Reminiscing About All That Jazz (Band that is)….

In my normal solitary fashion, I decided to take a morning walk around a new town I needed to visit. It just so happens that my journey passed by the local high school. From the street I could hear the sounds of music protruding from the walls of the establishment. So, I stopped to listen, and laugh, at what I thought would be the amateurish attempts by the students to master a piece of classical music. Much to my surprise, they were not playing concert music at all. Jazz music was coming out of the room. I got excited. It brought me back to my days in high school when I was part of the band. Let’s see…band and introverts…hmmmm. Don’t even go there. If you’ve ever watched the movie “American Pie”, well let’s just say there is some modicum of truth there. I was in all that band had to offer…marching, concert, and jazz. I realized at a very young age that being a part of the band meant you could get out of a lot of other activities thrust upon high school students, such as P.E. Marching band was considered exercise where I came from. But jazz band was the best. Not only did you have to qualify to be a part of this group (which appealed to the competitive side of my nature), but the trips you took extended outside the state lines. Did we have to fund raise for those trips? Yes. Yes, we did. Back when I was in school fundraising usually consisted of selling items around the neighborhood. The worst thing a person can ask of an introvert is to go door to door and sell things like candy bars and magazines. It’s basically tantamount to being placed before a Foucauldian firing squad in a panopticon prison. It’s not so much about paranoid possibilities as it is dealing with the unknown, and rejection, from every envisaged angle. An introvert immediately recognizes the power dynamic which exists from the beginning. The neighbors you are pawning your goods onto are, without doubt, in control of the entire situation. We must portray the charade of an outwardly affable guise in order to interact with the public that will, more likely than not, reject our attempts at earning a dime. That hard, “What do you want, kid???” stare thinly veiled behind the eyes is enough to scare off any child from uttering a word let alone doing a dog-n-pony show to hock some chocolate or extraneous reading material. That is, of course, if your neighbors actually open the door. Even if the fears are unwarranted, the potential for them governs the introvert’s actions. That’s what it was like for me. I envision this is how the others in the Introvert Nation feel, too. I didn’t have parents who would bring my wares into the office and help me peddle them. I was on my own. Which left me with very few options; go out and sell, have my extrovert friends sell on my behalf, or somehow find a way to fund the trip out of pocket. The one thing I can guarantee happens to many an introvert in this situation…most of the funding for the trip came out of their own pockets (especially if those candy bars were really good, like mine were). Back to the trip. One of the biggest events on our schedule consisted of a competition in a state that starts with an “N” and ends with an “A”. No one wanted to miss out on this trip. Even getting there was adventurous. We would get shuttled to an airport that was nowhere close to our homes in order to catch a chartered flight to our destination. Now this airport was not what one would consider large, or medium, or small. In fact, it was almost non-existent. And by “chartered flight” I mean it, too, was small. Almost as big as that Canadair Jet I took to go to “AA”, but not quite so luxurious. Being as young as we were, we didn’t know we were supposed to be concerned with this plane. That was saved for the return trip when we had to circle the airport for an hour due to tulle fog. This group was just excited to be going somewhere…anywhere! Especially to the biggest little city…well you get it. Despite the constant slough of ominous warnings being issued by the chaperones, a good time was guaranteed for all. Once the plane skidded to a stop, we boarded a bus waiting to take us to our hotel. It should be mentioned that every hotel in this city, at this moment time, required you to become a smoker. I’m not talking about a cigarette here or there; I’m talking full-blown 2 pack a day kind of smoker. It was a requirement, I’m certain of this, and a person was notified by the tobacco distribution machines strategically placed at all entrances. As we crossed the threshold of the hotel, it registered in our teenage minds that we no longer considered ourselves accountable for our actions. At least until I realized our particular group had been strategically singled-out and placed next door to the band instructors’ room. I’m not going to kid you, there was a good reason for that. Even introverts can have friends with reputations for being troublemakers. I was that introvert and those were my friends. Was I an innocent puppet? Oh, HELL NO!!! Now, you may be asking yourselves what kind of trouble can a bunch of monitored teenagers do in a strange tobacco promoting town with most of the chaperones more interested in gambling than watching them? Well…A LOT. Did you know that six beers can easily be placed into a tenor saxophone case? Of course, this includes hiding them in the bell of your sax as well as the compartment for your spare reeds and mouthpieces. Between the sax players, and our friends in the trumpet/trombone section, we were set. All we had to do was be on the lookout for the periodic half-assed check-in by the chaperones in between sips and we were well on our way to being drunk. I don’t know what parents think sometimes, but placing freshmen and sophomores in the rooms of juniors and seniors in hopes that they would squeal on us is just bad logic. Freshmen and sophomores want to be popular, not the local narcs. Besides, we made them part of the clandestine mission. In exchange for hopes of some of our beer, they were willing to play along (or, at the very least, keep quiet). Remember how I told you about ideas that seem good when you’re drunk, but not when you’re sober? This was not one of those times. It’s good to have people who are willing to do your dirty work for you (i.e., the freshmen and sophomores). They had one job and they did it well. Keep the band instructor occupied, so we can sneak into his room, generously share our toilet paper (Hey! It wasn’t used), and short sheet his bed. As I mentioned, his room was adjoined to ours therefore it didn’t matter what keyless entry may or may not have existed. We made our own access. Then we drank some more and…well I don’t actually recall what else we did that night, so I’m just going to say we slept really…really well. And I don’t think it truly mattered. You see, there was another high school band, one town over from ours back home, that was there, too. They had gotten into so much trouble, we looked like angels (I’m talking serious damage to the hotel). In fact, they were invited not to return. Kind of like the Stanford band isn’t allowed to play at just about any other college-including Stanford. Yeah, like that. Which is okay because that happened to us during a marching band competition, so we could console them and teach them how not to get caught the next time. In the end we made it out of there relatively unscathed. Were we good from a musical standpoint? Meh. But we certainly weren’t the worst and made it to the second round. Regardless of the outcome, I wouldn’t have given up that trip, or the ones that followed, for anything. Oh, and that high school band I was listening to, they weren’t bad either.