Oh the innuendos that have followed the thought of what happens at band camp. Due to the movie American Pie, band camp is seen as a very sultry, scandalous, drama-filled experience. These kids are put together for six hours a night, under the light of the stars and bright football stadium lights. They're forced to bond with one another with things like section bonding and band stretches. Teenage hormones are racing. Add in a tuba and things are bound to start going awry, right?! Well...wrong. I go to a high school that has much more than its fair share of drama and scandal, but band camp is probably the one thing that is the least drama-infested environment. In actuality, it's just a bunch of kids who would never have spoken to each other without band, acting silly, having fun, swatting mosquitoes, and blasting their instruments as loud as they can.
I've mentioned several times in this blog how much marching band means to me. It's my niche. Where I fit in to my school. Amongst all of the drama, fights, and backstabbing of my school, band is the one place where everyone is just themselves. We sweat together for six hours a day, no one cares what they look like. Our biggest scandal is that our band director wore a cowboy hat today. Band is a place where I don't have to worry about sounding or looking stupid. A place where I can laugh at myself when I stumble over my own feet. I can go to anyone in the room and know that they're there for me. Maybe not all one hundred kids in the band are best friends with one another, but regardless, we're all family. We'll help each other, protect each other, laugh and cry with one another, and belt out Disney songs together.
Maybe band camp isn't as exciting and scandalous as it's made out to be. I've never heard of any four play going on behind the bleachers or on the football field, (practice rooms, now that's another story). So to set the record straight: band camp is a week of memorizing music, learning drill formations for the halftime show, making new friends, laughing, playing, and just being plain silly sometimes. And you know what, even though we don't have mindless rumors, scandal, and beyond to entertain us, it's just because we're entertaining enough as a group without it. I'll complain throughout this tiring week of marching, but when all is said and done, some of my best high school memories will have come from band camp. So this one time...at band camp...I turned a group of individuals thrown together with a bunch of instruments, and discovered a sort of family.
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