*A line, near the end of The Music Man.
I wasn’t the only one Saturday afternoon on Fayetteville’s Dickson Street to ask about the latest funereal Mardi Gras parade. A friend asked me the question, near the Walton Arts Center, before I had a chance to make my semiannual whine. An ally!
Fayetteville in recent years has two community, family-oriented parades a year, First Night on New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras. The latter is on Saturday afternoon before the bacchanalian night of Fat Tuesday. The First Night parade opens the festival, at 6 p.m.
Can you imagine town parades without school marching bands?
These two have some music. Each will have one or two flatbed trailers holding rock bands and their portable amplifiers. We have some hand-drumming circles, and they’re often walking along thumping their djembes. The women’s chorus Harmonia often sings. At the 2006 Mardi Gras Saturday, an adult community band had perhaps eight members blowing their horns from a flatbed. You don’t hearing any of these until they’re almost in front of you. Quickly afterward, more silence.
But it’s not the same thing as a school marching band. My friend recalled her junior high and senior high years in her community’s Christmas parade. I had six years in that one, another town, Fort Smith, where each spring we also had the Rodeo Parade. Statistically, if you have to march in step and in straight lines and not allowed to waver, you would step in couldn’t-be-fresher manure. Horses? This was Fort Smith. Yee hah, horses, you bet. Fun times.
Fayetteville doesn’t have horses in its parade. You see a number of dressed-up dogs, though. Springdale’s July Fourth parade features horses. Springdale, with its own rodeo, would.
Perish the thought that the University of Arkansas Razorback Marching Band offer a troop. I’d be grateful, and surprised. Nor would I suggest a full high school band march on New Year’s Eve, which is during the Winter Vacation, just volunteers, for merit points. Yet I recall marching on Memorial Day, which students have off. It’s not just Sousa military marches, if the city is too liberal for that. Even in the hoary days of the Ice Age 30 years ago, we played arrangements of current pop songs for the crowds on the sidewalks. And Sousa, too.
I want the Fayetteville High School Band in every parade. In the last months of 2005, every FHS musician and two to 20 of his or her relatives hit every citizen several times each for donations to send them to Pasadena, Calif., for the Rose Bowl’s Tournament of Roses Parade on Jan. 1, 2006. Do they march in their own hometown, and homecoming on a weekday does not count? No. I refused to give them money because they don’t participate in the community musically as an ensemble.
I’d like to see the city’s two junior high and two middle school parades step in, as well. Great practice for the younger ones. Great exercise. Great relationship-building that voters remember when increased property taxes are sought.
Today, the real Mardi Gras, The New York Times notes the struggling school bands in New Orleans, post-Katrina. They’re marching. -30-
