Day Ninety

This is a make up from Saturday February 28th, which was our first real competition, which was at Windber. The highlight of my afternoon was finding this... thing on display. The first picture is what I found after a quick lazy google of "drug identification guide." I would absolutely love to find one of these things on ebay. If you look closely (in person - you can't see it here), there's a warning in the bottom left hand corner telling you not to sample the encased drugs as they are not real. The chart is freaking huge though, everything in there is life sized. From the hash pipe to the coke spoon.

In all its glory...

Dangerous alcohol. Notice the actual bottle on display next to it for a size comparison. Also notice the cheap white zin and wine cooler.

What I want to know is who had to give up their bong, roach clip and (not pictured) hash pipe for the greater good? 

Aw, look at the little heroin kit!

Ah the Reagan years. We'll ignore AIDS but god damn if anyone's gonna get baked! Why do you need to identify drugs as a grade school student? Sara Benson (who was at the show with Tiff and Doug helping out their line for the day) made an excellent point. For someone who wouldn't know - like a child under 18 - this chart kind of tells you how to get high. Check out "inhalants" up at the top. Perhaps that's why there isn't an updated version of this anywhere. But yeah, I'm saying, what is the purpose of this? Are people less inclined to do drugs if they can identify them? "Well I was going to let you shoot that needle into my arm but not now, because I know that's HEROIN!" I don't understand the logic. 

Indoor has either changed a lot since I did it, or it feels different because I'm on this side of things now, or I have no clue what I'm talking about because it's been 9 years since I did it from the inside. We have no warm up areas, and they (so far) don't open up classrooms for groups. Apparently the standard is to just open the auditorium and designate a few rows for each ensemble. Makes sense because there's always some dumb ass kid who trashes the room or just messes with stuff, and if that happened to my classroom over the weekend I'd lose my mind. But still, that was the best part. Wandering around after the performance, meeting kids from other schools, hoping for an awkward almost romantic moment with whoever you had a crush on that week. Maybe that still goes on. I hope so, for their sake, because that's half the fun.

I wish we could rotate and have each kid run the ensemble for a night. Shoot even just for an hour. I think you become a better student once you can really appreciate what it's like on the other side of things. I was blessed with the ability to 'get it' when I was younger and was able to pick things up a little quicker than the other folks. Because of this, I was usually asked to help whoever was having trouble. Odd that I'm on my way to becoming a music teacher, because I absolutely freaking hated doing that. I had no idea how to teach anyone anything back then, and instead of being able to just chill because I learned my parts quicker, I wound up having to do more work. Either way, it gave me some pretty solid insight as to who really had the harder job. However, it also made me never want to teach. Ha. Can you blame me? I was 15 and I knew who had the sweet deal. All I had to do was show up. Everyone else told me what to do and how to do it. I just had to be there and take care of myself.