Our band uniforms were heavy-duty green canvas-like lumberjack pants. Or were they Park Ranger trousers? I think we had to go to the hardware store to buy them, sneaking over to the nuts and screws aisle to try them on. Or maybe it was Sears.
By the way, lumberjack pants? So not sexy.
Also? Yellow band T-Shirts with the words “March or Die” on the back. Suspenders were also mandatory and they encouraged “flair”. I wore a rainbow set like Mork from Ork and covered them with outrageous buttons and pins. We had to hold onto our yellow hard hats during certain moves or else they’d fly off.
Yes, in 1988, I was a band geek for Humboldt State University. My college volleyball career eligibility was used up and I had to find something to do to keep me off the streets. A fellow Sacramento Youth Band member, who was now in the university band, convinced me to sign on, so I dug up my flute and piccolo from their blue velvet-lined coffins and joined the Marching Lumberjacks (motto: Kiss Our Axe).
I hated it.
Which is too bad, really, because they look like they are having a good time. Totally non-conformist. Right up my alley, really.
This one time? At band camp?
Band camp was a weekend in August at a real campground, somewhere deep in the forests of Humboldt County. I was nervous about the rumors “death pizza”: pizza with ‘shrooms, and hash brownies, afraid they’d force feed us for some hazing ritual and I’d wind up stoned and alone with the gnomes. I’d be high, high up in a redwood tree, hallucinating with the rest of the recruits.
If you messed up a parade drill you had to tilt your head back for a mystery concoction that was poured from a “boda bag”, a tilted teardrop-shaped linen canteen thing. The Axe Major approached you with a bag in each hand and ask you if you wanted alcoholic or nonalcoholic. Then they squirted something nasty down your gullet. You wanted to be first, because the reactions from mistake makers before you only made you more afraid the awful sauce.
You know how when you expect Coca Cola and you accidenatally drink root beer and it totally freaks your taste buds out? So you’re about to drink something nasty and it’s not going to be anything you expect which makes it even harder to figure out what it is because fear and mystery liquid make for a strange cocktail indeed. In my case, it was Shasta Diet Chocolate soda.
Ick! But also: Whew!
Two of us were allowed to wear green lumberjack shorts at performances because we “had the legs for it”. The other “Gam Girl” was a fellow piccolo player with big beautiful blond curly hair, who I befriended out of desperation. We even went to the mall one day and shared an ear piercing, each getting one hole in one ear (I’ve been lopsided ever since, having added a third hole to my right ear). But after college, I never saw her again and now I have this extra stupid hole in my ear. And now, it feels like a forgotten one night stand after a drinking binge. Or like waking up the morning after with Sharpie evidence all over your face. I mean, this ear piercing was supposed to MEAN something, like blood sisters. Every time I see that hole, I think of good old whats-her-name.
Anyway, the Marching Lumberjacks’ big night was when UC Davis’ band came up for the football game. Our scatter band would deliver a huge halftime show of scrambling around to spell: H. S. U. That was it. That was the show. Three letters. We weren’t big enough or disciplined enough to pull anything serious off, so we went for humor. Kind of like this blog, come to think of it.
After the game, while the football fans filed out of the bleachers, we launched into the much-anticipated Battle of the Bands, which consisted of us on our side of the stadium wheezing out our songs and alternating with UC Davis belting out their virtuosos from their side of the stadium as we exhausted our musical libraries. The winner of The Battle was determined by who ran out of songs first.
We lost.
Every year, from what I’ve heard. I was only a member for one season.
My experience was depressing. I think I felt superior to “those yahoos” who were just in it for the sillyness and the pot. We weren’t nicknamed Marijuana State University for nothing, you know.
But I entered that whole adventure depressed. It was merely a band-aid covering a gaping wound. I missed being part of a volleyball team and felt left out while my sporty friends continued to be eligible and play. I thought this “band thing” would cheer me up, fill that void, but it didn’t, really. Which is too bad. They were funny. But I wasn’t in the mood for it. Not even when, at the end of the season, I was awarded with a handmade plaque. This wooden award was adorned with a cotton ball wrapped in pantyhose with a small string dividing it in half and glued to the base, so that it looked like, you know… a butt. A tiny little butt. It was the Cutest Butt award or something like that.
In a different year, that award would have moved me to tears. Someone took the time to make me a thoughtful award and I dismissed it. That’s right, I poo-poo-ed a Butt award.
I had always felt like I never fit in and was bored at the party and left early, missing my award, so somebody gave it to me later. Oh sure, I feel bad about it now, and I guess they must have tried to make me a part of their group, but I didn’t feel it. In fact, looking back on it, I was a total jackass.
How did I get out of my funk? I got a job as a high school volleyball coach at Eureka High School the following year. I was a “credible” volleyball person again.
But I still have the “Cutest Butt” award and the suspenders with “flair” in a box somewhere. It’s a bittersweet memory, but a memory nonetheless.
UPDATE: Found it!
And I stand corrected. It is not a Cute Butt award. It is a Cutest Tush award. I hope you will find it in your butt - oops, I mean - heart to forgive me.
* * *
Hey, did I show you my “Congrats for getting canned!” gift that my husband got for me?
I know!
