Band Fags at Their Best.

Me: Hi, I'm Cori and I'm a band fag.
Rest of the world: Hi, Cori.

Yeah, I'm a loud and proud member of the Shelby Whippet Band stationed from Shelby High School is Shelby, OH. Unless you live in the area, you've probably never heard our little town. Our head band director is Mrs. Lisa Baker, a woman most people aren't too fond of.

This past Friday, March 13th, the symphonic band (higher level players) and the directors traveled to the Ohio Music Education Association Large Group Adjudicated Event District Contest, also known to the bandies as simply Contest. The Shelby Whippet Band had been travelling to Contest since Dwight Summerville took over the band around fifty years ago.

If a group at District Contest earns a one rating, the move onto State Contest. Starting with Dwight Summerville and on until six years ago, the Shelby Whippet Band earned straight ones at District and State contest. Then, six years ago, Mrs. Baker selected a piece called At Dawn They Slept, a difficult piece about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They played it a District Contest and earned the band's first ever two rating. Since then, the band hadn't earned another two.

Every January, the band has its Mid-Winter Concert. After that, the Symphonic Band prepares for District Contest, which at that point is six weeks away. Mrs. Baker handed out a piece the day after the concert and we all just stared at it. It was B Class music, which is all we play, but it looked hard. There are so mny tempo changes and dynamics we'd never dreamed of. It was called At Dawn They Slept.

After handing it out, Mrs. Baker stood on the podeum, hugging the score to her chest and told us about the piece and how we'd earned out first ever two with the piece. For the past six weeks, we attacked the piece (along with our other two pieces for Contest) and made a lot of progress on it. Contest drew closer and closer and Mrs. Baker scheduled a Thursday night practice on the 12th, from 6:30 to 8:00.

We all showed up and at 7:15, Mrs. Baker exploded like we'd never seen before. We'd seen her mad before, but this was a new extreme. She told us to go home that Contest didn't matter and wasn't worth her time since we didn't think it was worth ours. She stormed out of the auditorium where we'd been practicing and left our other two directors, Mr. Tim Mayer and Mr. Bryan Day, absolutely dumbfounded.

A student asked if one of them would conduct us. Mr. Day told us no, that we'd had our chance and to go home. As we were silently putting our instrments away, a brave student spoke up. "What are you guy's doing?! We came here to practice, so we should. So what, Mrs. Baker isn't here, we can do sectionals and work on what we need to."

We split up by instrument and after fifteen minutes, to our surprise, Mrs. Baker came back. She told us she was disappointed and to take the shairs and what not back to the band room and set it up in our normal setting. We did quietly and she was no where to be seen after that.

Once our stuff wasback in our cozy and familiar band room, a senior member, affectionately known as Flounder, had us all sit. He, along with many other band mbers one by one took the podeum an spoke. A junior member stood up and talked about how he'd been in a bad car crash a week before and about how be could have died. Flounder put into motion a plan for a seven am rehearsal the next morning. He told us that if we cared enough about Contest to show up. He said he would conduct us as best he could.

I woke up half an hour early and made my way to the high school. Flounder got us halfway through our scales when Mrs. Baker walked in. Her face was unreadable. She looked at us and asked why we were there. Flounder summed it up for us. He looked at her with a smile and said "because we care." she directed us for the next twenty five minutes and we got so much done. We had our regular rehearsal and afterschool, we headed to Contest.

We waited anxiously to play and slowly we made it through our three pieces, playingAt Dawn They Slept perfextly, and headed to to sight reading. We waited on the edges of our seats for our rating.

When it was posted, we all began cheering and yelled, som of us even crying. We got a One. We all looked to Mrs. Baker who was now crying her eyes out.

Friday nght was one of the proudest moments of my fifteen year life. I'm so proud of every one in the band and all throughout the night I was reciting Mrs. Baker's famous sayings, commonly know as Bakerisms.

"Remember who you are and what you represtent."
and most importantly, "If something's worth your time, it's worth your best effort."