I spent all four years of high school playing flute in the marching band, a reality I, for a number of reasons, was not terribly thrilled with.
You see, band at my high school was not like band at UW-Madison. Why? Because we spent our halftime shows marching into awkwardly phallic cloud formations while playing “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked.” We were an even more pathetic version of “Glee.” (In retrospect, I like to think these designs were my band director’s attempt to be edgy and piss off some close-minded suburban parents. In reality, however, I’m guessing he was just as big of a prude as the flautists, somehow missing that two circles plus one elongated oval equals a body part our school refused to teach us about.)
On top of that, I suffered from a treacherous case of I’m-too-cool-for-band syndrome, a fact I am not proud of, but a reality nonetheless. Between this, my glaring lack of talent and the director’s tendency to sweat bullets and pop boners in class (I guess Souza marches really moved him), there was little reason for me to stay in band.
So what kept me there? My parents constantly chirping, “It will look so good to have four years of band on your college resume!” was one reason. The ease with which my friends and I could get under our band director’s skin was another. But the ultimate reason: Being part of the marching band was like existing in one giant, raging hormone with 100 others co-eds.
Thanks to movies like “Mean Girls” and “American Pie,” there is the well-known stereotype that band kids are sex-obsessed. On the one hand, this is true. There was that token couple that would spend the entire post-Bandorama party (yes, we had an event called Bandorama) making out on a sofa conveniently located right by the doorway everyone had to pass through.
But much like every other high school social scene, for every pair of horny 15-year-olds there was a girl still getting accustomed to her boobs. And for every girl like that there was the guy notorious for keeping a family-size bottle of Lubriderm next to his computer. Band was a terrific hodgepodge of sexually confused teenagers, and my friends and I dived right in.
This Bandorama party I mentioned is where everything worthwhile went down. To my inner 10-year-old’s dismay, high school parties did not look like what “Boy Meets World” or “Clueless” depicted them to be. Instead, they were a bunch of band dorks crowded into a basement while the parents sat upstairs eating Triscuits and watching “CSI: Miami.”
Still, it was where the magic happened. My friend got what she considers to be her first real kiss—in the rain, no less—at this party. She has nothing positive to say about the guy now, but you’ll be damned to ever hear her speak poorly of that experience.
Speaking of lip-locking, it was at this party where I first kissed my sophomore-year boyfriend. Our relationship was short-lived and can be summed up with the fact that when he went in for a midnight kiss on New Year’s Eve he landed on my open eyeball instead of my lips. A rather awkward moment, yes, but one incapable of erasing the oh-so romantic time we had grinding to Usher’s “Yeah!” in that now-infamous basement.
If you had asked me back then whether I would ever want to relive those moments, I would say “no” without hesitation. Even with the Bandorama parties, there was little I hated more than reporting to band class at 7:25 a.m. five days a week. Still, I cannot help but be nostalgic for the days when grinding was scandalous, Sunkist served the same ends as alcohol and my relationship’s biggest issue was bad aim.
Were you a sexually awkward band geek in high school? Reminisce with Jacqueline at jgoreilly@wisc.edu.
