Band

After school today, I have to go to band practice from 3:30 to 5:30. I really do like band, and  I think it's a lot of fun, but sometimes it gets tiring. Well, obviously it's tiring, because you're running around for 2 hours on the blacktop holding up a heavy horn and trying to keep the form and making sure your feet are in the beat and looking around at the form to make sure you're in the right spot and watching the field commander to make sure you're playing in time and then there's the whole business of playing your music. So, if anyone ever tells you that band is easy, they are lying to you. But it is fun. We have our first contest a week from Saturday, and I'm really nervous. We did a bunch of chopping up the show--we ditched the third movement entirely and used the back half of the opener as the closer. Our ballad this season is actually Scheherazade by Rimsy-Korsikov, which is really pretty. If you've never heard it, you should go listen to it on Youtube right now.  It's actually a story about this king whose first wife is unfaithful to him, so he is now convinced that all women are nasty cheaters, so every day he marries a new girl, and then at night he chops her head off. All this goes on for a long time before this chick Scheherezade, who starts telling him a story that's so intriguing that he doesn't kill her, because he wants to hear the rest of the story. She keeps spinning it out, telling story after story for a thousand and one nights. Finally, after she tells the last story, the king has fallen in love with her, so he doesn't kill her. And all of those stories make up the Thousand and One Nights. And so that's our second movement!