I marched bass clarinet and was on the drumline for a year. I had the smallest bass drum, but the harness would kill you in the 100 degree heat and man, did it get HEAVY after a few hours. Holy crap.
At least the bass drums had that harness to distribute the weight evenly across your shoulders. My bari sax weighed 20-25 pounds (as opposed to the bass clarinet, which weighs about 15 pounds) and all that weight was concentrated on that one thin strap around my neck. To make matters worse, when we came to attention, the bari was held in the same position as an alto or tenor (parallel to the ground and at chest level, with elbows held parallel to the ground as well). Try standing that way for long periods of time. It SUCKED. At least I got very developed arms out of the deal...
HA HA!!! That's so great about the football team! P.E. was only required my freshman year, but the jocks never gave us crap. The dance team did. Those girls acted like we had it SO easy compared to them and it used to irritate the crap out of me.
The dance team knew better than to give us crap. We were responsible for playing the music they danced to during halftime at the football games. If they gave us crap, we just adjusted the tempo by a couple of beats per minute. Totally threw them off.
I'm sure it's not a shock that I'm not a "girly girl."
You seem to take particular effort to tell us this... I bet you have a secret room that is all pink, fluffy, and completely girly, like a Valley Girl threw up on the walls.
I was a squad leader on the field and once in a while, I had to help the dance team because their formation was always ridiculously off and they did this "high step prancing" march that just looked hilarious. Trying to map out their steps in conjunction with ours was a fiasco. And I'm sitting here the whole time thinking to myself that if they had to carry a bass drum around or use all of their breathe to get sound of an instrument half you size, they might shut the hell up for five minutes.
See, our dance team was completely separate from the band. Now, we had a flag corps that maneuvered through the band during performances, but they were band members and their sets were all mapped out along with the rest of us. They were out there practicing every day just as hard as we did.
We won't even talk about how evil the band uniforms were . . .
Oh, the uniforms. I oddly miss the uniforms. Not the hats though. The hats could all go die in a fire. That was the only time I ever wanted to be a sousaphone player. They got to wear berets because the hats were to cumbersome with the instrument.
The shoes, though... We wore corfams...
Y'know... these:
Extremely high gloss. Looks awesome on the field when you have 150 flashes of light reflecting off shoes at the same time.
Absolutely EVIL on the feet.
They are made out of basically somewhat breatheable plastic. They get HOT in Texas weather... So much so that it's recommended that you wear two pairs of dress socks or one thick pair if you are going to spend a large amount of time in the sun (such as competitions). Why? People have gotten the tops of their feet burned just from the heat transfer.
