High Knee Summer

On one of my enduring love affairs

It’s the season of summer flings, a good time to talk about one of my many true loves. Like all good love affairs, this one has music, drama, awkward teens, and fashion. The object of my enduring affection? Marching bands. Obviously.

The house I grew up in until I was 16 was a couple blocks from a large public high school¹ in Sioux Falls, SD. Their marching band was, and still is, tip top. During the second half of summer and all through the fall, the marching band would practice their parade marches in the neighborhood, early in the morning before the heat set in. I have vivid memories of being in my bedroom with an open window, hearing them start soft and get louder as they approached Pam Road near our house. Like Winthrop in The Music Man, I would run out to the front yard hoping to catch a glimpse of those impossibly cool HIGH SCHOOL kids marching by.²

Almost as exciting³ as the music, were the commands that the drum major would be shouting out: Mark time…march! Forward march! Attention! And the pulsing drum cadence in between the songs. Back then, at least in Sioux Falls, the marching band canon was pretty predictable and stodgy: your Sousas, your school song, your occasional radio hit from 10 years prior. Nothing like the truly creative marching bands of today⁴. But I didn’t care or know the difference. I ate it up.

Lucky for me, my older sister joined the band in high school. We went to the Catholic high school, with a much smaller marching band presence, but the essentials were there. My sister was a percussionist: the pinnacle of importance and status in a marching band. When I came along two years later squeaking out notes on my clarinet, I quickly realized that unlike the drums, clarinets were close to meaningless in a marching band. We were just bodies on the field. Once I played an entire football halftime performance with a broken reed and no one, not even the people next to me in formation, noticed. At all.

Back in the day, in smaller high schools, you could do multiple activities without needing to specialize.⁵ I’d never heard of traveling sports camps, if they even existed. I was your classic Tracy Flick type of student, a wholesome enthusiast for So Many Extracurriculars. Only rarely did they conflict. Sophomore year I was a football cheerleader, so I would cheer for the first half, race to the restroom and put on the heavy-as-shit wool marching band uniform complete with spats,⁶ do the halftime show, then race back to the bathroom and change back into my short skirt/sweater (also wool), knee high tube socks (it was the 80s) and grab my pom-pons.⁷

I try not to live with too many regrets. What’s the point, after all. But a big one, maybe one of my biggest, is that eventually I dropped band. For cheerleading. I think I had people advising me against this at the time, but I didn’t listen. The call of the pom-pons. I did get to go on one band trip, to Missouri where we stayed with the families of the St Joseph MO band.⁸ Good clean Greyhound bus fun.

Quitting band has paradoxically only increased my love for marching bands. Once when I lived in Madison WI as an adult, I bought a day pass for the regional marching band competition even though I knew no one competing. I see kids marching in parades or at halftime, knowing that this *might* not be the pinnacle on the high school clique pyramid. But I can see even if they can’t, that it’s truly so much cooler to love music, to play music, to go all in on the band vibe and do something together as a team. I think the band has become a LOT hipper since I was a kid, like homecoming king status,⁹ and that’s the arc of history bending toward justice right there. I almost always cry when I see bands now. I tear up for the awkwardness of youth, putting yourself out there, making memories, my own regret about quitting, and the fact that marching bands (and the flag corps, can’t forget them and their half-calf cowgirl boots) will never ever be replaced by a screen.

Make it a Band Kids summer.

1. If you’re from Soo Foo, it was Lincoln High School. Later as a cheerleader at a rival high school, we would make locker posters for the athletes on the day of their game. For a Lincoln High School game, I suggested we make posters that said Assassina*e Lincoln. And the other cheerleaders loved it. We drew guns on construction paper and added the athletes’ names: Assassina*e Lincoln, Josh! No one ever questioned it or asked us to take them down. We didn’t know! It was the 80s! CRINGE. REGRET.

2. I know. I’ve never had a good sense of what’s genuinely cool. I blame it on the fact that I read too many books.

3. Seriously, I know how this sounds. But it was exciting!

4. See Ohio State. See ANY of the HBCU bands. Deliriously talented and fun to watch.

5. We’ve evolved in the wrong direction on this one, right?

6. Spats really only looked good on Babar and band kids. Fun fact: band shoes are called dinkels, which probably doesn’t add to their coolness calculation.

7. Spelled correctly.

8. My host mom served us fried chicken and mashed potatoes with white gravy. The gravy was a total revelation to me. I raved about it for years.

9. I saw this happen at my old high school a few years ago. Percussionist (of course) was the homecoming king.