Life of the Band Nerds

Headquarters

My school happened to be lucky enough to have a music program. I am forever grateful of this fact because it led me to become friends with some of the best people i know. To give you an idea, this story will take place during my eighth grade year at school (2013/2014).

Let me paint a picture for you now. We had a music program, but it was grossly underfunded. Our classroom was in a portable on the other side of the playground. (It was a k-8 school so we still had a playgound and recess.) In this portable was our singular, very amazing, extrordinary Band teacher. Lets call him Mr. C.  Mr. C was all our favorite teacher. He did more than just teach us how to read music and play our instruments, he taught us music theory too. He genuinly enjoyed music.

Moving on. we had a grand total of 12 (Later 11, then 12 again, then 13) peiple in 8th grade band. At our school, you started band at 5th grade so we had four years all together of band. We started 5th grade with approximately 40 people. As you can probably imagine, after four years together and watching all the "other people" quit, we became pretty close to one another.

Keep in mind all these names that i am giving out are possibly these people's real names, and they're possibly not, you dont know! That's the beauty of this. (Unless you actually know me, then you'll know or not.)

My group of friends included most of band. There was Jeremy, Renèe, Caroline, Justin, Sydney, and later on, Nathan. (He showed up later in the year after the first concert so i was no longer the only clarinet in 8th grade.) Keep in kind that I'm refering to this as 8th grade band because Advanced Band in my school was made up of both 7th and 8th graders, but because of some stupid schedule thing, we had to practice seperated.

Band was pretty much our refuge place in a way. Whenever there wasn't a class in there during our breaks, we would be in there just hanging out with Mr. C and eachother. You could say it was our headquarters.

We even had a mascot. It was one of those weird string things where when you push the bottom, it collapses. You know what I'm talking about? Well Mr. C had a pig one that was a gift from one of the quitters before they left. In our last year, we adopted him as our mascot and deemed him Sir Porkchop Von Bacon, or Sir Porkchop for short. It was just a little joke, but he was part of our band culture. He even made it into the yearbook!

Our time at band was a strange littke magnificent adventure that I thought should be shared. So as we liked to say: Band Nerds, ASSEMBLE!