Skip to main content

Drooling and Drums

Football makes me drool. Not in an anticipatory Pavlov kind of way. More like a my-jaw-has-gone-slack-from-disinterest kind of way, and I have forgotten to swallow my spit. But this evening, I went to Small Town's football game against some other team from Ohio. All I know about the other team is that their colors are red and white. Our colors are red and white as well, so the whole field and the two marching bands tended to blend.

I did pay attention to the preliminaries, though, and discovered that our band does not form a giant D for the team to run through, as I previously thought. They form the giant D in order to play the almamater, which is sung like a hymn from the stands. Then, they form some kind of gauntlet that leads from the big inflatable smoke-blowing helmet to the 50-yard line--and that's what the team runs through. And I think the cheer leaders.


There is a woman with season-ticket seats near mine. I've held my season-ticket seats for about four years but rarely use them. I suspect this woman has held her season-ticket seats for 30 years and hasn't missed a game. Based on her constant yelling and barking at the coaches and players, I think she was a coach in another life. I think she was Bear Bryant minus the hounds tooth hat. Or was it tweed?

The reason I go to these games is for the half-time. My seat is on the 30-yard line, which is usually where #2 is positioned on the field with her trumpet. Unfortunately, tonight the new drill had her on the other side. I was eager to see this show because the drill and the drum feature were written by my friend JW. She writes great cadences and great drum features. I was not disappointed.

She put together a drum circle, and it seemed intimate to me. It seemed that this circle could have been performed for the sake of the performers, and the audience was just allowed to watch out of courtesy. I'm not sure if that was JW's intention, but it made for a great half time, and it gave me a chance to wipe my chin.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

No More Mr. Nice Guy

It's good to be a nice person--to say nice things, to do nice things, to write nice things--but I declare an end to the use of the word nice. Nice is what you say when you can't think of any other adjective. Someone shows you a picture of their back yard--that's nice. Someone tells you about their afternoon adventure--that's nice. Or someone describes their childhood in great detail and sometimes with painstaking effort--that's nice. It's a lazy word, and it's non-descriptive. Nice is like mashed potatoes with noodles and chicken gravy all in a big pile on one plate with some canned corn for garnish. Everything is the same color and texture and base substance--starch (this is a favorite Amish dish). Nice is like a partly cloudy day in April when outside feels like inside, and you can't tell a difference between the lighting and the temperature of your living room and the lighting and temperature of your front yard. Nice is a glass of lukewarm water. ...

Long Live Anita Bowser

You know I occasionally check my hometown newspaper's website to scan the obituaries (morbid, I know, but I'm at that age). Over this past weekend, I read the obituary of Indiana State Senator Anita Bowser . She was a noted Democrat who championed causes protecting the neediest in the state's population. She was respected on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence and plain and outspoken approach to law making. The picture on her senate page is lovely. I remember none of those things about Anita Bowser . My first year or so in college was spent at a branch of Purdue University, and in the early 80s, Anita was a political science professor. She taught my American Government class my freshman year, and she was a mess. Somewhere in my old text book, I have a sketch of her drawn on a particularly dull day in class--her hose sagged at her ankles, her slip showed at least half an inch all the way around, her hair had been slept on but not brushed, and her bright red lip stic...

My Sitemeter is All Bloated and Not Quite Itself

I'm tempted to let it sit on the couch with its feet curled up under a blanket, a hot cup of coffee in hand, a block of cherry almond bark Chocolove within reach, and An Affair to Remember spinning in the DVD player. I'm one of those obsessive bloggers, the kind who checks her sitemeter as often as possible throughout the day, the kind who gauges the quality of her writing by the number of readers who regularly stop by. I've become less interested in the overall number of hits and more interested in the number of repeat hits. The return visitors are the ones I long for. When my sitemeter reads forty at the end of the day, and the majority of those hits are webpals who have conversed, I'm happy. Forty may seem low to many of you, but I've only been at this since August. To me, forty is a jackpot. A few days ago, I sat down at my laptop and discovered a number somewhere in the eighties. Eighties! Yippee! Yeeha ! Hoo-rah ! I've been discovered by the webworld , o...