Synthesis 003

One day the pit was practicing with Miss Papa right outside the chorus room. I forget where my instrument was, or which instrument exactly I was playing at the time, but I remember I was against the wall that the back door to the auditorium is on. I remember Marc and Brian were sitting down with their backs against the same wall, too. Miss Papa told me to play my run in part two, or just to play part two, or something along those lines, and asked them if they thought it was crazy or something along those lines. I remember Brian didn't really say anything, and Marc just said, "It's a lot of notes." I was still afraid of Marc and Brian then because they were from Chichester and Marc never smiled and always wore a hat. He thought I was a senior for a long time, and I think he told me later that he wasn't impressed with me because he thought I was a senior, but then when he found out I was a sophomore he thought I was a lot more impressive since I was so young. I'm not really sure on how that came about though.

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Like I was writing about before, our sets had a "frame" basically for some drawings to be held in - of clocks and clock designs, of course. At first the plan was to have blinds that we could just quickly flick from one side to another, from design to actual clock face. I remember Evan Gibbs, the only black member of the drumline [who played bass], was an extremely good visual artist and was always pulled out of practice to help design the artwork on the props. Whenever I would walk through the band locker room in the beginning of the season, Evan would be in there bending over some huge canvas and trying to draw something. I think mostly he was there in the very beginning when we were trying to get the blinds idea to work, and I think it was partly his influence why we decided we couldn't use them and they were just unworkable. No matter what medium he tried to use, he couldn't get it to go on the blinds right, and he just knew everything would end up looking all wrong. We ended up using large bedsheets instead, I think.

Another interesting thing was that the clock we used on everything - our shirts and our props, etc. - read an impossible time. The minute hand was just a couple minutes past vertical, but the hour hand was halfway between two hours. I forget if we knew this was impossible when we designed the clock, but I remember they designed it that way so that the hands would be displayed properly on the sets... Oh well. I don't think the judges took points off.

Peace out.