Oh, Say, Can You Boom-Crash

September 5, 2016 

Weather permitting, my beloved Florida State University Marching Chiefs will rehearse this afternoon at Oak Ridge High School in Orlando before heading to Generic Corporate Overlord Stadium for the Seminoles' season opener against Ole Miss at 8 pm. 

My first band directing job out of FSU was at Oak Ridge. And our band’s first performance, on September 11, 1987, was one for the ages, thanks to my intrepid students and their unflappable drum major, Amy Booth—and a pants-wettingly fabulous cameo from Mother Nature.

Oak Ridge opened its football season at home against Dr. Phillips High School, which had just opened its doors and was instantly Oak Ridge’s biggest rival, since many former ORHS Pioneers were now newly minted DPHS Panthers.

The skies had been overcast all day, but the rain had held off … until the Pioneer Marching Band took the field for pregame.

Just as Amy started the National Anthem, the rain came. By the second line, “Whose broad stripes and bright stars,” it was falling in fat drops and big splashes. By the time the rockets red-glared, it was raining cats, dogs and hammer handles. 

But Amy and the band soldiered on. And the crowd stuck with them, however trepidatiously. 

On the beat right after the line “that our flag was still there,” Mother Nature took over on the bass drum, with stunning precision.

BOOM!!!

It was as if Amy (or God herself) had cued it. The flash, the boom, lights out, the smell of ozone.

I was standing atop the press box, stupefied. Transfixed. Drenched. (Perhaps more drenched than rain alone could account for, if you get my drift.)

Amy and the Marching Pioneers, meanwhile, were unfazed. Or at least not too fazed to keep following Amy’s impeccable 3/4 conducting pattern as she took them from a stately 100 beats per minute to “Tempo di Holy Shit” in less time than it took me to mutter, “I need new undies.”

The moment Amy cut off the shortest fermata in the history of fermatas (“andthehomeofthebray—”), I screamed and flailed at the band from the top of the press box: “GO!!!” And go they did, beating a hasty yet admirably non-chaotic retreat to the bandroom, which was conveniently located just the other side of the visitors’ bleachers. (The school got an extreme makeover in 2010, and the warm, dry refuge where my students and I rallied that night is now a baseball diamond.)

We waited out the weather in the gym with the Dr. Phillips band. Did we even go back out once the game finally started? I honestly don’t remember. I had to do some googling even to confirm that the game finally did start—and finish, with the Panthers beating the Pioneers, 23-19.

I won’t forget that thunderclap, though, nor that scarily, hilariously inappropriate conclusion to the National Anthem. Nor, especially, the musical fellowship afterward. Dr. Phillips’ band director, the incomparable and fearsomely tall Mike Parks, was among the many faculty and students who had defected from Oak Ridge to the new school. So my predecessor and I, along with our kids—classmates turned crosstown rivals, helping each other out of their sodden uniform jackets—enjoyed the beginning of a beautiful friendship, trading tunes and making memories together after an exhilarating moment of terror and fun.