Inauguration Day
Today's inaugural festivities are the first since 1993 that I've watched on TV at home. In the past four inaugurations—Clinton's second in 1997, Bush's in 2001 and '05, and Obama's in '09—I marched with the U.S. Air Force Band. This time around, I was a standby in case a primary percussionist couldn't make it. I have mixed feelings about not marching. On the one hand, Inauguration Day is genuinely historic, and being an official part of it, however peripherally, is something to tell the grandkids about. Then again, it is The Mother of All Parades: a marathon of rehearsals (including a full-scale predawn dry run the week before) for an event that dominates the national consciousness for weeks and completely wigs out the detail-fixated and the security-obsessed. I wrote this after President George W. Bush’s first inauguration in 2001. It's probably safe to say my colleagues' day today was pretty much like this one, only with better w...