed up on the party bus (even though it was CLEARLY labeled), so we pretty much just talked and discussed strange religions. We only had one "rave" before we got yelled at.

We got back to school at midnight and I made it home by 1 o'clock, at which point I slept. . . . . . .

That was U of O, an exciting day, with some judging issues that you can look up on OregonLive.com if you care, but I'd rather focus on the fact that it was fun and we pleased the audience, because that's what marching band is truly about.